Drill Baby, Drill

Dear Mr. President,

“An Industry Becalmed,” an article in yesterday’s New York Times reminded me once again of your betrayal of those who elected you in 2008. Your vow to put in place a clean energy program and address the most serious issue of our time—global warming—abandoned and ignored. Almost four years later there’s no more talk from the White House of global warming, no green energy policies or initiatives; instead, your energy policy is now “all of the above” which includes the Republican slogan Drill Baby, Drill. You can call yourself a green energy advocate and speak “green,” but your actions speak a different story. After the BP disaster in the Gulf, you made one of your famous “pivots” and reopened deep-water drilling, opened offshore drilling in new places like the Arctic, approved construction of the XL Pipeline, allowed unregulated fracking—perhaps the most disastrous non-policy policy of your administration—and you’ve done nothing to fight for clean energy. In the wake of your betrayal, the fossil fuel industry is conducting a full court press to defeat renewal of subsidies for producers of wind turbines, $1 billion a year (while lobbying strenuously to keep their own multi-billion dollar subsidies) and spending $153 million to promote Romney’s position of no-holds-barred unregulated drilling and mining for oil gas and coal. Clean energy advocates are so disillusioned with your “explicit embrace of fossil fuels and implicit embrace of all the environmental degradation that entails [that] are almost indistinguishable from the Bush administration” (NYT Sept. 14, p. A16), that they’ve contributed a mere $78,000 to your campaign. Romney’s campaign, by contrast, has received more than $13 million from the fossil fuel industry, $3 million from Oxbow (William Koch) and more millions from oil-rich David Koch’s Americans for Prosperity. Your betrayal also has another cost: the loss of jobs. With the impending Dec. 31 expiration of production tax credits that make wind power competitive with fossil fuel generated electricity, orders have dried up and wind power companies are laying off and closing up shop. The Becalmed article is a depressing list of companies laying off workers from good paying jobs: 945 in Kansas (Siemens), 1,400 in Colorado and Texas (Vestas), 175 in Iowa (Clipper Windpower), 167 in Tulsa (DMI Industries), 92 in Pennsylvania (Gamesa)…the list goes on. So much for your “green” policies. I want a real Green. Jill Stein for President!