JACQUELINE MARCUS FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

Instead of making American taxpayers pay for the estimated billions of dollars in damage resulting from Hurricane Sandy’s damages, the bill should be sent directly to the industrial polluters, the Koch Brothers and oil & coal executives.

If you believe that these two extreme storms, a hurricane colliding with a massive winter storm in late October, are typical Mother Nature activity, you’re living in a Dick Cheney fantasy world. Before trapped emissions created the “greenhouse effect” and rapid glacier ice melts played havoc with cyclical weather, what is now categorical evidence of climate change disasters, hurricanes would hit southern Florida once every ten years. It was regarded as exceptional and rare. Fast forward to 2008, and on the average, five to ten hurricanes hit the U.S. shores during hurricane season. As late as the 1980s, the idea of a hurricane smashing the northeast coast from New Jersey to Maine would be unthinkable or totally exceptional.

Welcome to the New Normal of global warming, sponsored by and perpetually prolonged by your friendly polluting oligarchs who are doing their best to keep us dependent on fossil fuels. The polluting industrialists have spent billions of dollars via the corporate media to keep the public in a state of doubt over climate change. Please watch this excellent PBS Frontline documentary, “Climate of Doubt” that explains how Big Oil & Coal deceive the public.

Hurricane Sandy is being assessed from every single meteorological angle except for the most obvious, important one: Climate Change. This is not Mother Nature’s fury, as I explained in my last Buzzflash commentary, let’s get real: this is the extreme type of weather that climate change is producing. The world community of scientists and climatologists predicted that climate change damages would cost taxpayers billions and billions of dollars in repair from electrical failures, flooding, infrastructure, and food shortages.

Hurricane Sandy provides some context as to why the Pentagon claimed that climate change is a far greater threat than terrorism.

So instead of making FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency), pay for the damages at the cost of billions of dollars, the Federal government should send the bills to the Koch Brothers and to the executives of Big Oil & Coal every time there is a climate change catastrophe. If they were forced to pay for the damages caused by global warming, perhaps it would financially force them and their shareholders to shift to clean energy alternatives, knowing that they will have to pay for all climate change disasters from infrastructure to agricultural damages at the cost of billions of dollars. Of course, don’t expect our sold-out, oil-soaked members of congress to hold the polluters accountable.

