Can’t oil barons ever be honest? (Hint: no)

Former New Mexico Gov. Bruce King once opposed a bill because, he said, he feared it would “open a whole box of Pandoras.”

An odd rhetorical twist, but it would be helpful if today’s ego-bloated, high-tech billionaires and corporate profiteers had a bit of self-restraint, rather than thinking their money equals genius. For example, such doofuses are presently pushing convoluted schemes to “solve” our globe’s technology-caused climate crisis with — what else? — technology.

Their latest box of Pandoras includes a grandiose plan to “geoengineer” carbon dioxide, the destructive gas spewed into our air by the production and use of fossil fuels. The geniuses say they have the techno-knowhow to suck-up that bad gas and pump it a mile deep into the Earth. See, problem gone! All they need, they say, is for taxpayers to put up trillions of dollars.

Who’s behind this hustle? Oil giants. Yes, the same prevaricating snake oil salesmen who cause most of the suffocating CO2 pollution that’s rapidly cooking our planet! Such petro-peddlers as Occidental Petroleum are now trying to rebrand themselves as “carbon management” experts, asking us to trust them to reengineer our atmosphere. But they’re frauds; their magical “Vacuum Cleaner in the Sky” won’t remove even 1% of the new carbon emissions released every year.

Worse, Occidental says it intends to keep much of the CO2 it vacuums up, using the gas to force more oil out of the ground — thus creating more global warming! As Occidental’s CEO gleefully puts it, geoengineering “gives our industry a license to continue to operate for … 60, 70, 80 years.”

Razzle-dazzle technology is not a climate solution. It’s a business-as-usual lie told by profiteers desperate to keep burning fossil fuels — and our globe.

To find out more about Jim Hightower and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www. creators.com.