Tom Knott: Advertising the horror of money from big oil

By Tom Knott (Contact) | Monday, June 23, 2008

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To their everlasting horror, the global-warming alarmists have discovered that ExxonMobil advertises with the Washington Nationals.

This act of free enterprise cannot go unpunished, so the global-warming alarmists have initiated a campaign to educate the Lerner family and baseball-supporting public in the hope the Nationals will end their relationship with ExxonMobil.

The global-warming alarmists, a few in polar bear suits, descended on the ballpark Friday to highlight the injustice of the Big Oil company, to point to its destruction of the environment and to remind everyone how it funds global-warming denial groups.

It is unclear whether the global-warming alarmists walked to the ballpark from their homes, took mass transportation or drove there in an automobile. That, of course, is often the rub with the global-warming zealots.

They talk a good game if it concerns you, your neighbor and the person down the block. They just do not always practice what they preach, no one more comical in that regard than Al Gore, the high priest of global warming forever preaching the gospel of carbon offsets from his private jet and energy-guzzling residence in Tennessee.

The global-warming alarmists held placards outside the ballpark's gates that urged fans to boo during the ExxonMobil-sponsored seventh-inning stretch. And boo they did. Other signs called for ExxonMobil to be banned from Nationals Park, which earned a silver rating from the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, the first U.S. sports venue to claim that distinction.

Of course, it is easy to be disgusted with the bogeyman known as Big Oil. Its overpaid executives stand on street corners all across America and persuade gullible motorists to pull into the nearest gas station and fill up.

Capitol Hill lawmakers rail against this unlawful practice and are threatening to impose a windfall profits tax on Big Oil because it is just not nice to be basking in record profits. Why, it is un-American, so not cool. We should be redistributing those profits to the little guy but not before Capitol Hill gets its sizable cut.

Or perhaps we can return to the energy price controls of the '70s, which, not surprisingly, resulted in Soviet Union-like supply shortages, long lines at gas stations, a spike in prices and the old odd-even-numbered-license-plate solution.

It was a fun time in the '70s, not the least of which was the impending ice age facing the planet. Thankfully, the global-warming alarmists, just as they are doing now, warned us that America would give way to tundra, food production would drop precipitously and zillions would die from starvation.

This calamity was averted by disco fever, which warmed the planet out of the ice-age danger.

So now the planet is warming at an alarming rate, the Potomac River is readying to submerge the Lincoln Memorial and ExxonMobil and the Nationals have forged a galling relationship at the ballpark, which, by the way, is consuming all kinds of energy. You really would hate to see the Nationals' Pepco bill each month.

Anyway, the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, Greenpeace, Oil Change International and Friends of the Earth have come together to denounce the awfulness of it all.

The thought of the Nationals possibly awarding the ballpark's naming rights to ExxonMobil sends a shiver up the spine of the global-warming alarmists, which is not to be confused with the thrill that is going up the leg of Chris Matthews.

As the Lerner family knows too well, it sometimes can be tough doing business in a city that does not know the first thing about doing business, other than spending other people's money.

This worked in the favor of the Lerner family after the city's lawmakers agreed to pony up $611 million in tax money to build the $796.6 million ballpark whose final bill remains incomplete.

Now the Lerner family, in trying to operate a genuine business, has taken up with a green that is different from the green of the green groups.

Shame on the Lerner family for trying to make a buck after building a green ballpark.

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