Guest column: Ohio leaders worship scum of the earth

Don’t get me wrong. From the coal that still generates some of our electricity to the oil that fuels our motor vehicles to the fake “green energy” known by realists as natural gas, we still need the scum of the earth. It’s just that the majority of Ohio’s so-called leaders want us to burn more of it, not less. And they couldn’t care less about the truth of climate change – or its heated transmission to our grandchildren, for that matter.

I’m old enough to remember the coal shoot and odorous furnace in the cellar of my grandparents’ house, where I spent the early days of my life. Fortunately, I’m not old enough to have dodged the equine fecal slop that cluttered American roadways before automobiles replaced horses and buggies.

There once was a time when conservatives were not devoted to horse manure. But now they’re committed to the scum of the earth. No matter the pollution, the stench, the heat, the floods, the storms or the lives cut short, they’re turning their backs on facts, notably in Ohio.

Regardless of the outcome of the racketeering trial against former Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder, we already know about corruption associated with passage of Ohio House Bill 6 in 2019. It’s been well-established that Ohio politicians were bought off by FirstEnergy Corp. so that Ohio energy consumers have pumped more than $1 billion from their skinny wallets into the palm-greasers’ deep pockets.

We know now that the bailout for the company’s two nuclear plants on the Lake Erie shore was a hoax, not a dire necessity, and that our money’s going instead to two sooty Ohio River coal plants, one of them in Indiana. And we know that the fossil-fuel industry, including the shrinking coal component, was further energized by HB6’s reduction in Ohio’s renewable-energy standards.

There’s much more. Also passed in 2019 was Ohio Senate Bill 52, which enables counties to essentially ban any substantial wind and solar projects. While landowners can be denied their property rights for green energy, the Ohio Unitization Law enacted in 1965 actually can force them through mandatory pooling to allow gas and oil drilling, including fracking, beneath their property.

This past December Ohio House Bill 507 was passed to open state lands up to fracking and to label natural gas as “green energy.” Natural gas isn’t filthy black like coal or oil, but it’s a far cry from green.

For the record, state Sen. Matt Dolan, the Republican who lives in Chagrin Falls but who has been redistricted out of his hometown and the rest of the Chagrin Valley, supported the so-called “nuclear bailout” but opposed the green-energy gaslighting and bans on wind and solar energy.

Republican state Sens. Jerry Cirino, of Kirtland, whose district now includes far eastern and southern Cuyahoga County, and Sandra O’Brien, of Ashtabula, whose district now includes most of Geauga County, are all in for the protection of dirty energy. Democratic state Sen. Vernon Sykes, of Akron, whose district now stretches into southern and eastern Geauga County, opposed all three dirty-energy bills.

Democratic state Rep. Phillip M. Robinson Jr., of Solon, also opposed dirty energy, while Republican state Rep. Sarah Fowler Arthur, of Ashtabula, was all in for it.

And our governor happily signs on to undermine true green energy.