Climate Change Cop Out: We've been here before - Profits Trump People/Constitution - Is America who we say that we are
- Carlton Buford
- Jun 26
- 12 min read
Updated: Jul 20
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Donald Trump and the republican party's Climate Change Cop Out since his return to office last year, is a repeat of the selfish and corrupt actions inflicted on America by the US oil industry in the 1950s, when it failed to alert, prepare and lead America into action to mitigate the real and catastrophic risk of Peak oil production actually occurring by 1970 in America and oil production then going into permanent decline over the next 40 years, forming the fundamental and structural economic and social decline in America, beginning in 1970.
In the 1950s the US and global economy and society was almost totally dependent on oil to run and operate everything . This was especially true in the USA, the largest, the fastest growing, the wealthiest and most successful economy on the planet. In the early 1950s, the best and most credible scientist and economist in the world, warned the US energy industry and policy makers in the US that oil production would peak in America by 1970 and go into permanent decline for the next 40 year if America, did not do something between then, 1950 and 1970 to prepare and protect America from this catastrophic and permanently crippling of the US economy and American society. Oil production peaking in America would be a sustainable existential and catastrophic event - tragically disrupting economic and social life for everyday Americans for many years and decades into the future, with no easy fixes, if this was allowed to occur.
So given this warning from the best minds in science and economics in America, what do you think the energy industry and supporting energy industry politicians in congress did in response to this catastrophic threat to America and American life? Pretty much the same thing we see today with the threats of Climate Change to the US economy and American society. The US energy industry practically ignored this threat and distracted attention away from the very real threat and reality that oil production in America could really peak by 1970. From a US Capitalist and Capitalism perspective, the energy industry did not see any economic reasons for creating new massive alternative supplies of energy, in preparation for the case that US oil production actually peaks in 1970 and goes into decline over the following 40 years. But why wouldn't the oil industry be motivated and patriotic about helping America to prepare to mitigate the catastrophic risk of Peak oil by 1970. What possible reason would it not want to keep oil flowing freely and abundantly at affordable prices for America, like it had been doing for the last 40 - 50 years?
Well, again, if oil companies knew that oil production in America would likely peak in 20 years and then go into decline for the next 40 years, wouldn't you think that US oil companies would be working to discover more oil and help to create alternative supplies of energy to patriotically help and to make sure that the greatest, most efficient and most productive economy on the planet earth would stay that way. That would seem logical right? That would seem like the right, moral and rational way the competitive economic players in the US economy would behave, if the Market Knows best, and we really do not need government intervention, the private sector would automatically and proactively start to take action, invest and prepare for the risk that US oil production would peak in 20 years, and by 1970, America would have ample resources to meet US energy demand if and when oil production peaks, America would have created alternatives to oil or additional supplies of oil, to allow the US economy to continue to operate as one of the lowest cost and most productive economies on the planet. Free market conservative economist and politicians would call this the magnificent invisible hand of the free market place.
Well unfortunately for America the invisible free market hand of America did not show up, because the oil industry and oil sector was and is not a free market, competitive economic ecosystem. The oil industry back in 1950, knew better than any other industry in the world what the catastrophic implications for the US economy and the American people would be if oil production 20 years down the road, 1970, peaked and went in decline for four decades. An efficient, competitive economic participant in the US economy being incentivized by the magnificent invisible free market hand of the economy which automatically incentivizes efficient market players to do what is best economically for the economy and society as a whole, would have incentivized the oil industry, business, government and banking system to create sufficient additional supplies of oil or other alternatives to oil in sufficient quantities in the event that the real risk of oil production peaking by 1970, would be mitigated, allowing the US to maintain a low cost, super productive and super competitive economy both domestically and in international competition, allowing the US economy to continue to grow economically adding net value to the US economy broadly without incurring massive and sustainable government and trade deficits. On the other hand, a crony capitalistic industry would see this potential catastrophic peak oil production market failure in the US economy as a super duper on steroids opportunity for a once in a century opportunity to lock in a totally captive customer, who have the greatest wealth on the planet. If oil production actually peaked in 1970 and went into decline for 40 years, the oil industry could use this structural long term shortage to become the wealthiest industry in America and potentially the world, in the 40 years, following 1970. Unfortunately if this happened, this would be at the catastrophic expense of the cost of living in America and the cost of doing business in America, structurally destroying the economic basis of America's best in the world economy and the beginning of the structural economic and social decline in America. The oil industry and its stakeholders would be in economic heaven, but feeding off of the catastrophic pain and suffering of the bottom 80% to 90% in America.
Which choice do you believe the oil industry took? Of course, the oil industry was as old, as familiar and as beloved and useful in the US economy as good ole American Apple Pie. Of course the oil industry took the rational patriotic competitive economic option which minimizes chaos, increases certainty, and keeps prices low for consumers and small businesses, allowing the US economy to work best for all Americans just as it is described in the constitution of the United States of America, and in free market capitalistic text books right? No need for American consumers, families, small businesses to get all concerned, protesting or putting pressure on politicians or industry, just keep your heads down, keep your nose to the grind, stay asleep, no need for wokeness, no need for challenging how the free market works, it will just all work itself out automatically if government and democracy just stays out the way, right.
Wrong!!!
The US oil industry as demonstrated by their behavior, between 1950 - 1970, are not moral and just capitalist, but are Crony capitalist. Crony capitalist are immoral and uneconomic exploiters who do not look to help create and sustain America's highest goal - creating and maintaining A more perfect union for All Americans - Crony capitalist look to maximize profits for their stakeholders, by any means possible, at the expense or destruction of anyone who gets in their way. The oil industry's intentional lack of leadership in helping America to research, plan and prepare to invest over 20 years, to mitigate the real threat that oil production in America could realistically peak and go into permanent decline over the next 40 years, was a catastrophic failure and economic moral hazard, that has massively crippled and increasingly reduced the productivity and effectiveness of the US economy by many orders of magnitude over the last 50 years, while at the same time making the oil industry wealthy beyond all conceivable possibilities.
So what happened? In 1970 oil production in America did actually peak and went into permanent decline for the next 40 years.
From 1970 to 1983, the price of oil increased 2,000%. The price of oil did not increase by 10%, not by 50%, not by 100%, not by 300%, but the price of oil increased by 2,000% between 1970 to 1983.
To demonstrate how catastrophic this was, imagine the current price of gasoline, increasing by 2000%? That would take current $4 per gal gasoline price to $84 per gal and for a 15 gallon Gasoline tank, the cost to fill up your tank for one week would be $1,300. Over a month, assuming you feel up your tank 4 times per month, your monthly automobile fuel cost would be $5,000 and $60,000 per year for one car. If you are like most families, you have two cars, so your monthly fuel cost would be $10,000, equivalent to making five home mortgage payments each month. Now that just for the cost of gasoline in your car, imagine how much your cost of living will skyrocket for other areas of your life.
This gives you a taste of what is was like for American consumers and businesses in the 1970s and early 1980s when the price of oil actually climbed by 2,000% between 1970 and 1983, causing the Great Inflation of the 1970s and early 1980s, which literally, structurally and fundamentally broke the economic backbone of the US economy over that 13 year period, turning the US economy into an uncompetitive, high cost, unaffordable broken economy, economically by 1983.
The big story or lesson that should have been learned from this experience is that the Great Inflation was 100% preventable, if Americans would just have been who we say that we are as described in the constitution. But our lust and desire for power and control over other Americans at their expense and even destruction is why we had the Great Inflation which is the fundamental and structural source of America's Affordability, Debt, Inequality and Polarization crisis that America is still catastrophically weighed down by to this very day as we will demonstrate shortly.
Now Back to Connecting the Dots from history:
Now, by the early 1980s, America had come to another strategic cross road after surviving the Great Inflation of the 1970s and early 1980s. The US economy was structurally broken economically, super high cost of living, super high cost of doing business, uncompetitive to many international trading partners in many sectors and industries in the US economy. How could America grow its uneconomic and uncompetitive US economy on a going forward basis, without leaning on an expensive all of government and all of business approach. For the structural and economy wide problems that beset the US from the 13 year ravages of the great inflation, there is no short cuts if you really wanted to fix the US economy, structurally and prepare it to once again be able to operate economically and affordably for US consumers and small businesses?
To address this issue, in the early 1980s, Ronald Reagan and the Reagan revolution stepped to the table with a different approach.
What the Reagan revolution did in the early 1980s was to fix the symptoms in the US economy with the appearance of solving the structural problems in the US economy. But at the end of the day, since the Reagan revolutions solutions were really not solving the real problem in the US economy but was really only solving the symptoms in the US economy, 25 years later, the Global Credit Crisis and Great Recession exploded onto the marketplace, revealing the Ponzi Scheme Corruptness of the Reagen Revolution, 25 year solving of the economic symptoms directly and causally created the Global Credit Crisis and Great recession of 2007 - 2009. By year 25, America's best in the world, capitalistic free market, competitive economic economy, was naked with no clothes at the onset of the global credit crisis in 2007 - demonstrating that you cannot solve a structural problem burned onto the breast plate of the US economy over 13 long years, by easily and quickly solving an economy's symptoms that does nothing to kill a metastasizing economic cancer, continuing to suck the economic life blood out of the real and fundamental US economy, whose structural economic problems have not been addressed.
Again, to recap, following the great inflation of the 1970, the US economy had a broken and excessively high cost of living and high cost of doing business problem. The structural solution for solving this type of economy wide problem is to harness the full diversity and portfolio of skills, abilities, perspectives, etc…of the American people to solve this problem, again this process is called democracy - creatively, collaboratively, diversely and synergistically - creating 1 + 1 = 5 productivity effects that are beyond mankind's wildest expectations, when we make time to invest in the value of our diversity to create miraculous results, unachievable by any other method known on the planet.
The Reagan revolution was a clear example of how republicans rigged the US economy to make it look like their crony capitalistic system had solved America's economic problem when in fact it was hiding the economic cancer that was continuing to metastasize across the economy, with still very visible signs that America's Economic problem had not been solved, but as the old saying goes, if you keep telling a lie long enough, and no one challenges it, it becomes truth until the lie blows up in our faces and the truth can no longer be hid or misrepresented. The Emperor with no clothing, the 2007 - 2009 Global Credit Crisis and Great Recession.
Reagan revolution economics was built on growing the US economy uneconomically, where wealth and income in total is the measurement that reflects healthy, secure, vibrant and successful growth in the US economy, even though that growth required catastrophically uneconomic borrowing and uneconomic wealth distribution in the US economy where now 85% of wealth in the US economy is owned by just 20% of the people in the US economy and 70% - 75% of consumption in the US economy is done by the wealthiest 20% in America. Over the past 50 years the buying power of the bottom 80% is down 75%, while the buying power of the wealthiest 20% is up by 160%. Over the past 50 years, the wealth transfer between the bottom 80% and the top 20% has been about $90 Trillion. The Reagan Revolution uneconomic growing of the US economy, through financial engineering, transformed the US economy into a Ponzi Scheme financial system in the early to mid-1980s going forward.
When did sustained and massively large increases in US Federal Government Deficits and US Current Account and Trade Deficits begin in the United State on a sustained and massively growing basis, year after year going forward and have not stopped from that point forward. 1983 was the year where the Reagan Revolution financial engineering and uneconomic massive borrowing in the private and public sector, to make spending in the US economy affordable short term but massively massively catastrophically much more expensive in the medium and longer term. The Reagan revolution effectively Transformed the US economy into a Ponzi Scheme Financial System, where the bottom 80% borrow massively to continue spending in the short term, but become more and more constrained in the medium and especially longer term, where borrowers are spending massively more to pay for already excessively expensive products and services but now with interest tacked onto that already super high cost principle portion of the debt. On the other end of the economy the wealthiest 20%, borrow massively to buy and bid up their asset values, creating wealth growth for themselves at exponential levels, with other people's money. This explosion in asset values of the wealthy, but their own bidding up of these asset values with other people's money, made the prices of goods and services that the bottom 80% need to purchase, much more excessively unaffordable, creating the viciously and observed phenomena, from 1983 to 2008, where the rich got super crazy richer at the expense of the bottom 80% get catastrophically poorer over the 25 year period.
This is the Ponzi Scheme Financial System that Reagan brought to the US economy and is really just a sophisticated Ponzi Scheme for swiftly but uneconomically growing the US economy on the backs of the masses until the wealthy have to start eating the wealthy to keep the system alive. How do we know this is true? We saw the first phase of the implosion of the US Ponzi Scheme financial system in 2007 - 2009, the Global Credit Crisis and Great Recession.
To prevent the world from entering into another Global Depression like back in the 1930s, the federal reserve, doubled down and expanded its balance sheet by $9T to refinance all or most of the clogged up and bad dept developed over the previous 25 years from the Reagan Revolution's Financialization of the US economy - Catastrophically Un-economic growing of the US economy with massive debt levels, diversified and dispersed all around the globe to make it look like the US economy was strong, financially and economically fit, creating exceptional economic value for American citizens and the world, but it was a farce, really only creating exceptional real economic value added for the wealthiest 20% in the US economy at the expense of everyone else.
Today the US economy is riding on borrowed time. The money borrowed from the Fed to save the financial system from the Global Credit Crisis and Great recession is still being used to keep the US and Global Financial System afloat, but America's true, fundamental economic economy is still horribly broken in need to structural economic reform, so that America and the world does not need to feed on a Ponzi Scheme financial system to limp along year by year until it permanently implodes on itself. The wealthy few want to keep the con game going long enough where they can afford to get out without having to depend on the system for anything. Their miscalculation is that they will be ok financial and security wise, if the system implodes on itself, however, the poor and the wealthy will all go down together, like all Ponzi Schemes of history past. That is why it is best that we slow down and work together, to make the system work best for all of us, before we all lose everything because we do not have enough love and faith in each other to be who we say that we are, Americans - Committed to create and maintain a more perfect union for all Americans, not just the wealthiest 20%, as America's highest priority.
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