The wrong side of history

Throughout the course of civilization, there have been certain constants. Recurrent forms of governments, markets and violence are a few basic examples, but I’d like to address one consistency that glares chief among them in today’s battle for a more sustainable future: resistance. Whenever there has been social progress to be made, there has been consequent resistance.

This proves true even if our focus is narrowed to national history. Martin Luther King Jr. had the segregationists, Susan B. Anthony had the anti-suffragists and even today the LGBTQ community faces opposition in its fight for marriage equality. In all of these cases, the resistance has been (and will be) remembered as being on the wrong side of history.

But there is a far more wicked form of resistance taking place every day — one that not only threatens a small group’s rights, but also fundamentally harms our environment and the well-being of humanity as a whole.

Let us first consider the overall state of the environment – a topic worthy of much pontification but that, for a columnist’s word count’s sake, I will try to keep succinct. Among other pressing environmental issues, the most imperative is the sum of the following statement, which isoverwhelmingly supported by the scientific community: Man-made global warming is happening and will lead to an environmental catastrophe if we do not act soon.

This issue is no longer debatable. However, that point established, it would be foolish not to question further and consider the face of resistance, the force most opposed to a sustainable future, the force most opposed to our sustenance on Earth: the fossil fuel industry.

The fossil fuel industry, the most profitable enterprise in the history of the world, reports record profits year after year, raking in $137 billion in 2011 and more than $1 trillion since 2001. This is in no small part due to the fact that governmental policy regulating carbon emissions, its top waste product, is virtually nonexistent — and lest we forget that carbon is the atmosphere’s most destructive and overly abundant greenhouse gas and the primary contributing factor to global warming.

To put this into more relatable terms, imagine yourself as a business owner: you would make a lot of money too if you weren’t forced by law to properly dispose of your waste. But who wouldsuffer from your gain? The fossil fuel industry is committing unprecedented environmental damage in the name of sheer mammonism.

But arguably the most nefarious aspect of the fossil fuel industry is how it spends its dirty dough. Through immense campaign contributions and lobbying, the industry holds a heavy presence in nearly all forms of government, managing time and again to escape any real accountability for its pollution of the atmosphere and other environmental damage.

No less, Washington actually gives the fossil fuel industry billions of dollars each year in the form of government subsidies. The most credible estimates of these subsidies range from $10 billion to $52 billion annually, while efforts to remove even small portions of the subsidies are constantly defeated in Congress due to the shameful unification of Oil and State.

The industry has a history of deliberately distorting public opinion as well by funding climate change denial groups and propagating the falsehood that there is credible dissent of global warming (there isn’t). In fact, the oil lobby has even gone so far as to organize public rallies with companies busing in employees, portrayed as citizens’ movements in protest of carbon emissions regulations.

In any struggle for social progress, “Know your enemy,” Sun Tzu’s classic proverb, still rings true. Make no mistake about it: As long as the fossil fuel industry is able to continue its egregious resistance unimpeded, we are on a fast track to an environmental catastrophe. In this election year and the coming ones, we must fight for carbon emissions regulations and sustainable development — we must let our representatives know we want our money going toward renewable energy subsidies, not perverse fossil fuel subsidies.

The battle for sustainability won’t be easy, especially in the face of such unprecedented wealth and opposition, but this will have to be our generation’s defining victory. Not for us, but for humanity. There is really no other option. It’s time we start realizing that.

Originally printed in The Maneater