And our future could have been so much better
Earth Day originated in 1970 as a grassroots response to industrial pollution, proposed by U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson, after witnessing the devastation of a massive 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill. The first Earth Day was held on April 22, 1970, mobilizing 20 million Americans to demand environmental action, ultimately leading to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and landmark environmental legislation.
By the end of that decade, President Jimmy Carter predicted that America could be oil independent by the year 2000 and then started to support alternative energy like solar and wind. All of this happened after the 1970s oil crises, which were primarily caused by geopolitical conflicts in the Middle East, leading to supply embargoes by OPEC, which caused global panic, production cuts, and a quadrupling of oil prices. The 1973 crisis was sparked by U.S. support for Israel in the Yom Kippur War, while the 1979 crisis was driven by the Iranian revolution against the US-backed Shah. Does any of this resemble our current situation?
Israel, Middle East wars, and oil, this keeps coming back like a bad dream that we keep repeating with the same results —no peace, escalating oil prices, unresolved geopolitical conflicts, and inflation. A leader who stepped back into this quagmire would really have to be an idiot. We already knew this, that our very own Orange Felon is attempting to turn back the clock on just about every progressive advancement that has occurred over these 56 years — including starting to begin drilling off of Santa Barbara again–back to the future. Stupid isn’t even an adequate word for it.
Since the first Earth Day, it has also been confirmed and revealed that Exxon-Mobil did the research on climate change that predicted global warming and the harm it would cause. Then they buried it and led the denial propaganda campaign that the Republicans have been using against anyone who even uses the term. We are still addicted to oil, even though it’s killing us, and the U.S. is now (thankfully) oil independent, but still dependent on the global price of oil. Price fixed by OPEC.
The recent failure of negotiations to end this war was farcical if not tragic.
A post of one observer on Quora put it succinctly, “Oh Lord, embarrassment in Islamabad. Iran shows up with all its top government officials with a motorcade and is treated like heroes. The USA shows up with the trio of idiots … JD Vance, Trump’s real estate buddy Steve Wykoff, and Jared Kushner, and they look like losers. I don’t know if Trump is panicking … I think Trump is too stupid to panic; he believes himself to be invincible, but it’s a pathetic showing, to say the least. For someone who likes to make powerful impressions to make people think he’s a fearless leader, Trump has missed the mark … ‘bigly.’”
And yet every Republican president since Dwight Eisenhower has attempted to influence Middle East foreign policies to benefit the USA because of oil, and it has done nothing more than to create more anti-American sentiment and given birth to various Islamic terrorist groups, one of which attacked our country on September 11. President Reagan with his Iran-Contra scandal, both presidents Bush with their Saudi alliances, then the wars in Iraq, and now Trump and his misguided missiles for an unprovoked war. A gallon of gas used to be under a buck before all this started back in the 1970s, and every time there’s a war, inflation hits. This is nothing new; it’s predictable.
So, this year, we are heading back from our goal of zero-emissions, the EPA budget is slashed, and the gates have opened for more oil production, even as consumption has dropped because people like driving fuel-efficient cars. Yet here in the San Pedro Bay industrial harbor complex, we’re still a long way from zero-emissions. If we spent half as much on cleaning up the air and water as we are on this misguided war, we would be a long way to turning around global warming, and leading the free world to a more peaceful future.
And then there could be a huge Earth Day celebration to say, “If we can send astronauts around the moon, we can heal our own planet!”