This is the fourteenth article in a continuing series by the NRDC Action Fund on the environmental stances of candidates in key races around the country.
After the Gold Rush, but before Hollywood and the Silicon Valley, California's Central Valley became one of the most prosperous agricultural areas in the world. Recent water shortages have challenged this legacy; however, fruit, vegetable and particularly cotton, remain the driving force in the region's economy. The Central Valley may be undergoing a demographic shift of late, but it's not due to agriculture's decline - it's because high home prices in the Bay Area are driving middle-income workers to Tracy and Stockton. The 11th Congressional District, which includes much of this area as well as some Bay Area suburbs and areas further south, is historically conservative. And, while the region remains the most Republican part of the Bay Area that is not saying very much. Currently, Democrat Jerry McNerney represents the 11th district in the U.S. House.
Rep. McNerney came into office in 2006 after defeating arch anti-environment Republican Richard Pombo. At the time, Pombo was a seven-term incumbent with a daunting campaign war-chest, and the number one target of the environmental community. As chair of the House Natural Resources Committee, Pombo spearheaded unsuccessful efforts to weaken the Endangered Species Act, drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve and to lift the ban on offshore oil drilling. In stark contrast, McNerney was a renewable energy consultant and entrepreneur who made clean energy the signature issue of his campaign. Environmental groups, like Defenders of Wildlife, campaigned fervently on McNerney's behalf, and his election over Pombo remains one of our community's signature victories of the past decade.
Not surprisingly given this background, McNerney has been a champion for the environment during his first two terms in Congress. According to the League of Conservation Voters (LCV) he has rarely missed an opportunity to take the environmental vote on key issues, scoring a 93% in the last session of Congress. In endorsing his current reelection bid, LCV President Gene Karpinski said that McNerney "has been an invaluable leader in championing clean energy jobs and protecting our natural treasures... As a wind energy engineer and father of an Air Force veteran, Congressman McNerney knows from experience how important clean energy is to our economy and our national security."
Unlike Rep. McNerney, who voted in favor of the historic American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES) - the first climate bill to pass a chamber of Congress - his opponent this November, David Harmer, thinks, "global warming is more a religion than a science." And in April, Harmer told a tea party rally, absurdly, that climate legislation would enable the government to regulate every time they exhale. With Harmer misrepresenting both the unassailable science of global warming and reasonable solutions like ACES, you have to wonder if he'd be another Pombo if he ever got to Congress.
The NRDC Action Fund believes that it is important for the public in general, and the voters of specific Congressional districts, be aware of this information as they weigh their choices for November.
This is the eleventh article in a continuing series by the NRDC Action Fund on the environmental stances of candidates in key races around the country.
Today, we examine Iowa's 3rd Congressional District, stretching from Des Moines to the Cedar Falls-Waterloo area. The district's economy is heavily agricultural, but also has a large financial and insurance sector component, with Des Moines referred to as "the Hartford of the West" for that reason. Since 1997, Democrat Leonard Boswell has represented the 3rd congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives. This year, Boswell is being challenged by Republican State Senator Brad Zaun.
So far in this campaign, Boswell has strongly defended his record and has attacked Zaun for "his opposition to Iowa's biofuels industry, which employs thousands of farmers and factory workers in the state." For his part, Zaun has attempted to tie Boswell to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and President Barack Obama, while running a series entitled, "Fourteen Reasons Why We Need a New Congressman."
On clean energy and environmental issues, Rep. Boswell has an excellent record. In 2009, for instance, Boswell received a near-perfect 93% rating from the League of Conservation Voters (LCV), as well as a 100% rating from Environment America. Boswell voted for the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES), an extraordinarily important piece of environmental legislation which the New York Times described as "the first time either house of Congress had approved a bill meant to curb the heat-trapping gases scientists have linked to climate change." At the time of his vote for ACES, Boswell said that the legislation "would harness the most innovative workforce in the world to create a clean energy future, creating millions of jobs in the process." Boswell added that "[e]nergy independence is vital to our national security and economic future, and this legislation advances this goal while confronting the serious challenge of climate change."
For his part, Brad Zaun received a mediocre rating of 42% on the environment from the Iowa Sierra Club in 2009-2010. In this video, Zaun declares, "I question global warming" and claims - incorrectly - that ACES will "cost businesses and all of us that have homes millions of dollars." In addition, Zaun claims that coal-fired power is far more economical than wind power (certainly not true if you count environmental and other "externalities"), brags that he's being "compared to this one lady that says 'drill, baby, drill,'" and argues that "we need to take advantage of our resources." On his website under "Energy and Natural Resources," Zaun argues that America "must increase domestic oil and gas supply by exploring and utilizing more of the energy resources we have at home." Message to Brad Zaun: we saw the results of that approach in the Gulf of Mexico this past summer!
On the other hand, Zaun has not joined most of his fellow Republican candidates this year and signed the Americans for Prosperity "No Climate Tax Pledge." Zaun also advocates "exploring alternative sources of energy...including nuclear, wind, solar and other alternative energies." And, Zaun says, "We must be careful stewards of all of our precious natural resources by always avoiding strategies which unnecessarily damage our landscape or environment or pose health risks to our citizens." That's all well and good. But advocating for coal-fired power, "drill, baby, drill," and global warming skepticism is a very funny way to accomplish those goals.
The NRDC Action Fund believes that it is important for the public in general, and the voters of specific Congressional districts, be aware of this information as they weigh their choices for November.
Sometimes I think America is the proverbial child-star-gone-bad of nations: we have a crippling addiction, but we still won't go to rehab.
We are hooked on burning dirty fossil fuels like cavemen, and no matter how many times we hit rock bottom -- deadly coal mining accidents, the uncontrolled oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and American soldiers risking their lives overseas -- we won't embrace the safer, smarter, cleaner path of renewable energy.
Change shouldn't be this hard.
That is the message behind a new ad campaign launched by NRDC's Action Fund this week. The ad urges senators from both sides of the aisle to put America back in control of our energy future.
Americans want change: a recent poll found that seven in ten Americans think clean energy legislation must be fast-tracked in the wake of the catastrophic Gulf oil spill.
Yet our elected officials haven't delivered the clean energy that voters want. Too many lawmakers fear that if they vote for a clean energy future, they will fall prey to populist mood swings come November. But they are mistaken and here is why:
1. Support for clean energy and climate action is not a flash in the pan. President Obama made clean energy one of the three planks of his platform. His energy policies have been vetted, reviewed and fleshed out through the longest presidential campaign in history and into his administration.
And all the while, clean energy has remained popular with American voters. So much so that Tea Party candidates now talk about it themselves. Most of their claims are bogus, but it is revealing that they haven't left clean energy on the cutting room floor.
2. Tea Party candidates are like the streaker at a football game. They get a lot of attention for their bold, rebellious positions, but after you get a closer look, you want to turn your head away. Their catchphrases simply don't hold up to scrutiny, never mind a 24-hour news cycle.
Rand Paul sounded good in his 30-second campaign spots, for instance, but just days after he won the primary, he started saying business owners should be allowed to kick people of color out of their establishments. After seeing Paul on The Rachel Maddow Show or Sarah Palin being interviewed by Katie Couric, viewers start to realize that Tea Party slogans don't always make for sound governing policy.
3. The Tea Party is today's rebranding of conservative Republican voters. It baffles me that people talk about the Tea Party as if it were something new, when in fact it is just the latest packaging of the radical right. We have seen this before and we know how it ends: people who identify with the radical group of the day are people who already vote and who will continue to vote for the most conservative candidate. This is not a new batch of voters up for grabs, and therefore, there is no point in pandering to them.
4. Angry voters may scream the loudest, but that doesn't make them powerful. It is human nature to pay attention to the loudest person in the room, but that doesn't mean you have to like them. The official Tea Party page on Facebook has only 200,000 fans. The "Can this poodle wearing a tinfoil hat get more fans than Glenn Beck" Facebook page has 280,453 fans.
Right now, every politico is trying to figure out how to win in November, and some are getting distracted by the noise of the radical right. The truth is that these people have been angry for a long time and they will be angry long after lawmakers leave Congress. It is how they live their lives. And while they have extra visibility right now, it looks like most elections will be decided on issues particular to each state, not Tea Party anger.
5. People will vote for lawmakers who create jobs, growth and security. In the end, winning elections and governing the nation is about making people's lives better. Passing clean energy and climate legislation will do that. It could generate nearly 2 million jobs, put America at the forefront of the global clean energy marketplace, strengthen national security and reduce dangerous pollution.
Now is not the time to be bullied. It is the time for lawmakers to stand up and put America on a path to a cleaner, better future. This kind of change isn't hard at all.
Sens. John Kerry (D-MA), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and Joe Lieberman (I-CT) met with industry groups Wednesday evening to discuss their much anticipated tripartisan climate legislation. Based on leaks from the meeting, it sounds like the climate bill will be incredibly industry friendly, which may mean that the bill does little to help the environment.
A syncing feeling
According to reports from sources in the meeting room, the bill calls for greenhouse gas curbs across multiple economic sectors, with a 2020 target of reducing emissions by 17 percent below 2005 levels and an 80 percent reduction by 2050. Power plant emissions would be regulated in 2012, other major industrial sources will be phased in during 2016.
But the bill contains major concessions to the industry, according to Aaron Wiener at The Washington Independent. The senators' proposal would halt dozens of state climate laws and regulations and preempt U.S. EPA climate regulations under the Clean Air Act.
The head lobbyist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Bruce Josten, told reporters after the meeting that he believes the bill will be 'largely in sync' with what most industry types would like to see. The Chamber, of course, has been one of the most formidable foes of climate legislation to date. In addition to the Chamber, the senators also met with the Edison Electric Institute, American Petroleum Institute, and Portland Cement Association.
A climate bill that syncs up with organizations opposed to climate legislation. Really? But, like Sheppard writes, although these leaks from the meeting don't sound too great in terms of climate, "Kerry had already scaled back expectations on that front."
The fears
Kerry, Graham and Lieberman have argued that an "energy-only" bill, which would focus on wider financial support for low-carbon energy projects, a national renewable electricity mandate, and allows wider oil-and-gas drilling in the eastern Gulf of Mexico, among other measures, would be easier to pass than a comprehensive bill.
As David Roberts writes for Grist, this refers to the American Clean Energy Leadership Act (ACELA), which passed last year. But unlike the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES) that passed the House, with substantial parts devoted to directly supporting clean energy and boosting energy efficiency, ACELA "sucks," according to Roberts. He writes:
As a standalone bill, it does virtually nothing for renewables, boosts efficiency a middling amount, and dumps a bonanza of subsidies on offshore drilling, nuclear power, tar sands, oil shale, and natural gas. It also weakens the Renewable Fuel Standard. It's a minor deviation from the awful energy status quo and would be a depressing end indeed to the year-long Obama-era effort to finally address America's energy problems.
The real bill
Many details of the forthcoming legislation are still unclear, and the real bill isn't expected to be released for another few weeks. Environmental groups who attended a meeting with Kerry yesterday to discuss details of the bill were close-mouthed about their reactions, and stressed that the bill is still in draft stages and may change significantly, as Sheppard writes at Mother Jones.
Let's hope the final bill will offer real solutions to fight global warming and curb greenhouse gas emissions. National Radio Project talked with several climate change activists who discussed the steps needed to make significant change following the less-than-concrete outcomes from Copenhagen. It's definitely worth a listen.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
Climate legislation is returning to the Senate's docket, and leaders on Capitol Hill are hoping that this version, a compromise bill spearheaded by Sens. John Kerry (D-MA), Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Joe Lieberman (I-CT), can pass without getting caught in the morass of money and politics that has delayed action so far.
A long, long time ago...
Remember, there was a time when Congress was going to pass climate legislation before the international climate change negotiations in Copenhagen. President Barack Obama was going to show up with a bill in hand and lead the world towards a better climate future. After the House passed its climate bill in June 2009, the Senate began discussing climate change, and a first stab by Sen. Kerry and Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) went nowhere. Now, Kerry has turned to less liberal colleagues to draft an alternative that would appeal to moderates and even Republicans.
Now the Massachusetts senator is promising that climate change isn't dead. A new bill is coming-more information may be in the offing as early as today, as Kate Sheppard reports at Mother Jones.
Third time's the charm
Sen. Kerry is trying a new tactic to pass climate legislation. He's waiting to release his plan until he knows the bill has the 60 supporters it needs to circumvent a filibuster. The details have not been hammered out yet, and even the Senators who've been in talks with Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman don't seem to have a clear sense of what will be in the version that will emerge.
In the House, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee, released an ambitious draft of the legislation, let lobbyists and members of Congress fight over it, and passed a much-changed edition months later. Sen. Kerry tried a similar plan on his side of Capitol Hill (that was the Kerry-Boxer bill), but it did not work.
With this piece of legislature, Sens. Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman are working out the compromises before they release the legislation. Both reporting and speculation about their bill say that it will abandon the cap-and-trade system passed in the House. Cap-and-trade restricts carbon emissions across the economy; a variation on that policy that the Kerry-Graham-Lieberman bill may favor will limit the system to a few sectors.
Will it work?
Kerry's expected bill may be a much weaker plan than any proposed so far, yet it is still not certain that the Senate will support it. The lead authors of the bill have been meeting with conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans, as Sheppard reports, but those targets have not promised support yet. Coming out of a meeting, Sen. George Voinovich (R-OH) told reporters: "There were some interesting things that were discussed in there and like everything else in the United States Senate, the devil is in the details."
From a distance, banner-day climate legislation still seems possible. Environmental groups like the Sierra Club, the National Wildlife Foundation, and the National Resources Defense Council believe that they will see a bill this year that caps carbon. These green groups would be able to live with the incentives handed to industry groups so far, according to Campus Progress' Tristan Fowler.
"There are compromises [that can go] too far. Fortunately, I don't think we're getting near that territory at the moment," Josh Dorner, a spokesman for the Sierra Club, told Fowler.
Sickly green
Before getting too excited about stamping a green seal of approval on Congress' legislation, consider Johann Hari's testimony in The Nation about the relationships between environmental groups and the industries that they oppose.
Hari has reported on climate change issues for years, and at first, he "imagined that American green groups were on these people's side in the corridors of Capitol Hill, trying to stop the Weather of Mass Destruction. But it is now clear that many were on a different path-one that began in the 1980s, with a financial donation."
Hari argues that as environmental groups began to reach out to polluters, handing them awards for green behavior and accepting support from their deep pockets, they learned to compromise too readily and accept political excuses for delaying action on climate change. While in other realms these compromises might fly, when the stakes are as high as they are on environmental issues, that behavior turns the stomach.
"You can't stand at the edge of a rising sea and say, 'Sorry, the swing states don't want you to happen today. Come back in fifty years,'" Hari writes.
The green future
When Kerry, Lieberman and Graham do release the compromised bill, watch for a tsunami of money and influence that could pack the bill with prizes for specific industries-or derail it altogether. Just this week, the natural gas industry's lobbyists told The Hill, a D.C.-based newspaper, that they were ready to fight with the coal industry over incentives in the Senate bill. At AlterNet, Harvey Wasserman writes that the nuclear industry spent $645 million in the past decade to get back into the energy game, according to a new report from American University's Investigative Reporting Workshop. (Hint: that $645 million is working in their favor.)
In the Senate, the influence of oil companies will play an important role, according to David Roberts at Grist.
"While coal has a lot of power in the House, oil has enormous power in the Senate, particularly over the conservadems and Republicans needed to put the bill over the top," Roberts explains.
No matter what legislation passes and what incentives it contains, environmentalists need to continue putting pressure on their representatives in Congress and on national environmental groups to push back against polluting industries and work to fix the world's climate.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
Last week, the Labor Department reported that youth unemployment stands at 18.2%, nearly twice the national average of 9.8%. The percentage of young people without a job is a staggering 53.4 percent, the highest figure since World War II. Looking deeper, the statistics for youth of color are terrible and telling.
According to the most recent data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 40.7% of black youth between 16-19 are unemployed, almost double the amount of whites teenagers (23%). For Latinos the same age, the rate is nearly 30%. Get a little older and the gap grows wider. Unemployment for black Americans aged 20-24 is 27.1%, over twice that faced by white youth (13.1%) in the same age range.
The glaring differences indicate that unemployment is not only decidedly raced, but also that the current economic condition is wholly unforgiving for young people of color. Only a massive, well-funded set of green jobs programs explicitly designed to close those racial gaps can create a truly vital, full-employment economy.
The New York State Senate and Assembly, too often a model of corruption and dysfunctionality, rose above petty politics last week to pass forward-thinking legislation on climate and energy, setting a precedent for bipartisanship and a sensible cap and trade system. The State Senate passed the groundbreaking Green Job/Green New York Act, with strong support from Republicans, Democrats, and the Working Families Party, which spearheaded the legislation. The bill -- expected to be signed into law this week by Gov. David Patterson leverages $112m in revenue from the Northeasts's Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) into $5 billion of private investment to finance home weatherization, energy efficiency projects, and green jobs creation.
It's been a chaotic Congressional recess, what with birthers, doubters, and lobbyist-financed astroturf groups disrupting townhall events screaming about euthanasia, that's it's easy to forget how 5 weeks ago there was a whole lot of screaming over the House's courageous passage of The American Clean Energy and Security Act.
The people who run the finance industry are extremely smart. Says so on the label. That's how they were able to convince the government to make good on their gambling debts, though if they were a little smarter, they might have remembered that the house always wins.
They've created speculative bubbles in recent decades (and more than one had to be bailed out) over commodities like silver, unsecured loans, real estate, dotcom firms whose business plans hinged on sock puppet sales, real estate ... well, you get the picture. On to the next big thing.
That thing might well be carbon markets. Turns out, the companies that hold most of the current derivative risk will be able to make ridiculous, unsupervised bets sell dizzyingly complex derivatives against carbon offsets, too. Though no worries, the price of failure would only be the absence of a price signal that will push atmospheric carbon levels down, hastening catastrophic global climate disruption. No big:
... Well, Waxman-Markey had some good language regulating carbon and other energy derivatives.
... However, in the 300 pages of amendments added to Waxman-Markey just after 3.a.m on the night the bill passed, a few new sentences materialized that placed a big asterisk on those safeguards. The final text now says that the sections of the bill regulating carbon derivatives will be overridden by any derivatives legislation that the House passes later in the year. ...
Senator Barbara Boxer, who chairs the Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee, announced this week that her committee won't mark up energy and climate legislation until after the August recess. That's a good thing. It means progressive groups and activists have more time to coordinate their efforts to support the emergence of a progressive bloc of senators on these issues.
The American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES), also known as the Waxman-Markey bill, narrowly passed in the U.S. House of Representatives at the end of June. The ACES bill seeks to mitigate climate change via emission reductions, investments in energy technology, creation of clean energy jobs, and rigid standards for energy efficiency. Check out Grist for a valuable breakdown of the act.
This may be one of the most important things anyone's said yet about the Waxman-Markey climate bill, or ACES. Ken Ward Jr. writing at The Charleston Gazette shares a quote from the communications director of the United Mine Workers of America, Phil Smith:
As it stands now, the amount of money dedicated to coal in this bill is remarkable, and the future of coal will be intact.
I've been working extensively to fashion a controlled program that Congress can adopt which will preserve coal jobs, create the opportunity for increasing coal production and keep electricity rates in regions like Southwest Virginia affordable. The compromise that I have reached with Chairman Waxman achieves those goals.
It doesn't seem unreasonable, as many have pointed out, that industry's weeping and wailing about this bill in public hides the fact that they know it's the best deal they're going to get.
Indeed, the EPA is one of the few government agencies that's done anything constructive to push us away from the destructive, outmoded coal industry. As the indispensible David Sasson reports, they did so just yesterday:
In a previous post, I wrote about how the coal industry got its way with ACES, the Waxman-Markey climate bill. Much of their victory had to do with sharply limiting the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency, whose chartered purpose is to protect the environment, and therefore, public health.
The agribusiness industry won a similar victory. When Rep. Collin Peterson (D-MN), chair of the House Agriculture Committee and point person for an alliance of rural and coal state Democrats seeking to weaken the bill, put his foot down and said, "I'm pretty sure that any role for EPA in agriculture is a deal breaker."
Rep. Peterson's main complaint about the first draft of ACES, and what seemed to be the general complaint of the House Agriculture Committee, was that the legislation didn't give farmers enough money for things they were already doing. Throw more money at us based on no scientific evidence whatsoever, he said, or no deal.
House leadership took Peterson at his word. Like, for example, this word:
... Young people, however, seem to have a special role to play. In many ways, to borrow a phrase from a fellow activist Ken Ward, we may be "the last generation."
Not the last generation on earth - - no doubt society will keep the babies coming until the very end. But maybe the last generation to see winter in Vermont (as I write, a slow drizzle has replaced the usual December snow), the last U.S. generation to grow up in a time of relative economic prosperity, or the last generation to live in a world not plagued by higher levels of disease. And in the face of all this, we're getting royally screwed by our governments. The Stern Report recently re-emphasized that the impact of global warming on the world economy will be like that of the Great Depression, World War I, and WWI . . . combined. Guess who's going to be paying for all of this out of pocket? ...
For all that Rep. Henry Waxman and Rep. Ed Markey tried, and of their sincerity I have no doubts, the current Waxman-Markey bill, The American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, or ACES, fails this Last Generation.
In opening my case, I yield the floor to Greenpeace USA Deputy Campaigns Director Carroll Muffett, who today said the following:
... A good number of people have told me in the past few days that major environmental organization[s are] actively working against strengthening amendments to the bill, stating that those groups are fearful that any actual strengthening will keep the bill from being passed. ...
I've certainly been hearing the same things, including that if the bill fails, progressives (both elected representatives and non-profits) will personally get blamed for any mouthing off they do now. (Don't get me started on the fabulists who're saying that it'll be easier once the Senate gets hold of this.)
... Chairman Collin Peterson (D-Minn.), who has made known that he has enough votes to derail the Speaker's priority legislation if agricultural provisions aren't changed, said he spoke with Pelosi "for a while" and that it was "cordial."
"She's not putting any pressure on me," Peterson said. "She knows where I'm coming from." ...
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