Month 9, Day 28: He’s Riiiiiiiiiiiiight.

The Seattle Times ran an AP story on Governor Schwarzenegger’s remarks about the companies promoting Proposition 23 in California.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Monday blasted the out-of-state oil companies that are trying to undermine California’s global warming law, saying they are motivated purely by greed.

Companies such as Valero Energy Corp., Tesoro Corp. and Koch Industries are spending millions of dollars to manipulate the will of Californians and “buy votes,” the Republican governor told the Commonwealth Club.

Their motivation, he said, is “self-serving greed.”

The Governator may be an idiot in many ways, but he’s on the money here.

Governor Schwarzenegger is exactly correct in his description of the corporations which are pumping money into California’s electoral process. Valero Energy Corp., Tesoro Corp. and Koch Industries are motivated entirely by greed — and a particularly short-sighted greed at that. By focusing entirely on profit in the short term, these corporations are endangering the natural ecosystems which sustain human civilization. Catastrophic climate change is not an abstract threat to some unspecified future generation; it’s happening right now in Pakistan (whose government may well be the first political casualty of anthropogenic global heating), and it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets any better. An economy shattered by climate chaos won’t be able to support major extractive industries; in their support of California’s Proposition 23, Valero, Tesoro and Koch are undermining their own chances of continued existence in the longer term. Along with ours.

Warren Senders