Like parasite, White House oil insiders will kill host
By Mark Gongloff / Bloomberg Opinion
Fungus enthusiasts and fans of the video game/TV show “The Last of Us” will be familiar with cordyceps, an actual parasitic fungus that invades insects and forces them to do its bidding until they die. It’s a great deal for the cordyceps, which uses its hosts to expand its reach. For the insects, not so much.
The takeover of the U.S. government by the fossil-fuel industry during the second Trump administration threatens to do similar harm to its host body.
President Donald Trump’s current government includes 43 former employees of the industry, according to a study by the nonprofit advocacy groups Public Citizen and The Revolving Door Project. They’re joined by a dozen former members of think tanks funded by the industry, several lawyers who have represented it and dozens of former executives with other companies that contribute to greenhouse gases.
These political appointees are mostly clustered in the White House, the Energy and Interior departments and the Environmental Protection Agency, where the bulk of the government’s business related to fossil fuels happens. But they’re also scattered through the departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Justice and Transportation. That reflects Trump’s whole-of-government approach to reversing the progress his predecessors made in fighting global heating and transitioning the country toward cleaner energy sources.
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