Possible Effects of the U.S. Midterm Elections

The Lie of Climate Change

What this could mean for Canadians and for anyone else concerned with the environment is that they will see a heavily funded attack against not only regulatory bills such as emission caps but against the entire school of thought on climate change.

“It’s a flat-out-lie,” suggests Mr. Norman Dennison, an electrician and Tea Party founder in Corydon, Indiana, who bases his views on the Bible’s claim that God made the Earth for us to utilize.

In the poll taken by the New York Times from where Mr. Dennison’s quote was extracted, the findings were that more than half of the Tea Partiers thought global warming would have no effect whatsoever on the world; and that their overall consensus was that efforts to address climate change are elite efforts to impose a world government and redistribute wealth.

These views are echoes of what the Fossil Fuel Industry – another player with big stakes in this race – has been expressing for years through campaigns, rallies and research seeking to disprove Global Warming. They furthermore hold that caps on emissions are conducive to the loss of jobs and have adverse effects on the economy.

According to the Center for American Progress Action Fund—an advocacy group in Washington—the oil, coal and utility industries have also jumped on this wagon, spending over $500 million dollars to disprove the theory of climate change and to defeat candidates supporting it.

This could be catastrophic for Canada’s environment and Native Groups dependent on it. Koch Industries are not only one of the leading sponsors of the Tea Party (and their ideologies), but are also the owners of Pine Bend Refinery, a Rosemount, Minnesota-based refinery that is “among the top processors of Canadian crude in the United States,” as stated by the company’s website, and is therefore highly dependent on the Albertan crude bitumen from which oil is extracted.

According to The Tyee, a newspaper from British Columbia, the company processes around 325,000 barrels a day, of which 80 per cent comes from Alberta. The process itself of turning all that bitumen into oil has already been labeled a “black eye” on Canada by many documentaries and Native Leaders since it “creates 82% more carbon emissions than that for conventional oil.”

Before the Tea Party, private oil and energy companies already made major advances in 2009 when they were able to lobby the U.S. congress and government – aided by the Albertan Premier and other Canadian ministers – to lower their caps on emissions from 20 to 17 per-cent, and to allow the importation of what environmentalists are calling “dirty oil” into the U.S.