If You Apply the 1% Cheney Doctrine to Climate Change: Exxon Deserves a 'Shock & Awe'

[maxkeiser]

by Max Keiser
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/max-keiser/if-you-apply-the-1-cheney_b_104440.html

I'm all for Exxon competing in the global market for profits, but I'm against giving them corporate welfare and I'm against the White House appeasing arsonists when they should be holding them accountable. If Exxon were forced to compete without massive handouts from US tax payers, they would go out of business, or be forced to change their business model. Then, free-market capitalism would triumph over Wall Street-Washington corporate-communism and its axis of price-fixers, market manipulators, and insider traders.

We would, in a true meritocracy, expect a company like Exxon, and its current business model of arson-for-hire to go out of business when cost-efficient, carbon-neutral alternatives for energy exist. So how do we get the market working again? How do we raise the cost of abusing the system and the environment high enough to curtail Exxon?

Here's an idea. Imagine if Dick Cheney's 1% doctrine were applied to Exxon and other climate change extremists (estimated to be killing over 250,000 per year around the world, and growing rapidly).

Cheney is quoted as saying, "If there's a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping Al-Qaeda to build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response. It's not about our analysis ... It's about our response."

That's interesting because according to the Pentagon, there exists a virtual dead certainty of a risk bigger than Al-Qaeda; a risk that, "...vastly eclipses that of terrorism."

"A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world. The document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. The threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism, say the few experts privy to its contents."

Just this past month it was reported that the City of Barcelona is importing tanker-loads of water to keep the city alive due to the devastation of climate change in that region.

Climate change, according to the Pentagon, poses a greater threat than terrorism. So where's Cheney and his 1%? How come the Pentagon is spending 1.5 trillion a year on secondary targets like Al-Qaeda and ignoring the primary threat? Could it be that Cheney, the White House, and the Pentagon are Climate Change Terrorist & Holocaust (CCT&H) appeasers?

Before making that case, let's get some input from Rex Tillerson, the head of Exxon. He must be 100% certain that no such threat as a climate change holocaust exists, right? Or he must have cognitive dissonance or selective amnesia or he's senile. Because he would never admit to any culpability, not even 1% of devastation of this magnitude if he were of sane mind, would he? Unless he's like Captain Queeg in the The Caine Mutiny going on about his missing strawberries in the face of a clear and present danger and a crew revolt, in which case Rex should be classified as an enemy combatant and thrown in Gitmo.

Tillerson: "My view is that this is so extraordinarily important to people the world over, that to not have a debate on it is irresponsible," he said. "To suggest that we know everything we need to know about these issues is irresponsible. "And I will take all the criticism that comes with it. Anybody that tells you that they got this figured out is not being truthful. There are too many complexities around climate science for anybody to fully understand all of the causes and effects and consequences of what you may chose to do to attempt to affect that. We have to let scientists to continue their investigative work, unencumbered by political influences. This is too important to be cute with it."

In other words, Rex Tillerson is not 100% certain. He admits there is at least a 1% chance of a man made climate change massacre. While the Pentagon emphatically insists that climate change is a greater threat than terrorism. And Cheney has demonstrated he's ready to act involuntarily with lethal force if faced with such threats.

So why no 'Shock & Awe' for Exxon?