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Thursday
Today is my father’s birthday—he died 11 years ago at 90—so in his honor I’m sharing one of his poems. Looking back, I’m so glad that he lived long enough to see the election of Barack Obama and somewhat relieved that he didn’t witness the rise of Donald Trump. He would have had poems for the occasion, however, including today’s poem on oil barons.
The poem appeared in his 1982 collection ABC of Radical Ecology, representing (you guessed it) the letter O. Even though we’re hearing of wonderful developments in the world of renewables—there are apparently days in California now when solar and wind-powered generators produce all the energy needed and then some—Big Oil has not given up the fight. If we increasingly hear about billionaires flocking to Trump, it’s because he making offers like the following:
Donald Trump dangled a brazen “deal” in front of some of the top US oil bosses last month, proposing that they give him $1 billion for his White House re-election campaign and vowing that once back in office he would instantly tear up Joe Biden’s environmental regulations and prevent any new ones, according to a bombshell new report.
According to the Washington Post, the former US president made his jaw-dropping pitch, which the paper described as “remarkably blunt and transactional,” at a dinner at his Mar-a-Lago home and club.
In front of more than 20 executives, including from Chevron, Exxon and Occidental Petroleum, he promised to increase oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, remove hurdles to drilling in the Alaskan Arctic, and reverse new rules designed to cut car pollution. He would also overturn the Biden administration’s decision in January to pause new natural gas export permits which have been denounced as “climate bombs”.
A follow-up story calculated that Trump’s deal would save the oil industry $110 billion in tax breaks.
This news comes a year after we learned that, as long ago as 1959, oil companies knew that burning fossil fuels was contributing to climate change and yet kept it secret. .
OZ in my father’s poem is ozone, and it’s worth noting that the international effort to protect and rebuild the ozone layer has been one of environmentalism’s more significant victories. (There’s still some ozone depletion but nothing like what we were suffering in the 1980s when this poem was written.) If the world accomplished this, maybe there’s hope yet.
Unless, that is, Trump and the dirty oil men get their way.
O Is a Dirty Oil Man
O look out for the
Oil Barons the Omnipotent
Outrageous and Obnoxious
Owners of the O so delicate O-
Zone
Officious
Oligarchs of Order and
Ordure they would
Obliterate
OZ
for an Ocean of
BUZZ
business busyness bossiness booziness
Olympian
Overbearing
Opinionated and
Omniversou they are also
Obsolte
(but they don’t know it yet)
O look out
for the
Oleaginous
Oil-powerful
(they think)
Lizards of Ooze
