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The Far Right is Selling Off Our Future For Pennies on the Dollar

MartinEdic
4 min readMay 14, 2024

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Photo by Chris LeBoutillier on Unsplash

A billion dollars sounds like a lot to most of us. That’s a thousand million bucks if you haven’t run the numbers lately. But in the grand scheme of really big money, that’s a round up error. We have multiple $100x billionaires and their names have celebrity status. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffet, etc.

But for the biggest private enterprise on the planet a billion is chump change. I’m talking about the fossil fuel biz, aka big oil. And last week, in the midst of a sordid criminal trial and constant stories of weather disasters all over the country, a Presidential candidate went off the reservation and blatantly did something never seen before.

He offered up our future for sale and the price tag was a bargain: one billion dollars in exchange for his promise to eliminate all environmental restrictions on the oil and gas business when he is elected.

If anything this shows us both how desperate Donald Trump is and what a small thinker he is, no big surprise. Big oil would happily pay ten times that for his promise and never even notice the cost. Aside from the fact that this offer, made to two dozen oil executives, is probably illegal, it may be the most appalling thing this man has done as a politician.

And it barely made the news. We now know the price of Trump’s desperation and it is pocket change in the grand scheme of things.

Let’s step back a day or two. If you watch the news, any news, you know the lead story for weeks now is the weather. The tornados, the flooding, the predictions for the hurricane season. It’s bad, very bad, and it is ironically hitting many of the states that glow red with Trump supporters. Texas. Oklahoma. Louisiana. Those floods and tornadoes are destroying lives every day this spring on a scale we have never seen.

We know that global warming is the direct result of burning vast amounts of fossil fuels for years, and it is not coming; it has been here for years. We are far ahead of predicted levels of global temperature increases. The science is rock solid, but you don’t need science to verify that if you live…

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MartinEdic
MartinEdic

Written by MartinEdic

Mastodon: @martinedic@md.dm, Writer, nine non-fiction books, two novels, Buddhist, train lover. Amateur cook, lover of life most of the time!

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