Franklin County Democrats

The TRAIN Act: A train wreck for cleaner, healthier air:

Consider just one of the clean air standards in danger because of the TRAIN Act – the Mercury and Air Toxics Standard.

• It has been more than 20 years since the overwhelmingly bipartisan passage of the 1990 Clean Air Act, which set the stage for the EPA to limit mercury, acid gases, and other hazardous pollution from America’s coal-fired power plants.
• Opponents still claim they need more time to prepare for this rule, even though they have had more than 20 years.
• They claim they can’t meet the pollution standards even though the technology is widely available, and even though 17 states already require their coal plants to limit mercury emissions.
• They claim this rule will hurt the economy even though economic analysis finds that for every $1 spent to clean up toxic air pollution the public receives up to $13 in public health and other benefits.

Supporters of the TRAIN Act claim to be helping our economy. But the TRAIN Act delays critical human health safeguards that will provide hundreds of billions of dollars in public health benefits to Americans each year.

The roll call is instructive:

This is what drives me a little nuts about LEO. Don’t get me wrong, I love these folks and I’m glad to see so many self-identified Republicans involved in the fight to stop the coal ash landfill in the Labadie Bottoms floodplain. But after the landfill issue has been decided are they going to go back to voting for Republicans? Are they only involved because this time it happens to be in their backyard?

I appreciate that the founders of LEO went to great lengths to make the coal ash landfill a non-partisan issue. That’s the way it should be because we all breathe the same air. In fact, that’s the way it use to be decades ago as evidenced by the passage of the Clean Air Act. But those days are long gone. As the numbers above show (and they are not unique when it comes to coal) today it is very much a partisan issue.

Bottom line: When you vote for Republicans you are voting against your environment, your health, and your safety, or someone else’s.

Well, the idiocy just never stops. On Saturday, climate change denialist extraordinaire, Republican Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer (MO-9), succeeded in attaching an amendment to the House budget bill that would prohibit the United States from contributing our share of funding to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The Republican-controlled House also passed a separate amendment to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gas emissions.

Simultaneously, Republicans have been conducting Congressional hearings on climate science, inviting “expert witnesses” who unsurprisingly think man-made climate change is a bunch of hooey.

But something went horribly wrong with their star witness:

Prof. Richard Muller of Berkeley, a physicist who has gotten into the climate skeptic game, has been leading the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, an effort partially financed by none other than the Koch foundation. And climate deniers — who claim that researchers at NASA and other groups analyzing climate trends have massaged and distorted the data — had been hoping that the Berkeley project would conclude that global warming is a myth.

Instead, however, Professor Muller reported that his group’s preliminary results find a global warming trend “very similar to that reported by the prior groups.”

So while House Republicans are busy defunding research to study climate science and deregulating greenhouse gas emissions for their pals in the fossil fuel industry, a study headed by one of the foremost skeptics of global warming is essentially producing the same results that climate scientists have been producing for decades. Oops.

Bloomberg:

China is pushing ahead of the U.S. and Europe in developing clean-and low-carbon energy as a way to spur the nation’s economy, the diplomat leading United Nations Climate talks said.

“China is going to leave all of us in the dust,” Christiana Figueres, head of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, said at a panel discussion today at the World Economic Forum today in Davos, Switzerland. “They’re committed to winning the green economy race.

China last year boosted spending on low-carbon energy by 30 percent to $51.1 billion, ‘‘by far the largest figure for any country,’’ Bloomberg New Energy Finance said Jan. 11. Global accounting firm Ernst & Young said in September that China for the first time overtook the U.S. in its quarterly index of the most attractive countries for renewable energy projects.

Naturally, this will all be dismissed by the paranoid right as a vast liberal conspiracy because someone at the United Nations was quoted. Meanwhile, America falls further behind the rest of the industrialized world with each passing year because our nation remains hamstrung by irrational right-wing thinking.

And I’m not talking about radical conservative fringe elements who meet in Internet chat rooms. I’m talking about leaders within the Republican Party who hold positions of great power.

Look at some of the recent positions taken by ranking members on the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

continue reading…

Just a follow-up to my post from the other day regarding the disturbing number of representatives in the 112th Congress who do not believe in climate change (or science in general).

Below is an example of what we have to look forward to during the next two years. Rep. John Shimkus (R-Il) uses his time at the March 25, 2009 hearing of the U.S. House Subcommittee on Energy and Environment to read passages from the Old Testament to make the point that God will decide when the earth will end — not man. Therefore, man-made climate change is none of our concern.

Mr. Shimkus will most likely be the incoming chairman of the House Energy Committee in the 112th Congress. Pray.

TPM:

Republican Members of the House of Representatives are set to take on a larger role in setting environmental priorities and funding scientific research in the 112th Congress, in the wake of a blue-ribbon report that once again warned that the U.S. is in danger of slipping in global science and technology.

So it’s a bit troubling that some of them don’t believe in climate change and still others want to strip the Environmental Protection Agency of some of its power to regulate pollution. And then, of course, there’s the guy who apologized to BP on behalf of the government after the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

When George W. Bush took control of the White House in 2000 a very good friend of mine predicted he would turn out to be the worst possible person for the job at the worst possible time in American history. Boy, was he proved right. I’m afraid, the same thing just happened with Congress.

At the very moment we need serious policymakers in charge of government we have just elected a group of political neophytes, conspiracy theorists, and global warming denialists who openly state their top political priority over the next two years is to deny President Obama a second term in office.

Meanwhile, tomorrow is Nov. 9, 2010. The temperature will hover near 80 degrees. The clock is ticking.

The U.S. House passed Currency Reform Act 348-79.  legislation will remedy the Chinese practice of undervaluing its currency. The effect of this undervaluation is to make Chinese goods less expensive in the U.S. and make U.S. goods more expensive in China. Many economists believe that the Chinese have kept their currency undervalued by 30-40% and this has led to our massive, job-destroying trade deficit with China.

In 2009, our annual trade deficit with China was 226 billion dollars.

A summary and complete roll call vote on HR 2378 can be found here.

Now if we can find a few Republicans that believe in American jobs, trade partners that don’t cheat, and know a little economics to act on those beliefs in the Senate. Imagine how many jobs, tax revenue, and lives would be changed if America produced another $226 billion in goods and services!