Once upon a time, there were two major parties in the United States who both agreed that it mattered to protect Americans’ health and the ecosystems that enable our robust nation to prosper. While not in perfect harmony, once upon a time, these two parties would come together to agree on solution paths to address environmental challenges to improve public health and create new economic activity.
What seems like fantasy today was once the truth in America … once upon a time.
Today, we have a political party that is intent on destroying protections for Americans’ health and to hasten our already headlong rush into climate catastrophic climate chaos.
From the video’s introductory statement:
If there’s one issue that hasn’t been talked about enough in this election, it’s the environment.
Yet the difference between the parties is stark: Republicans, bankrolled by polluters like the Koch Brothers, want to cut the EPA and rollback or weaken vital environmental protections like the Clean Air and Clean Water Act, laws that ensure millions of Americans can breath our air and drink our water safely.
Mitt Romney calls the EPA “a tool in the hands of the President to crush the private enterprise system,” and has vowed to block needed protections on things like fracking and carbon emissions.
Now, perhaps the weakest thing of this video (other than it has the audacity to be longer than Americans’ 30 second attention span) is the title: “The GOP Threat to The Environment” falls into the framing of “environment” as something external, something outside (or alongside) humanity and human interests rather than the reality that the economy is within the environment, that we live within the environment, that our society will not thrive in an ever-worsening and disrupted eco-system (and eco-systems). Perhaps the true title is: “The GOP Threat to U.S. (and all of us) via their attacks on the environment.”
This video was produced by New Left Media.
Hat tip to lowkell at Blue Virginia.