It’s nice to see that there is some level of justice out there in the icy cold universe, so completely indifferent, as it is, to human happiness. Sometimes bad things actually do happen to bad people.
Case in point: coal baron Robert Murray, who has had a busy couple of years. He tried hard but somehow failed to get adequate subsidies from the U.S. federal government to maintain the solvency of his company, Murray Energy, when his meetings with then-U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry somehow proved fruitless. Though he ultimately failed to prevent his company from plunging into bankruptcy, this hasn’t deterred him from his nonstop efforts to cast doubt as to the validity of man-made climate change.
From this New York Times article:
Murray Energy filed for bankruptcy protection in October, reporting $2.7 billion in debts and more than $8 billion in obligations, in large part to pension and health care plans for workers. But those debts appear to have done little to scale back the spending habits of Mr. Murray, a prominent supporter of President Trump who helped engineer dozens of climate change and environmental rollbacks over the past three years.
The 79-year-old coal executive has been a vocal denier of the established science that human activities like the burning of coal are causing climate change and once warned that his dying industry must receive subsidies from the federal government “to make sure grandma doesn’t die on the operating table.”
According to filings made public this week, Mr. Murray paid himself $14 million for one year’s wages as chairman of Murray Energy while his then-president, Robert D. Moore, who has since become chairman, earned $9 million annually in addition to his retention bonus.
Mr. Murray’s charitable giving over the past two years included $2 million to the Boy Scouts of America. He also funded an array of conservative political action committees as well as groups that deny the existence of climate change and have worked to revoke former President Barack Obama’s regulations aimed at reducing planet-warming emissions.
The company gave $300,000 to Government Accountability & Oversight, a group focused on countering organizations that oppose Trump administration environmental rollbacks. An additional $200,000 went to the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-market think tank that maintains that scientists have not proven that human activity is the main cause of rising emissions. And $130,000 was given to the Heartland Institute, which has sponsored climate-change deniers to speak at United Nations climate change conferences.
Eventually, coal will be gone, as will be climate denial. The level of capacity for this planet to support life at that time, however, is anyone’s guess.
For now, we’ll have to content ourselves in the knowledge that justice is sometimes served.
