Hightower Lowdown

Here they come--America's Drill Team! Out front are the two high-strutting leaders, John McCain and George W, thrusting their drum-major batons and chanting "Drill! Drill! Drill!" Right behind them are the famous Marching Lobbyists of Big Oil, and--look!--prancing alongside are House minority leader John Boehner and the Merry Pranksters of the Republican caucus, doing a precision routine of call and response:

"Alaska's wildlife refuge!" shouts Boehner. "Drill it!" barks the caucus.

"America's seacoasts!" hollers Boehner. "Drill 'em!" booms the caucus.

"The White House lawn!" shrieks Boehner. "That, too!" cries the caucus.

And the lobbyists break out in a synchronized grin.

[ read more ]

It seems to me that George W missed his true calling. I think he has long harbored a secret desire to be a thespian, for he’s a man who clearly loves to dress up in costumes.

There’s his famous Top Gun outfit, for example, which he strapped on back in 2003, strutting around vampishly to
declare “mission accomplished” in Iraq. Also, every few weeks, George likes to reprise his slapstick role as the
Cowboy President, appearing on his Crawford ranchette all duded out in boots, jeans, and that cowboy hat to
perform his patented “clearing brush” routine.

But Bush’s most-outstanding performance as a character actor has
to be when he plays Ranger George, nature lover and defender of
America’s treasured national parks. You can catch this shtick at least
once every campaign year, plus special dramatizations annually when
Earth Day rolls around. Using one of America’s spectacular park sites
as a backdrop, George dons hiker duds and plays to the cameras,
espousing more hearttugging fealty to our natural wonders
than any character since Smokey the Bear.
Bush debuted this act in his first
presidential run. On September 13,
2000, he struck a Teddy Roosevelt
pose standing on the banks of a
roaring river within sight of majestic
Mount Rainier in Washington State.
He lambasted the Clinton-Gore
administration for allowing a $4.9 billion
maintenance backlog to build
up in our national park system. [ read more ]

Many of you Lowdowners have told me that you often share the newsletter with your teenagers—and even younger children. Therefore, for proper parental guidance, I feel a responsibility to post this warning:Parents beware! This issue contains graphic material that could be unsuitable for minors—including environmental rape, corporate violence, and a level of political depravity that could leave them scarred for life.

With that said, I'm going to tell you a story that begins with breathtaking beauty, quickly takes a grotesquely ugly turn, then reveals a shocking callousness, yet also unfolds with heartening grassroots heroism. Ultimately, this is a cautionary tale that enlists you to write a better ending, for it shows with shining clarity why we must—ABSOLUTELY MUST—take our government back from the Kleptocrats who now hold all three branches in their greedy grasp.

The Beauty

Drive into the heart of West Virginia and Eastern Kentucky, and you'll find yourself in the midst of America's—and maybe the world's—oldest mountain range: the Appalachians. There are no adjectives adequate to describe the serene, ancient beauty you see, hear, smell, taste, and feel in these mountains. View them from a high point, and they are like blue-green waves breaking across the horizon as far as you can see. This is a remote and rugged expanse of high razorback ridges, plunging down into deep and dark valleys (called "hollers" here) and forested by an unparalleled diversity of mature broadleaf trees with an Appalachian ancestry going back nearly 300 million years. Pristine creeks and streams run through this region, and uncountable species of flowers, fish, woodland animals, birds, and other living creatures call it home.

Mountain people call it home, too, and they have a deep tie to this place that is the stuff of songs, legends, and history. Their culture is a rich, unique mix that encompasses the Shawnees, Creeks, Choctaws, and Cherokees who populated these mysterious mountains way before the Scotch-Irish, who first came in the 1730s, and later arrivals, including Germans and escaped or freed slaves. Because of the enveloping, insular nature of the Appalachians, people here retained all of these ethnic traditions and blended them to produce a music, religion, spirit, and attitude that is special. These days, quite a few people in Appalachia are impoverished, with little economic opportunity for them in the region. Yet they cannot conceive of living elsewhere, because here—at least they have their mountains.

The ugly

In a cabal of ignorance and arrogance, giant coal corporations and their political henchmen literally are decapitating the Appalachian Mountains. It's called "mountaintop removal" (MTR)—a form of strip-mining that is so dastardly, so perverse, so destructive, so unbelievable, and so unnecessary as to leave anyone who sees it whopperjawed, if not temporarily insane with outrage. ... [ read more ]

No president has really been serious about conservation and renewable energy, but Jimmy Carter at least made a symbolic statement in the 1970s by having some solar panels installed on the White House roof. Shortly afterward, however, Ronald Reagan, backed by the oil boys, defeated Carter, and that was the end of that —one of Ronnie's first acts in office was to order that those damned solar panels be taken down and junked. Since then, every president has made the obligatory Earth Day nod to solar, wind, and other alternatives as a means of breaking America's self-destructive oil habit, but there's been miserly commitment behind their rhetoric. Using its political and lobbying clout, King Oil has been able to maintain its hegemony over energy policy, its stranglehold on the economy, its preeminence over the environment, and its priority call on military action.

In the quarter century since Carter tried to tell us something important with his solar gesture, every president has been in deliberate denial about where America is headed if we don't get off oil. And now, we're there:

• America's oil consumption has increased 25% since 1980—we're now chug-a-lugging 20 million barrels of oil every single day (up from 16 million in 1980).

• Global consumption is above 83 million barrels daily and rising rapidly.

• U.S. gasoline prices are approaching $3 a gallon.

• To keep the crude flowing, the U.S. is deploying its military all around the world at a staggering cost in money and lives.

• The chemical refuse of our gasoline addiction is fogging the globe with greenhouse gases that are altering our planet's climate,

The world's supply of recoverable oil is fast running out. An energy policy (or the lack of one) that leaves us with no alternative but swilling more oil is suicidally stupid. But where's the leadership? Neither the White House nor the Congress, neither the Republican nor the Democratic party, has a plan for coping with what is clearly a looming disaster. They're not even discussing it.

Instead, the Bushites' babble on blithely about letting corporations move their drilling rigs into the pristine Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. This is akin to handing out umbrellas to people standing in the path of a tornado. Aside from the environmental and spiritual damage of drilling in ANWR, even the most optimistic assessment says that there would be only enough oil in the entire refuge to supply the U.S. for 800 days—so paltry that the companies themselves have shown little interest in making the investment to drill in such an unpromising field.

Cut the leash

If our leaders are too corrupted, too weak, and too unimaginative to cut America (and ultimately the world) free of our tether to Big Oil, then we must do it ourselves. A good place to begin is for us to start buying cars, trucks, and other vehicles that get 500 miles per gallon.

Whoa, Hightower, there you go again, breathing some sort of strange fumes and talking nonsense! 500 mpg? That's science-fiction stuff.

No. It's in the here and now, using two affordable, available technologies that are already achieving amazing fuel economy on America's roads and cutting pollutants to little or zero. Combined, the two technologies create "plug-in, flexible-fuel hybrid vehicles," for which a more manageable moniker would be "gasolineoptional," or GO cars. [ read more ]