[imagesource: Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images]

You might not recognise that man above, but his name is Andrew Wheeler.

He is the head honcho at the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), although that name is a bit oxymoronic.

Wheeler took control at the EPA in 2018, and since then he’s done everything in his power to roll back a number of regulations aimed at protecting the environment.

That’s why he’s the second name mentioned in Rolling Stone’s article, ‘Climate Enemies: The Men Who Sold the World’, which is a who’s who of powerful people destroying our planet.

Here’s a little more on Wheeler:

[He] has curtailed the agency’s ability to use scientific data when establishing regulations, rolled back clean-water protections that prevented polluters from dumping chemicals in streams and wetlands, and waged campaigns to strip numerous emissions regulations — from checks on methane to tailpipe-exhaust restrictions in California.

He came to the EPA after spending years as a fossil-fuel-industry lobbyist. “Wheeler is the embodiment of the anti-regulatory ‘deep state’ in Washington,” Ken Cook, president of the nonprofit advocacy organization Environmental Working Group, told us in 2018. “He’s playing the long game. And that’s exactly what makes him so dangerous.”

Who the hell would pick a guy like this to lead the EPA? Oh, yes.

Number one on the list is the man who appointed him, but more on that to come.

First of all, let’s see the cover of the latest Rolling Stone magazine, featuring none other than Greta Thunberg.

If you’re not one of those people with completely irrational hate for a teenager just trying to help protect the planet, you can read Greta’s full interview here.

OK, back to the men who sold the world, and a certain Donald J. Trump:

Trump has been a godsend for the fossil-fuel industry, gutting the budgets of the Environmental Protection Agency and Department of the Interior while stocking each agency with former fossil-fuel-industry executives and lobbyists.

He has auctioned off millions of acres of public land to oil-and-gas drilling and rolled back close to 100 environmental regulations, paving the way for 200 million more tons of carbon to be pumped into the atmosphere per year. But Trump insists he’s one of the good guys.

“I’m an environmentalist,” he said last fall after bailing on a climate-focused meeting of the G-7. “A lot of people don’t understand that. I think I know more about the environment than most people.”

He knows more about most things than anybody else…

Next up on the list is Rupert Murdoch, who is currently gearing up for some lawsuits due to Fox News’ coverage of the coronavirus pandemic:

The billionaire executive chair of News Corp. and founder of Fox News, Murdoch started a network of media properties that has been instrumental in the propagation of climate-change skepticism, both in America and abroad.

As climate-fueled wildfires decimated his home country of Australia, Murdoch’s outlets spread disinformation — The Australian dismissed the fires as “nothing new.”

It’s even worse in the U.S., where Fox News has been a platform for climate deniers for years. In 2019 alone, its guests called climate science “fake,” argued the climate is bound to change “with the Earth rotating at 1,000 miles per hour,” and claimed that pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere couldn’t be bad because “we exhale carbon dioxide.”

You really should watch Succession, which is a great parody of one of the world’s most morally reprehensible empires.

Robert Mercer, of the Mercer Family Foundation, is then called out, before Warren Buffett makes an appearance:

The “Oracle of Omaha” is a little shortsighted when it comes to the climate crisis. The billionaire financial guru has long been pumping money into the fossil-fuel industry, and it doesn’t look like he has plans to stop. In 2019, Buffett invested $10 billion in Occidental Petroleum’s interest in the Permian Basin, marveling to CNBC how “incredible” it is that the region is producing 4 million barrels of oil a day.

He’s rationalized his climate-killing investments by arguing that his first priority is to enrich his shareholders, not save the environment.

Warren, who sits in fourth place in terms of richest people in the world, is 89, so he won’t have to live with the consequences of his actions. Thanks, Warren.

Let’s do one more before we go – Charles Koch, the CEO of Koch Industries:

Koch Industries pumped more than 25 million metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere in 2017, according to a University of Massachusetts study, more than Chevron, BP, and a host of other fossil-fuel-industry powerhouses. Charles, 84, and his brother David (who died in 2019) began funding climate denial long before the crisis went mainstream.

In 1991, Charles’ Cato Institute hosted a conference for skeptics titled “Global Environmental Crisis: Science or Politics?” They continued to work to prevent congressional action on climate change for decades, founding and funding anti-science advocacy groups like Americans for Prosperity and Freedom Partners.

As Kochland author Christopher Leonard wrote for The New York Times in 2019, the Kochs’ “unrivaled” political influence machine “has been employed to great effect to ensure that no government action is taken to control greenhouse gas emissions.”

What a stand-up pair of brothers.

We’ll call it there, but you can read the full list of the men who sold the world here.

[source:rollingstone]