[This post is written by NRDC Action Fund's Peter Lehner, who is the Executive Director of NRDC]
As Congress starts filling leadership positions and charting its new legislative agenda, there is something Members should keep in mind.
NRDC Action Fund stands ready to work with anyone interested in creative ways to safeguard the environment and create a clean energy future. But if Members of the new Congress think the election brought a mandate to block the Environmental Protection Agency from doing its job of protecting public health and the environment, they are grossly misinterpreting the votes cast on Tuesday.
American voters went to the polls demanding a revival of the dismal economy. They did not ask for turning back the clock on America's environmental safeguards.
And the surveys prove it.
In election-day polling of voters in 83 battleground districts, Americans supported the EPA's actions to reduce greenhouse gases by a margin of 22 percentage points: 58 percent in favor compared to 36 percent opposed.
Nearly 70 percent of voters agreed with the statement that "we need to hold corporations accountable for pollution," while only 27 percent disagreed.
There is no mandate for reversing anti-pollution measures or for undermining the EPA. Indeed, the agency enjoys extraordinary support from voters of all parties. A poll conducted in September by Opinion Research Corp/Infogroup found 71 percent of Republicans, 89 percent of Independents, and 93 percent of Democrats back the agency.
Americans value the EPA because its programs for cutting pollution have saved hundreds of thousands of lives and slashed rates of respiratory disease, developmental delays, and non-melanoma skin cancer. Even the Office of Management and Budget in the George W. Bush White House said that the benefits of the Clean Air Act over the previous ten years had far outpaced the costs, by up to $545 billion.
Yet over the past few months, several members of Congress have tried to undermine EPA's authority, especially its ability to reduce carbon emissions. While these efforts benefit polluters, they do not reflect the wishes of the American people.
Voters have made their position clear, both in responding to surveys and in overwhelmingly rejecting Proposition 23 in California. The New Congress would be wise to listen.
If you go to the website for the US Chamber of Commerce (USCOC), America's "voice of business" that claims to represent the interests of over 3 million businesses, it feels like you've found the site for a right wing advocacy group. There are clips from FOX News (that aren't making fun of them), attacks on healthcare and financial regulatory reform, and links to Wall Street Journal op-eds claiming that America has more to fear from the political influence of labor unions than from corporations with annual profits in the billions. The implication is clear -- American businesses have right wing values.
However, this assertion was challenged in 2009 when USCOC announced its opposition to attempts by the federal government to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. USCOC said that doing so would "strangle the economy", called for a "Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century" as if human-caused climate change was yet to be proven, and threatened to sue the EPA if it decided to act without holding the trial. In response, Nike resigned from USCOC's board of directors, and major companies like Apple, Pacific Gas and Electric, PNM Resources and Exelon left USCOC completely.
It turns out that when it comes to climate change, US businesses aren't so conservative after all. That's why a group like American Businesses for Clean Energy (ABCE) is so important. And if you own a business and believe the US should be doing more to fight climate change and help support the clean energy economy (which is creating jobs at 2.5 times the rate as the rest of the economy), you should seriously consider joining ABCE.
ABCE represents over 2,500 businesses of all shapes and sizes, including big companies like Gap Inc. and Warner Music Group as well as small local businesses from Al's Painting in Ann Arbor, MI to Zoey's Pizza in Manchester, NH. You don't need to be a business that focuses on green products or services to join -- all are welcome. There are no fees or dues to pay, no meetings to attend, no further obligations, and ABCE will not engage in any lobbying on your behalf. You don't need to resign from any other business coalitions. All you have to do to join is visit ABCE's website and enter some basic information about your business.
That's it. You're done. But you will have done something incredibly important.
When I was in college, I used to drive down this quiet two-lane highway to Cincinnati. Cinci was the closest place from my small Midwestern college that was even close to happening. But the road was beautiful. Everything was laid out before you: old farmhouses, calm fields, large swaths of forest. That is, until you got about a half an hour outside Cincinnati, where the roadside became a crawling neon expanse of service stations and fast food chains. I tried to imagine how many people within a 30-mile radius really needed to eat hamburgers on a daily basis. Why'd they build so many of these places? It was just so unremittingly ugly.
I think about this a lot when I read all of the organized environmental arguments about why we need to do something about global warming - which of our practices cause the most greenhouse gases, the likely effects of doing nothing, the economic benefits of greening the economy, how to combat the powers that be, etc. -- and I'm on board with most of this analysis intellectually, no question.
But the thing I hear so rarely from environmental and political organizations (okay, excepting Bill McKibben and some other individuals), the simple gut-smacking truth outside all the facts and figures and political this-and-that, is how tragic it is that the way we've used land these last 50 years has turned one of the most extraordinary continents on the planet into something ugly to be around. And that right there is the connection between aesthetics and greenhouse gases. Because all this extra ugliness needs enormous amounts of carbon-spouting energy to run: factory farms to grow and harvest pesticide-infested food, buildings upon buildings to sell the food, energy from coal to power the buildings, fences upon fences to protect the buildings, cars upon roads under cars to get people to the buildings, drab, energy inefficient subdivisions to house the people in the cars, and electricity-sucking lights to keep it all illuminated (and the stars hidden from view).
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