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"President Barack Obama praised a landmark climate change agreement approved Saturday in Paris, saying it could be "a turning point for the world." Obama , called the agreement "the best chance we have to save the one planet that we've got." (CNN)
The agreement sets out a global action plan to put the world on track to avoid dangerous climate change by limiting global warming to well . by limiting global warming to well below 2°C. The agreement is due to enter into force in 2020. (EU-GOV)
In other words, the (non-binding) agreement locks in six more years of delay before setting a goal that is insufficient to reverse global warming. The agreement does nothing to stop deforestation, ocean pollution or species extinction. Unbelievably this is hailed by the corpstream media as an environmental victory.
Equally as unbelievable, the Reformed Liberal media in the U.S. hails its iconic Obama for his ecological leadership in “producing” (i.e. conducing to) an agreement — you know as if it were a commodity.
Needless to say, a lot of ink and bytes are spent on dissecting the technicalities of the non-agreement — of the so called “framework” which sets us “on a course” for dealing with global warming. But it occurs to us that there is a very simple why the United States will never really get behind an agreement to detox the world from oil: petrodollars.
We are no expert in economy, but everything we have been able to research agrees on one point: without petrodollars the United States would go bankrupt.
I shall leave the technicalities to others, but the general agreement seems to be that the life blood for the U.S. monetary system (and hence its economy) is the fact that everyone in the world buys and sells oil in dollars.
This is very important to the United States. So important in fact that the U.S. is evidently willing to invade, overthrow and/or kill anyone who refuses to sell oil in petrodollars, as was recently the case in Libya. (This was widely reported, right?)
If this is true — that the solvency of the U.S. government and of the economy it bankrolls — is dependent on the sale of oil then isn’t it equally obvious that the U.S. cannot really get behind any program that calls for independence from oil. After all, no sale no petrodollar.
This is not to say that capitalism as such is not inherently destructive to the world’s ecology on which depend for life itself. It is, for all the reasons explained by others and here. It is to say that the world’s largest and most important economy cannot move away from oil-dependence within any timeline likely to avoid ecostrophy.
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