Rolling Stone - Daniel Kreps
"The level of complete corruption from the fossil fuel industry that marks this administration is like nothing we've ever seen," environmentalist says
On a bad news day for Earth's climate, environmentalist Bill McKibben appeared on 'Real Time' to discuss the dire situation and how to fight back.
On a particularly bad day for Earth's wellbeing – the EPA revealed massive budgetary cuts while the Trump administration waffled on the Paris Agreement on climate change – environmentalist and 350.org founder Bill McKibben appeared on Real Time With Bill Maher to discuss the dire situation and how the American people can fight back.
"The level of complete corruption from the fossil fuel industry that
marks this administration is like nothing we've ever seen," McKibben
said, adding that new EPA chief Scott Pruitt frequently sued the EPA on behalf of energy companies while Attorney General of Oklahoma.
"Earlier
this afternoon, the EPA under Mr. Pruitt… their budget cuts leaked out.
Not only are they going to cut by 97 percent the amount of money
they're spending to try and improve water quality in the Great Lakes –
which finally begun to improve, same thing with San Francisco Bay, Puget
Sound, Chesapeake Bay; good thing that no one lives in any of these
places," McKibben said.
"They also said they're going to
drastically cut the amount of money they spend on something called water
quality compliance, the kind of things that helped alert us to things
like Flint, the water crisis there. Of course, since they're zeroing out
the environmental justice program at EPA, that probably won't be a big
worry anymore."
After pointing out that the Keystone Pipeline
would be built using Russian steel – the oligarch of that Russian steel
mill gifted Vladimir Putin a $35 million yacht, McKibben noted –
McKibben attacked the argument that state governments will handle the
things the EPA doesn't by highlighting the crisis in Pruitt's own state
of Oklahoma.
"For as long as this continent has been around,
Oklahoma has been seismically inert, as stable as it was possible to
be," McKibben said. "Now, it shakes a lot more than Oklahoma. It's the
most seismically active place on the continent because we've done
nothing but frack it for the last 10 years and force all this water
underground into wells on the faults."
Even as the nation is divided into two halves – liberals who believe in climate change and conservatives who turn a blind eye toward it
– McKibben warned, "In the end, these are not political questions. In
the end, physics doesn't care what your skin is. It just does what it
does."
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