Big Oil Spent $200 Million In The Last 18 Months To Sabotage Climate Action

According to a new analysis by Common Dreams, oil companies have poured more than $200 million into political initiatives and donations in order to thwart any efforts by Congress to reduce our emissions and protect the environment. This includes helping to sabotage legislation that would have helped the country transition to clean energy. It is difficult, though not impossible, to fight against this kind of money. Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins explains what's happening.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

According to numbers that were calculated by the group climate power and shared exclusively with common dreams. Big oil has pumped more than $200 million into efforts to kill climate action in just the last 18 months, 200,000,018 months, just to make sure that we don't get things like investments in renewable energy, which we actually did get this week, thanks to a deal between Schumer and mansion. Well, we still have a couple Democrats that we've gotta get on board with it, but getting mansion on board was a big deal. So kudos to mansion for finally doing the right thing. Even if it is a watered down bill, it doesn't go. As far as we needed. At this point, we gotta count every victory as an actual victory. It, it, it's not good enough. It's still got some handouts to big oil, but it's better than nothing. And sometimes that's the best you can get.

But anyway, 200 million, and of course, 80% of the industry's campaign donations went to Republicans. So 20% went to Democrats, right? That's that's also pretty bad. 20% of 200 million is still, you know, 40 million spent lobbying Democrats. And of course, giving direct campaign donations. Here's the problem with these numbers. We can't fight that right? There is no organization on the left. There is no organization fighting for climate that has that kind of money. We are out gunned at every possible turn in our fight to protect the environment, to protect human life and human health. We are up against, I mean, I don't want to use David versus Goliath because this is even bigger than Goliath, but we're up against these insurmountable odds. These people, these oil industry, you know, companies that have seemingly endless money, the, the profit margin by the way, is about $3 billion per day is what these companies are pulling in combined $3 billion in profit a day, but they don't always win. And that is of course the silver lining here. Yes, we're up against these behemoths. Yes, we're up against unlimited corporate money, but we're not always losing as we continue to see the effects of climate change, right? In our own backyards, whether it's floods, which we've seen this week, wildfires, which we've seen this week, other extreme weather events that we've seen this week, all of those things combined start to wake more and more people up.

In fact, as I always point out the only place where there's actual disagreement about whether or not we should take action on climate change, I is in Congress. You ask anybody in this country, Republican Democrat, or what have you, majority of them all say, yes, we should be doing more to protect the environment. Yes, we should be investing in renewable energy. Like I said, the only disagreements that exist are in the halls of Congress. We're actually all United on this United against an industry that is spending 200 million every 18 months, but they're not always winning. We're getting some victories here. They may be small. We may feel that they don't do enough. You know, the numbers show us, they don't do enough, but we're getting small victories here and there, which of course is always better than getting absolutely nothing so they can spend all the money they want. But the tide is shifting both literally and metaphorically. And as that tide continues to shift more and more people are demanding action.