Big Carbon Fights Back

San Francisco, CA -- As the House gets ready to withdraw $13 billion in subsidies from the oil industry, and the President gets ready to deliver a State of the Union that must somehow square his rigidity and recklessness in Iraq with the clear evidence that the War has increased the vulnerability created by our oil addiction, Big Carbon is flailing around, testing new strategies for coping with public demand for action on energy and global warming.

Rolling Stone has exposed the effort by coal companies to sneak a huge new wave of pulverized coal plants into construction before new rules and policies take effect.

According to the American Heritage Dictionary, a suicidal act is one that is "dangerous to oneself or to one's interests; self-destructive or ruinous." By this standard, the coal boom that is currently sweeping America is the atmospheric equivalent of a swan dive off a very tall building. At precisely the moment that scientists have reached a consensus that we need to drastically cut climate-warming pollution, the electric-power industry is racing to build more than 150 new coal plants across the United States.

But in Texas, where Rolling Stone says the play is centered, TXU is running into an unexpected wave of resistance -- major Dallas business interests creating new political action committees to fight off the plants, resistance from the mayors of both Houston and Dallas, along with 33 other cities, and even hunger strikes. Dallas Mayor Laura Miller says, "TXU is purposely misleading the public in order to build old-technology coal plants the cheapest way possible to get the biggest return on their money."

The changed political climate in Texas extends to Exxon-Mobil, which, after decades of leading the absurd wing of the global warming cynics crowd and receiving a fairly public black eye for doing so, has now decided that the game has changed. The Wall Street Journal reports that Exxon-Mobil now "has stopped funding some groups that challenge global-warming fears and is discussing what a U.S. emissions policy might look like."

But while Exxon-Mobil has come out of the cold, the sincerity of many of the recent converts to responsibility and environmental concern was cast into sharp doubt when the chief economist for the Chrysler Corporation, which along with the US car companies has been trying to promote an image of itself as part of the global warming solution, told a private breakfast what he really thinks. Chrysler's chief economist Van Jollisaint launched a blistering attack at the Detroit Auto Show on "quasi-hysterical Europeans" (his bosses) and their "Chicken Little" views of global warming.

Van Jollisaint is livid that his attitude is not shared in Stuttgart, where Chrysler's parent company, Daimler-Benz, is headquartered. But representatives of Ford and General Motors, also present at the breakfast, evidently did nothing to dissociate themselves from this tirade, which the BBC, in breaking the story, commented were "consistent with the cynical view held by some in the US environmental lobby that announcements by car companies about the future development of green vehicles are nothing more than window dressing."

And while Exxon-Mobil may be signalling a new realism, the entire oil industry is launching an enormous public relations campaign lamenting how loss of taxpayer subsidies at the hands of the new Congress will make America's oil addiction worse -- because in the view of the industry, domestic carbon is so much more benign than the imported variety, and we should pay them lots more money to stay in business here in the US. So how is Bush going to handle these swirling cross-currents? Well, British Prime Minister Tony Blair is putting out the word that Bush will commit himself to a dramatic U-turn.

However, no sooner had the Observer filed the story than the White House denied it to ABC, saying it was "inaccurate on all fronts,and especially regarding the State of the Union." So we seem to be in a time of very turbulent and chaotic weather among the Big Carbon companies and their political allies -- exactly what global warming theory would predict.

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