Heroic Rockefeller


Heroic Rockefeller? What's that title doing here?

Would Jennings Bryan have admired John D. Rockefeller Senior? Of course not!

Then why is Polistra admiring John D. Rockefeller IV? And why did Happystar morph into Happycoal for the occasion?

Here's why:

I rise today to lend my support to Senator Murkowski’s Resolution of Disapproval for one simple but enormously important reason: because I believe we must send a strong and urgent message that the fate of our economy, our manufacturing industries, and our workers should never be placed solely in the hands of the federal Environmental Protection Agency.

I have long maintained that the Congress, the elected voice of the people – and not the unelected EPA – must decide major economic and energy policy. It is our job – because we represent the people of this country. We are accountable to them.

And there are no greater or more closely intertwined economic and energy issues that we face today than climate change, greenhouse gas emissions and the challenge and need for clean, safe, reliable, domestic energy.

I have and will continue to spend a great deal of time and focus thinking about – and, more importantly, listening about – these issues. Listening first and always to West Virginians, and to my colleagues, to outside experts, to environmental advocates and industry representatives.

I am not here to deny or bicker fruitlessly about the science, as some would suggest. I care deeply about this earth and about the fundamental human commitment – the higher calling we all have -- to be its steward. Greenhouse gas emissions are not healthy for the earth or her people and we must take significant action to reduce them. We must develop and deploy clean energy. Period.

But EPA regulation is not the answer. EPA has little or no authority to address economic needs, no ability to incentivize and deploy new technologies, no obligation to protect the hardworking people of West Virginia and the nation.

Their jobs matter. Their lives matter. And any regulatory solution that creates more problems than it fixes, and causes more harm than good, in the real lives of real people, is no solution at all – or at least not one I’ll be any part of.

...

My EPA delay bill is another strong action – one that I believe can win the support of most stakeholders -- to ensure major energy and economic policy are set by Congress, and I will continue to press for action on it.

I also support legislative action this year to prevent any future catastrophe like the Gulf oil spill (which is to my mind a very separate issue), and I support legislation to advance new clean energy technologies.

West Virginia is poised to lead a major part of the effort on clean technology because we know energy – we know coal and natural gas and CCS, like few others know it.

The fact is that we in West Virginia know and embrace what too many others either don’t understand or don’t want to see -- which is that our nation is dependent on coal for more than 50 percent of its electricity today.

And even if the country achieves maximum success for all the new ideas on the table for new green energy, our American quality of life – and the rapid rise of energy needs around the globe -- will drive the same or greater need for coal for many generations to come. Coal mining is hard, dangerous, and very proud work. It turns the lights on all across America.

Well, "denying" the science is not fruitless. When all the "advanced" nations of the world are trying to kill their own economies and their own people in the name of a blatantly transparently violently false theory, the first step should be to get rid of the blatantly transparently violently false theory. Until the genosuicidal pseudoscience is absolutely revoked, abjured, recanted and deleted, the tyrants will continue to use it as justification for their Final Solution.

Murkowski also exhibited the same shit-faced cowardice, saying the science is not the point.

Think of a member of the German Reichstag in 1937, trying to oppose the goals of the National Socialists while simultaneously granting that the eugenic "science" of Herr Professor Doktor Alfred Rosenberg was completely valid, that Jews and Slavs were incurably inferior and dangerous. You can't have it both ways. You can't support the diagnosis and oppose the cure. If you won't argue against the theory that Jews and Slavs are dangerous, then you can't honestly argue against Hitler's elimination of Jews and Slavs. And if you won't argue against the theory that CO2 is dangerous, then you can't honestly argue against Atmungsführerin Lisa Jackson's elimination of CO2.

Despite that failure on the moral level, Rockefeller is nobly serving his own people and his country on the pragmatic-politics level.

His passionate focus on serving his people comes across much better in the actual speech than in the transcript. Serving the people of his own state is the highest duty of a legislator, a rarely observed duty in these times of mindless party robots.
  ¶ 8:58 AM