Compare the following two stories. First this one from an AP Business writer, Steve Quinn:

DALLAS – Exxon Mobil Corp. said Thursday it earned $10.36 billion in the April-June period, the second largest quarterly profit ever recorded by a publicly traded U.S. company.

The earnings figure was 36 percent above the profit it reported a year ago. High oil prices and the growing global appetite for fuel helped boost the company’s revenue by 12 percent to a level just short of a quarterly record. Its shares briefly rose to a new high.

“We continue to see demand growth year over year,” Henry Hubble, Exxon’s vice president of investor relations told analysts. “We’re selling everything we can make.”

Now contrast it with this one, from the Seattle Times:

GRANTS PASS, Ore. – Bottom fish and crabs washing up dead on Oregon beaches are being killed by a recurring “dead zone” of low-oxygen water that appears to be triggered by global warming, scientists say. […]

Scientists studying a 70-mile-long zone of oxygen-depleted water along the Continental Shelf between Florence and Lincoln City have concluded it is being caused by explosive blooms of tiny plants known as phytoplankton, which die and sink to the bottom.

The phytoplankton are eaten by bacteria, which use up the oxygen in the water. The recurring phytoplankton blooms are triggered by north winds generating a rollover of the water column in a process known as upwelling.

“We are seeing wild swings from year to year in the timing and duration of the winds that are favorable for upwelling,” Jane Lubchenco, professor of marine ecology at Oregon State and a member of the Pew Oceans Commission, said from Corvallis. “This increased variability in the winds is consistent with what we would expect under climate change.” […]

“If we continue like we are now, we could see some ecological shifts,” Barth said. “It all depends on what happens with the warming and the greenhouse gases.” […]

“We’re not really sure what is down the road. If it’s just for a short period of time, it will not be as devastating as if it starts lasting a significant fraction of summer,” she said. Crab fishermen in Oregon and Washington are finding dead crabs in their pots, and deeper water fish, such as ling cod, wolf eels and rockfish, are showing up in Oregon tide pools, apparently chased to shore by the dead zone advancing across the Continental Shelf, said Lubchenco.

Get the connection? We are literally killing the biosphere upon which life depends (human life included) so that oil and gas companies like Exxon Mobil can make ever more massive profits. The same reason we are engaged in 2 war zones in the Middle East (Afghanistan and Iraq) and are supporting Israel as our proxy in another (Lebanon): oil.  This is also why the Republican Party has received 75% of the campaign contibutions from oil and gas industry over the last sixteen years, and over 80% in the last four.  And this is what happens when your government is bought and paid for by the Oil industry:

(Cont.)

While Republican leaders sharply criticize soaring gasoline prices and energy industry profits, GOP negotiators have decided to knock out provisions in a major tax bill that would force the oil companies to pay billions of dollars more in taxes on their profits.

House and Senate tax writers have been struggling to reach an accord on separate tax bills approved last year to extend some expiring tax cuts enacted during President Bush’s first term. But House Republicans have raised strong objections to Senate-passed provisions that would raise nearly $5 billion in taxes over five years — primarily by changing arcane accounting rules that have allowed oil companies to substantially lower their tax bills, according to House and Senate tax aides familiar with the talks. […]

House Majority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) made it clear yesterday that the leadership would only go so far in punishing an industry enjoying record-breaking profits if that punishment could have broader negative consequences. In January, Exxon Mobil Corp. alone reported the highest corporate profit in U.S. history: $10.71 billion for the fourth quarter of 2005 and $36.13 billion for the entire year.

Nero fiddled while Rome burned, so the legend says. However, this is no legend: the Republican party is literally leading the cheers for the Oil & Gas industry while our planet burns from global warming and from wars we have initiated to protect those same oil companies’ profits.

Will any Democrat, other than Al Gore, stand up and make these same connections in public? It would sure make for a helluva winning populist campaign if one of them would.