Far from being a reasonable alternative to the Hair guy, GOP presidential hopeful Marco Rubio is a hardline climate skeptic. His energy proposals are indistinguishable from Sarah Palin’s. As Mother Jones puts it, Rubio has
” … called for expanding oil and gas development, weakening environmental protections, and rolling back President Barack Obama’s efforts to combat climate change, which Rubio characterized as an illegal intrusion into the market by overreaching government agencies … he pledged to review Obama’s offshore drilling policies to ensure increased oil and gas production, promised to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, and called for speeding up approval of natural-gas export terminals, according to a policy paper posted to his website Friday afternoon.” (Read the story here.)
Mother Jones quotes Khalid Pitts of the Sierra Club, who says “Senator Rubio’s plan appears to have been written by executives in the fossil fuel industry.” This isn’t accurate, because even big oil companies are abandoning the position still argued by many Republican politicians that climate change either isn’t real or isn’t a problem we have to deal with. As Bloomberg reports,
“Ten major energy companies declared their support for a global deal to prevent climate change, but stopped short of offering unanimous backing for carbon pricing. Producers including BP Plc, Saudi Arabian Oil Co. and Petroleos Mexicanos — who together account for almost 20 percent of the world’s oil and gas output — said in a statement they will back policies consistent with the goal of keeping the increase in average global temperatures to within 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). The joint conference in Paris Friday follows a June letter from BP, Eni SpA, Royal Dutch Shell Plc, Total SA, Statoil ASA and BG Group Plc urging governments to agree to carbon pricing at the United Nations’ so-called COP21 climate change summit starting in the French capital next month. While the new Oil and Gas Climate Initiative added the support of companies from Saudi Arabia, Mexico and India, the broader group didn’t agree a common position on whether companies should pay a price to emit greenhouse gases.” (Read the story here.)
So, while Big Oil isn’t ready to agree on remedies, or who will pay for them, they’ve moved beyond denial and are talking about taking action on the problem of climate change. Meanwhile, Rubio is still following Republican grassroots opinion, instead of leading America toward a solution, which is not what you want from a future president.
Of course, the “drill, baby, drill” mantra itself is outdated, for reasons having nothing to do with climate change. Markets are drowning in surplus oil, which is stressing the financial system, because low crude prices threaten to engulf the oil patch with a tidal wave of bankruptcies and bond defaults. The last thing the world, or your retired grandfather sitting in his rocking chair and watching his Exxon shares sink lower, needs right now is more oil production.
Photo: Marco Rubio is wrong about climate change and energy policy.
