Connecting connect

How does the quote below connect to content we have gone over earlier in the semester? 1. You must either use a direct quote from the past source or paraphrase a section you remember 2. and explain how it is connected to a portion of the quote below 3. Finally, check out what others in the course connected the quote to and state whether you agree or respectfully disagree with their connection and why. The coal companies write the laws. They control local and state politicians. They destroy the water tables, suck billions of dollars’ worth of coal out of the state, and render hundreds of acres uninhabitable. And ninety-five percent of the companies are not even based in West Virginia. The rights and health of those who live on the land are meaningless. The fossil-fuel industry’s group game of corporate politics was on display following the arrests in the fall of 2011 of 1,253 activist from the environmental brought some of the dirtiest energy on the planet from the tar sands in Canada through the United State to the Gulf Coast. James Hansen, NASA’s leading climate scientist, has said that the building of the pipeline would mean “game over for the climate.” President Barack Obama, ducking the issue, said he would review the proposal and make a decision after the November 2012 presidential election. The U.S. House of Representatives, urged on by lobbyists, however, voted a few days later 234 to 194 to a quicker review of the pipeline. The House attached its demand to a bill proposing a popular payroll tax cut. Oil Change International calculated that the 234 Congressional representatives who voted in favor of the measure received $42 million in campaign contributions from the fossil-fuel industry. The 194 representatives who opposed it received $8 million. Speaker of the House John Boehner, a champion of the pipeline, has received a total of $1,111,080 in campaign contributions from the fossil-fuel industry. His counterpart in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, who pushed it through the Senate, has received $1,277,208. Obama, saying the Republican deadline left no time to approve the project, did not sign off on the pipeline. But his administration did not reject it, either. The president invited the company building the pipeline, TransCanada Corporation, to reapply, which it has done. Obama, who approved the southern section of the oil pipeline, pushed a final decision on the full pipeline into 2013, beyond the presidential elections.