One day in the distant future, an archaeology team will carefully brush off what turns out to be a flash drive. They'll decode the contents and find the video embedded above. In quick succession, knowing glances will be exchanged, and then huge smiles, hugs, and high fives. The team will have solved the riddle of how such an advanced technological society managed to collapse.
It was the assholes.
A relatively small number of smug, insulated, status-obsessed, and myopically self-interested assholes had ruined everything.
For many government insiders, beltway elites, and other sycophants to the 1%, morality is an irrelevant and whimsical notion, not fit for serious discussion. Their cold and callous pursuit of self-interest, unconstrained by notions of right and wrong, will result in needless suffering on an unimaginable scale as climate disasters increase in frequency and severity.
In the video above, someone speaks up and politely asks a panel of DC insiders why they are not more concerned about moral considerations related to climate change. Phil Sharp, former Democratic Congressman and director of the host organization (Resources For the Future), summarily dismisses the questioner with, literally, a wave of his hand.
In so doing, Sharp protected the guest panelists, one of whom was attorney Jeffrey Holmstead, partner (and lobbyist) at Bracewell Guiliani and former EPA political appointee under George W. Bush. His clients include a number of large carbon polluters and coal companies.
Let me be explicit: Jeffrey Holmstead is paid millions of dollars every year to undermine and/or defeat laws establishing sensible climate policy for the world’s biggest polluters. As a result, millions of innocent people will die.
Instead of respecting the questioner and his decency, Resources For the Future and Phil Sharp protected fellow insider Jeffrey Holmstead.
But Phil Sharp is just a placeholder for so much of what is so wrong today.
Power elites in America and across the world have formed a well-developed circle-jerk of fraud to maintain their status. These criminal elites (because that's what they are) set the agenda for the rest of us. And, unsurprisingly, garbage in, garbage out. From the genetically modified food we eat, to the energy we use, to the media we rely upon to inform our choices... The entire system is corrupt.
The entire system.
From the denialists in Congress...to the advanced network astroturf front-groups... the NRA... the frackers polluting out water and causing earthquakes... to the war-profiteers... to the pesticide manufacturers killing our bees... to the GM food manufacturers... the oil companies spoiling our seas... the bankers that stole your neighbor's house...
All driven by rapacious greed, and damned the consequences...
When they aren't at Charlie Palmer's Steak House devising their next caper, they are gathering at panels like this one, ignoring their own stench and telling the rest of us not to worry our pretty little heads.
Of course, the sell-out beltway media grifters get their cut and dutifully remain silent... (I'm looking at you Mike Allen)...
Happy as they are to have solved one mystery, our future archaeologists remain befuddled by another: Why didn't anyone point out that the emperor was wearing no clothes? After all, right there on stage with Mr. Sharp and Holmstead was a lawyer from the Natural Resources Defense Council.... Why would any respectable environmentalist agree to sit on a panel with someone like Holmstead?
More broadly, why were so many sociopaths, miscreants and amoral deviants - people like Holmstead, like George Will, like the Koch Brothers, like Governors Walker, Scott and McCrory - why were they tolerated, or even welcomed and celebrated within polite society?