Why is America letting the oil industry destroy the planet?

When my mom got pregnant with me in 1950, my dad, whose lifetime ambition had been to be a history professor,

decided to abandon the GI Bill, drop out of college, and go to work in a steel plant in Grand Rapids, Michigan to financially prepare for their new arrival.

It was hot, dirty work and the steel came out of the furnace over asbestos covered rollers, leaving

Dad working in a cloud of the stuff.

In 2006, Dad was diagnosed with mesothelioma, an insanely painful and ultimately one

100% deadly disease. I tracked down a lawyer who did suits on behalf of

asbestos victims and he showed up to depose dad on videotape

along with more than a dozen asbestos industry lawyers, several of whom

were quite verbally abusive to dad. They barely fit into my parents' small living

room and left my father in tears. After the lawyer's fees I think mom ended up with around $135,000

which was better than nothing although the industry lawyers had filed an appeal that

forced him back to the hospital for a painful second biopsy to prove he had mesothelioma.

And then they procrastinated so long that the money didn't come until after he died.

These were Trump-style relentless attorneys representing a murderous industry that had known

since the 1930s that their product caused this exact disease.

Every senior executive in the industry for the more than 70 years between the time they discovered

how deadly asbestos was and my father's death knew and they participated in the cover-up.

Just like the executives in the tobacco industry who've known with certainty that they were

peddling death and disease since the 1940s and are today responsible for an

estimated half million American deaths every year including my younger brother Stan

who died of COPB last year.

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