The Survival of Everyone

by Contributor | October 21, 2025 11:33 am

The oil industry fears environmental regulations because they stymy future profits. Oil and gas companies are beholden to their shareholders and are driven by quarterly profits. The former CEO of Halliburton Energy Services, John Gibson, stated, “The board of directors doesn’t sit me down and say ‘John, make this a better planet.’ They want us to make and create wealth for our shareholders and our employees.”

At the behest of President Truman, the Brewster Committee in the 1940’s concluded, “The oil companies have shown a singular lack of good faith, an avaricious desire for enormous profits.” US taxpayers subsidize the oil and gas industry’s avaricious desire for profits. The International Monetary Fund found that American oil and gas companies receive $700 billion of taxpayer money each year. It also received $35 billion in annual tax breaks.

The oil and gas industry used those billions in tax breaks and taxpayer money to lobby the federal government to slash any environmental regulation that hurt its income. The industry spent $450 million in the 2024 election cycle. President Trump received $75 million in direct donations from the oil industry. The New York Times reported, “six months into Mr. Trump’s presidency, oil and gas companies are poised to reap multibillion-dollar windfalls.” That included “$18 billion in new and expanded tax incentives for the oil and gas industry.”

This radically violates the law. In July, the supreme judicial body in the world, the International Court of Justice, ruled that climate science was the law. Global warming was an “urgent and existential threat.” Fifteen judges on the world court ruled that when a country subsidized the oil industry, it was liable for “an internationally wrongful act.”

Five days later, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lee Zeldin, announced, “the largest deregulatory action in the history of the United States.” The Times wrote that the E.P.A., “planned to rescind the 2009 declaration, known as the endangerment finding, which concluded that planet-warming greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health.”

The White House personally supplied the five scientists who rejected the consensus of 99.7% of the scientific community. The Wall Street Journal admitted, “the Trump administration asked a group of five researchers who are skeptical of established climate science,” to write the report the E.P.A. used to justify its criminal insanity.

The administration’s push to burn more oil, gas, and coal was global. The Times reported, President Trump “is applying tariffs… to induce other countries to burn more fossil fuels.”

The scientific consensus was that humans burning fossil fuels caused global warming. That’s a direct threat to the profits of the oil and gas industry. Super marine heat waves lead to mass die-offs. Megadroughts deplete water supplies. Extreme weather damages crops and pushes up the price of food. Extreme forest fires increase, and the planet loses a record amount of forests. But our capitalist economic system prioritizes more burning of fossil fuels and profits.

Profits are more important than the survival of everyone.

 

Anton Porcari

Source URL: https://oswegocountytoday.com/opinion/letters-to-the-editor/the-survival-of-everyone/

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