Lamenting Lugar’s Loss

Posted by: Wesley Warren - May 16, 2012

In an age of politics bitterly fought along ideological lines, sensibility received another blow with the defeat of Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN) by tea party backed candidate, Richard Mourdock. Lugar was someone who put the good of the nation and the needs of his constituents above party and ideology. His defeat sends a bad signal to those who would like to see Washington come together to solve the nation’s most pressing issues.

In politics, the center is the place where people get together to work out differences. It’s not so much a spot between the left and the right as it is a willingness to get things done. Many praise Lugar’s record of bipartisanship but let’s face it, he was no moderate. In fact, in 2010 he received a 100% rating from the Chamber of Commerce and a 91% from the National Taxpayers Union. His conservative outlook extended to his views on energy and the environment as the League of Conservation Voters gave him a rating of 0% in this same year. And he didn’t lose because he was too moderate but mainly because he had lived away from Indiana too long, literally and figuratively. Hoosiers wanted a new face.

Yet despite his conservative values, he was a sensible man. He was someone with which you could exchange ideas and who was willing to work across the aisle to solve problems. Lugar built his career on arms control, securing our nation from international threat but was also concerned with the United State’s energy security. The Lugar Practical Energy Plan promised better job-creating economic growth, U.S. global competitiveness, and environmental stewardship through more productive use of energy in transportation and electricity. To this end he was committed to increasing energy efficiency and encouraging the use of alternative energy sources. He even went so far as to vote for Lieberman-McCain Climate Stewardship Act in 2003.

We should all lament Lugar’s defeat as he joins the ranks of other sensible Republican leaders who have recently left or are leaving Congress including Congressman Michael Castle (R-DE) and Senator Olympia Snowe (R-ME). In fact, Snowe cited the extreme partisanship in Congress as one of her reasons for retirement. NRDC Action Fund staffer Bob Deans has recently published the book Reckless: The Political Assault on the American Environment, illustrating how detrimental extreme partisanship has been for environmental policies in the 112^th Congress.

This year voters will have a chance to send a message about how they want their leaders to run the country. Here’s to hoping that message will be for them to return to sensibility.

Chairman Whitfield Admits Anti-Environment Energy Bills Won’t Lower Gas Prices

Posted by: Melissa Harrison - April 23, 2012

We’ve heard the lie that environmental protections are raising gas prices again and again. However, one House Republican was recently (and perhaps unintentionally) honest about the true impact of the Tea Party’s anti-environmental agenda.

“I don’t think any of us have said that our bill would reduce costs,” stated Energy and Power Subcommittee Chairman Rep. Ed Whitfield. As Rick Perry might say: “Oops.”

In fact, many members of the Tea Party have said that their bills to rollback environmental protections would reduce costs. The Ranking Democrat on the Energy and Commerce Committee has helpfully remixed some of these repeated assertions into a short video.

If, as the subcommittee chairman said, these bills won’t lower gas prices, what will they do? They will stop EPA from implementing parts of the Clean Air Act at dirty refineries. They will stop EPA from making fuels cleaner. They will stop EPA from updating clean air standards that reduce smog. And they’d undermine the heart of the Clean Air Act by forcing EPA to deviate from decades of success in only considering health when setting certain pollution standards.

Once again the Tea Party shows its true colors by putting polluter profits ahead of people’s health.

Tea Partiers Are Destroying the Legacy of the Republican Party

Posted by: Heather Taylor-Miesle - April 17, 2012

A new book out this week presents an astounding fact that could help shape the upcoming elections: the Republican-led House voted nearly 200 times to undermine public health and environmental safeguards in 2011.

This constitutes the largest attack on environmental protections in our nation’s history. But the American people didn’t ask for such a radical departure. Eight out of ten voters want the standards that keep our water clean and our air safe to breathe either strengthened or left alone.

Reckless: The Political Assault on the American Environment chronicles the Tea-Party-inspired attempt to strip away trusted safeguards. Written by Bob Deans, a veteran journalist who now works for the NRDC Action Fund, the book describes the damage these measures would do and the polluting companies they would benefit.

But the book also provides something else: a valuable insert to a 2012 campaign playbook.

Anyone running in a primary or race against a Tea-Partier or those who have voted with them should shine a spotlight on their radical environmental assault. They can remind voters that when the economy was in flames and Americans were losing their homes, these lawmakers spent their time trying to dismantle environmental laws that have stood strong for 40 years.

Instead of addressing the global financial crisis an unregulated mortgage debt, leaders like House Majority Leader Eric Cantor claimed that the Environmental Protection Agency and its public health safeguards were the “job destroying” villains.

Challengers can also remind voters that the Republication war against environmental protection is bad for our health.

Reckless describes how Tea Party House members tried time and again to gut the Clean Air Act. This isn’t some obscure, bureaucratic regulation. It is the law that has prevented more than 4,300,000 premature deaths since 1990. It’s the law that slashed the number of unhealthy air days in Los Angeles from more than 200 days in 1970 down 28 days in 2003. It’s the law that brought the percentage of American children with dangerous levels of lead in their blood down from 90 percent in the 1970s to 2 percent in 2000. And it’s the law that has had decades of bipartisan support.

But the Leadership of the House Republicans wanted to halt this progress and return us to darker, dirtier days. Challengers can offer voters a clear contrast: clean skies and healthier families or more smog and asthma attacks? I can’t think of one parent who wants their kids breathing more pollution.

Challengers—especially those going after moderate voters—should remind Americans of something else as well: the Republican Party didn’t always put polluters first. Reckless charts the GOP’s proud tradition of conservation from President Teddy Roosevelt to President George H.W. Bush—the man who called the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 one of his greatest legislative accomplishments. Most Republican voters continue to hold these values even if their lawmakers have set them aside: 58 percent of Republican voters said they oppose House efforts to block the EPA from reducing air pollution from power plants, according to a 2011 poll by GS Strategy Group and Hart Research.

Why have so many House lawmakers forgotten that conservation is part of conservative values? I see two reasons. First, the Tea Party scared the daylights out of moderate Republicans and even out of sensible conservatives.

And second, polluters spend a lot of cash in Washington. Reckless reports that people and organizations associated with the oil and gas industry spent $31.8 million on campaign contributions during the 2010 congressional elections, with 77 percent of the money going to Republicans.

Polluters may have piles of money, but candidates who stand for ordinary Americans and offer a vision of a cleaner, healthier future can mobilize voters better than any corporate-funded rally can. NRDC Action Fund’s research shows that promoting a clean energy vision can help candidates win elections. In this election cycle, candidates should remind voters how hard Tea Party Republicans worked to take away that cleaner future.

Americans of both parties want their kids to breathe safe air and drink clean water. To make sure we deliver on that promise, we must all do our part to end the House Republicans’ historic assault on environmental protections.

GOP Candidates’ Energy Distortions Defy Basic Logic

Posted by: Heather Taylor-Miesle - January 12, 2012

Mitt Romney has won the New Hampshire primary. That news doesn’t surprise many, since many pundits predicted it. What is more interesting is who landed in the second and third spots and the closeness???

Ron Paul came in second and beat out Santorum as the far-right candidate of choice. John Huntsman, meanwhile, had his long-awaited “surge” and came in third. Now momentum shifts to South Carolina, with all candidates staying in the race until that primary is over.

No doubt we will be hearing more about the candidates’ positions on energy and the environment. While these issues haven’t dominated in the campaign, they’ve been a constant thread, featured in debates and talk shows. Sadly, few candidates have offered the energy solutions our country needs right now.

Over the weekend, my daughter and I were reading side-by-side. She looked over at my magazine article and saw a photo of a pelican drenched in oil, and said, “Mommy, you go and make that stop.” Even a four-year-old could see something was wrong with oil run amok.

The next day, I saw a photo from KCOY.com of the man whose job it is to measure California’s snowpack high in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. He uses a giant ruler to assess how much water our thirsty state can look forward to in the spring. As of now, however, the guy has nothing to do. The picture showed him standing in a dry mountain meadow devoid of snow.

We are surrounded by shots like these — images that reveal something is profoundly wrong with our energy picture. In the face of intensifying climate change and rising gas prices, we leaders to offer smart policies based on the facts. Instead, GOP candidates are giving us more spin. All but John Huntsman continue to pretend climate change doesn’t exist — despite several of them acknowledging it in the past. Rhetoric trumps reality in their campaigns, and we can’t expect any climate solutions to come from their administrations.

But the distortion isn’t limited to climate. In the GOP debate on Sunday, Gingrich conjured a popular Tea Party boogey man: mythical dust regulations. To illustrate why he thought the Environmental Protection Agency was “incorrigible” he said, “In Iowa they had a dust regulation underway because they control particulate matter… They were worried that plowing on a corn field would leave dust to go to another farmer’s corn field. They were planning to issue a regulation.” That may whip up the anti-regulation crowd, but it is patently false.

As my colleague John Walke, the director of NRDC’s Clean Air Program, wrote on his blog: “Let’s be clear. There are no EPA farm dust regulations. There are no such proposed regulations. There are no EPA intentions for such regulations. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson has specifically disavowed such intentions in Congressional testimony when quizzed by suspicious Congressmen.” That didn’t stop Gingrich from hawking bogus claims.

Gingrich’s environmental falsehoods didn’t stop there. He said, “The long term answer to $4 heating oil is to open up offshore development of oil and gas, open up federal lines to oil and gas, flood the market… Under Obama, 2011 was the highest price of gasoline in history. It is a direct result of his policies.”

It is true gas prices soared last year, but the spike was the result of growing demand from China and India, political instability in Libya, trouble with refineries in France, and a host of other global forces.

If Gingrich believes more drilling would have made a difference, then Obama proved that claim false as well. Under the Obama Administration, companies drilled almost 21,000 oil wells in the first eight months of 2011—the highest number in almost 30 years. That’s nearly double the amount drilling the same period last year, and nearly triple the number drilled in 2009. Yet none of this expanded drilling made a difference to the global price of oil.

Huntsman was the only candidate in Sunday’s debate to give a nuanced view of energy markets. He said America needs to diversify its energy resources if we want to attain energy independence. “One of the first things I would do as president is I would take a look at that one-product distribution bias that always favors one product. And that’s oil… We have got to disrupt that one product monopoly that does not serve this country or its consumers.”

Now I may not agree with Huntsman on how to break up that monopoly or which energy resources we should expand, but at least he is looking at the problem head on. That is what America needs right now. You don’t have to have a PhD in economics and you don’t have to write a chapter on climate change for Gingrich’s book to recognize America’s energy future is not secure. My four-year-old can tell you that.

In the face of very real problems like global competition for oil and impacts of climate change, we need real solutions. Not leaders who peddle in false claims.

Cain’s Other Scandal

Posted by: Heather Taylor-Miesle - November 2, 2011

Herman Cain is having a moment. Thanks to his economics-by-mnemonics plan and his unconventional, smoke-filled ads, Cain recently shot to the top tier of the GOP campaign. He became what Ryan Lizza called the fringe frontrunner.

But when you step to center stage, you realize just how glaring the spotlight can be. Cain’s campaign is reeling from revelations that two former employees at the National Restaurant Association accused Cain of “inappropriate behavior.” His inconsistent statements about the ordeal are only making matters worse.

The harassment story will dominate Cain’s coverage for some time to come, but there is another scandal lurking in the background that deserves attention as well.

Mark Block, Cain’s chief of staff, has been implicated in a host of campaign financing improprieties. And as researchers pore over financial documents, they have found substantial links between Cain, Block, and the Koch Brothers.

Koch Industries own oil refineries and 4,000 miles of pipeline and was named one of the top 10 air polluters in the nation in a 2010 UMass-Amherst report. The Kochs’ political donations are often aimed at promoting their Libertarian views, but they also directly benefit their own profit margins. They have donated millions of dollars to nonprofit groups that fight environmental regulation and seed doubt about climate science. A Greenpeace report called them a “kingpin of climate science denial.” And though green groups tend to paint ExxonMobil as the worst of the worst when it comes to lobbying against climate legislation, Koch outspent even them.

It’s no surprise that Cain would attract Koch money and dollars. He says he doesn’t believe in climate change, and he believes public health and environmental safeguards are “burdensome.” Those are appealing positions for dirty polluters like the Koch’s business interests.

But now we can connect the dots. Cain’s Chief of Staff Mark Block ran the Wisconsin chapter of Americans for Prosperity, a group cofounded by the Koch brothers to develop the Tea Party movement. Block met Cain through Americans for Prosperity and encouraged him to run for president. Block then launched spinoff groups from Americans for Prosperity, including Prosperity USA, which gave money and services to Cain’s campaign. It also paid for Block’s trip to meet with David Koch in Washington.

This doesn’t mean Cain was the Koch brothers’ top choice. They fund several candidates who back their anti-regulation, anti-clean energy, and anti-climate action agenda. They were major players in the midterm election and they will likely continue paying to keep their dirty talking points at the forefront of the presidential race.

That is their right, according to current campaign finance laws. But it is also voters’ right to know where the big money comes from and what kind of influence it buys. In the case of the Koch brothers, it seems to advance candidates who give polluters a free pass and disregard how this will damage the health of American families.