Denial, Hopium, Insulation, Wishful Thinking - So Many Facets To Harvard's Refusal To Divest
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For example, our judges — afraid of corporate actors crying “judicial activism” — defer to the state and federal agencies charged with regulating the environment. But these agencies often suffer from serious conflicts of interest born of the revolving door syndrome. (This was evidenced by the recent revelations that North Carolina’s Department of Environment and Natural Resources had followed Duke Energy’s marching orders in blocking environmentalists from a meeting over water pollution charges.) And even if the agencies have the will to resist Big Oil’s lobbying prowess and mystificating fake science, they lack the resources to do so. (The EPA, for one, relies on corporate-funded groups like the American Chemistry Council to provide research into the dangers of those very groups’ products.)
Our elected politicians are even less likely to address the clear political aspects of the climate change problem. Facing the frightful campaign spending power of oil interests like the Koch brothers, and besieged on Capitol Hill by a lobbying machine that spends nearly half a million dollars each day, our congresspeople equate discussion of Big Oil’s malfeasance with career suicide. So don’t rock the boat, they say. Maybe it’s not as bad as it looks.
It looks pretty bad: The fossil-fuel industry was instrumental in the mid-20th century remaking American life in the image of the automobile and the open road, tying us all to a lifestyle of inflated gas consumption; it helped shape our foreign policy to protect its resources overseas, sending us into ill-fated wars for profit; and it was methodical in building the aforementioned lobbying machine that guarantees $59 of subsidies for every dollar it spends in Washington.
The failure to acknowledge such facts follows a familiar logic. Because we all consume fossil fuels, we feel guilty about blaming Big Oil: We sense that it’s somehow unfair to target companies that simply sell a product we need. And we tell ourselves that even if we weren’t complicit, we’d still be powerless to do anything: We’re addicted to carbon, and we always will be. This type of reasoning is behind the recent State Department report on the Keystone XL Pipeline. Sure, it’s really bad for us, the report says, but the carbon’s going to get into the atmosphere anyway. Powerlessness, rather than ignorance or shame, becomes the final justification for inaction.
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http://www.salon.com/2014/03/23/harvards_destroying_our_planet_americas_grand_institutional_failure_to_stop_climate_change/
