"If you are a power company in the US," Rosenzweig said, "you believe you might be regulated in the future, you want to be prepared and learn about this issue... these are the main reasons why those companies are involved."
In contrast, many of the leaders in the fossil fuel industry, such as the oil giant ExxonMobil, fully supports the Bush administration, citing the costs Kyoto would add to cleaning up power stations and of the conversion to cleaner energy sources.
...which of course is not a surprise to me, because even since the 1970's the fossil fuel folks (as well as the automobile and steel industries) don't want to pay any extra to re-tool their industry toward other fuel sources or the use of other fuel sources, even though, minimizing and/or eliminiating our dependency upon the Middle East as a source of fossil fuel is the right thing to do. God forbid they make less profit, they would rather leverage the US military to protect their investments and "secure the region" of the world with the fuel they want. Bastards.
Joined: Mon Oct 18, 2004 4:50 pm Posts: 3955 Location: Leaving Here
turkey sub jr. wrote:
I believe the fossil fuel industry did change back in the '70s with that whole "get the lead out" scene.
Upon further inspection of your post, are you saying they haven't done anything after that get the lead out campaign?
I'm saying that they have really put very little into getting hybrids and stuff out there, the technology for which has been around for quite a while. Ditto for solar power. All I'm saying is I'm not surprised that certain industries, fossil fuel in particular, are not in the same camp with other industries who support the treaty and are concerned about regulation. The Steel industry is a great example. The current administration, early last year, lifted tarriffs to allow for the purchase of over seas metals. The US steel companies stopped production in anticipation of buying cheeper metals from overseas, and then when the over seas sources would not sell to us, they were short handed, and jacked up the prices on everything 20-40 percent, which trickled down to contractors and consumers.
In the meanwhile, the steel companies have stock on hand and/or could start production back up (meaning more work for US labor forces), but choose not to do so, opting instead to just buy cheaper metal from wherever they can, so the demand ends up meaning more profit for them as people end up paying higher prices than they normally would and can't do anything about it if they need the resource/material. Government regulation benefitting a particular group of business owners, and costing everyone else. So while the US Oil guys keep hording all of their own oil, and buying cheaper oil from overseas, they can keep the prices up, and since the demand is always high, they just make money hand over fist without having to give up any of their own supplies. I'm sure it doesn't 100% work that way, but that's the 100,000 foot level.
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