Old Fossils and Fossil Fuels

Hillary Clinton got angry when confronted by a voter Thursday over donations she has received from the fossil fuel industry.

She was asked if she will follow through on her “word” to refuse “fossil fuel money” going to her campaign.

Clinton has been repeatedly attacked on the campaign trail by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders over donations from the fossil fuel industry. Neither she nor her affiliated Super PACs have received money from oil and gas companies themselves, but her campaign committee has received over $300,000 from fossil fuel employees. On top of this, her Super PAC Priorities Action USA has gotten over $3.2 million from donors connected to the oil and gas industry.

Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, along with millions of environmentalism supporters, claim to hate the fossil fuel industry.

But why is there a multi-billion dollar fossil fuel industry? Because of customers who purchase fossil fuels. Most customers are ordinary people who buy gas and purchase fuel every day.  This is why fossil fuel companies are so incredibly profitable: Because people want and need what they sell.

What I don’t understand: If it’s so fashionable and correct to condemn the fossil fuel industry, then why isn’t it fashionable to hate the people who make the fossil fuel industry profitable – the consumers? Nobody is making consumers buy gas, run air conditioning, or seek power in their homes, hospitals or places of work. If it’s immoral to manufacture and sell fossil fuels, isn’t it immoral to purchase them?

Consumers, by the way, include people like Al Gore, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders. It also includes Hollywood celebrities and high-powered politicians whose condemnation of fossil fuels is only surpassed by their disproportionate use of them. It’s so easy to preach and spout off when you’re on the environmentalist side of the street, since environmentalism is nothing more than religion for the educated and the cool.

You’d think if somebody really opposed something with the moral fury environmentalists claim to oppose fossil fuels, they’d stop using them. Their rationalized psychological cover is, “Well, the fossil fuel industry won’t allow competition.” Does this mean there are cheaper, safer and more efficient fuels available than what fossil fuels have to offer?  If so, we’re sure not seeing them. If such cheap and reliable sources of energy existed, consumers would flock and rush to them with the same intensity that people flocked from horse and buggies to the automobile – only faster. Wind, solar and other alternative fuels have not taken off, despite a more favorable political climate than ever before, since Obama came to office. Why not? Because they’re of limited value, at best. If this were not the case, we all would have been using them long before Obama came to office to push his environmentalism on the population.

Opponents of fossil fuels used to complain of conspiracy theories. For example, when oil men George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were in office, they were blamed for somehow rigging things in Washington so alternative fuels could not be developed. Well, for nearly a decade now, Barack Obama and his Republican enablers in Congress have funded every green program imaginable; and Obama even goes over the head of Congress by restraining fossil fuel development through the powers of the EPA. Yet people still flock in droves to purchase fossil fuels to run their cars, heat and cool their homes, and basically keep the lights of Western civilization on. This includes the very people who claim to be against fossil fuels.

I repeat: What gives?

Hillary Clinton, who will be the Democratic Party nominee for President come the fall, will never be asked this question. But somebody should ask her. As things stand now, she is the next President of the United States. The issue isn’t why she takes money from fossil fuel company employees. The issue is why she doesn’t condemn people who use fossil fuels, if fossil fuels are really as evil as she and environmentalists claim to think they are. She should be condemning herself, as well as all of her supporters, for using fossil fuels.

We live in an era of emotions over reason. In a lot of people’s minds, it feels good to be seen as putting down fossil fuel companies, even though everyone purchases and uses fossil fuels of their own free will, every single day. Reason finds a contradiction here. But emotions? No way. Emotions are supreme over reason.

I suppose that’s why we’re getting this angry, bitter old feminist fossil as our next president.