How did the Trump Administration end up undermining vehicle fuel-efficiency standards so completely that even the car companies didn’t want it to go that far? The New York Times has the answer: Marathon Petroleum, working with the Koch Brothers–funded American Legislative Exchange Council and assorted other fuel-industry uglies, ran a secret campaign to ensure that gasoline consumption would go up.
Smarmy complaints about “unelected bureaucrats in Sacramento, California or Washington, D.C.” forcing regular people to burn less gas were the work of a cabal of oil interests working behind the scenes with bureaucrats to force regular people to burn more gas—an extra “350,000 to 400,000 barrels of gasoline per day,” according to the Times‘ account of a Marathon investor call. Compliant members of Congress sent the Department of Transportation letters about the importance of making sure we use our abundance of fossil fuels, with language cribbed straight from an oil lobbyist’s Word document.
If everyone insists on running things like a bunch of movie villains, it’s only fair that this end with the people who run Marathon Petroleum and the American Legislative Exchange Council being torn apart by sharks in the canals where the streets of Miami used to be.
Meanwhile here’s a New York magazine story about how people are reading the Unabomber manifesto and trying to organize themselves to bring down technologized civilization before the destruction of the planet gets even worse than it already is.
