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The recent ouster of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) from his Congressional seat has shaken Washington Republicans and rattled open several leadership positions. And—as hard as it is to believe—the House Republican conference apparently hadn’t even hit bottom yet.
You’d think that it’d be hard to get much worse than Cantor’s record when it comes to clean air, clean water and action to tackle the climate crisis. As Majority Leader, Cantor worked side by side with Speaker John Boehner on pushing a destructive legislative agenda for what has been called the most anti-environmental House in history. Cantor himself earned just a four percent positive lifetime environmental voting rating from the League of Conservation Voters. In other words, he was among the lowest of the low when it came to doing the bidding of big polluters.
Cantor led the way on votes that would bar the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from acting to curb climate-disrupting pollution, force the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, gut clean energy investments, take support away from job-creating clean energy projects and voted over and over again to give tax handouts to big oil companies. And all the while, he’s tried to open up our public lands to drilling and make it harder for the President to designate National Parks. Still, while it is no tragedy to see Cantor go, its no comfort to look at the records of those who will replace him.
Current Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) just won an election among his colleagues to be promoted to Majority Leader. That’s the same McCarthy who somehow scored lower than Cantor on an environmental voting scorecard, garnering just three percent. In fact, between 2013 and 2014, McCarthy did not make a single pro-environment vote. Instead, he stood alongside Cantor in rallying support and votes for one of the most toxic agendas ever.
As Majority Whip, McCarthy spearheaded House Republican efforts to take nearly 500 votes attacking critical clean air and water safeguards, public lands protections and clean energy initiatives over just the last four years. And, now, with his eyes on a promotion, he’s flip-flopping on one of the few issues he was strong on by abandoning the Wind Production Tax Credit, better aligning his position with the right wing political ATM that is the Koch Brothers. Its no surprise—as Sierra Club’s Dave Hamilton explained.
“For years, Congressman McCarthy strongly backed the Wind Production Tax Credit as it supported thousands of California jobs, including many in his own district. He even pushed for the PTC to be extended to 2020,” said Hamilton. “But unfortunately the path to Republican leadership appears to now go straight through the Koch Brothers’ office. McCarthy is toeing the line by joining their call to kill competition from the wind industry by killing the PTC and American jobs right along with it."
While McCarthy is trying on a new brand of extremism, his promotion means a vicious fight broke out to fill his old Majority Whip post. And it was a race to the bottom.
The winner? Representative Steve Scalise (R-LA), who has been spending much of his recent time attacking the EPA’s first-ever carbon pollution protections. You know—that policy supported by 67 percent of the American people. Why? Well, Scalise is notoriously chummy with fossil fuel lobbyists in Washington. According to the Republic Report, Former Congressional staffers from his office have gone on to work for trade groups that have made it a priority to attack clean air safeguards and push offshore drilling. And the Republican Study Committee that he chairs held meetings inside the office of the lobbying firm hired by the Koch Brothers to fight efforts to tackle the climate crisis.
In public, Scalise is just as bad. For example, he’s rejected climate science as a “myth.” His evidence for ignoring the calls for climate action resonating from 97 percent of scientists, the U.S. Military and NASA? Barack Obama wore a coat for his January 2013 inaugural address when he discussed the urgent need to tackle the climate crisis.
In other words, don’t expect a new era of reason from the Republican-led House despite the new faces in leadership. Instead, Scalise and McCarthy stand for the brand of extremism that’s been well practised there over the last four years, which puts polluters in the driver’s seat while everyone else is trying to catch a ride.
Pesticide Action Network
Here we go again. After the 2012 fiasco in which Congress failed to pass a Farm Bill at the eleventh hour, the Senate rallied early this month to pass its version of the national food and farming legislation—which is up for debate and renewal every five years.
Ten days later, the Farm Bill died again when the House failed to pass its own version of the 2013 bill. It’s not clear exactly what’s up next. But we're rolling up our sleeves—again—to press for the best legislation possible, and we fully hope and expect that Congress will pass a Farm Bill this year.
So what happened last week?
Here's the scoop. House Democrats resoundingly opposed dramatic cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, also known as food stamps) included in the proposed bill. The proposed bill would have severely narrowed this aspect of our nation's social safety net, knocking two million current recipients out of the SNAP program.
What Will it Take?
Since we can expect Tea Party Republicans to oppose any bill without even greater SNAP cuts, the other Republicans and Democrats will need to work together.
And there are clear signs this is possible. Before the bill failed, the House passed a historic amendment limiting commodity payments. As policy analysts for the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC) explain, this may be the key—along with agreement on SNAP—to revival of the Farm Bill.
And several amendments with bipartisan co-sponsorship included important limits on government payments for insurance premiums. Unfortunately many of those amendments were among the 100+ that never made it to the floor for debate and vote.
So, creating a Farm Bill that could pass in the House means making less draconian cuts to the SNAP program, keeping reforms to commodity payment programs that were agreed to in the floor debate and making substantive reforms to crop insurance programs—which have surpassed the commodity programs in terms of government expenditure.
It will also mean including bipartisan amendments for rural economic development, local and regional food systems, organic agriculture and fair competition.
Meanwhile, On the Budget Side ...
In a separate process, both the House and Senate have to pass agriculture budgets every year to fund agriculture, rural development, nutrition and food safety programs. The huge gap in priorities between the House and Senate on the Farm Bill is also reflected in their budget proposals. They differ from one another by about $1.43 billion.
This week and last, the relevant Senate and House committees wrote up their proposal for agriculture spending for the 2014 fiscal year that begins Oct. 1. The full House is expected to take up the proposal next week. The full Senate will then follow.
While both House and Senate budgets allow for continued support of the important Conservation Stewardship Program, many conservation programs face cuts—including the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, the Wildlife Habitat Incentives Program and the Agricultural Management Assistance Program. Funding levels remain inadequate, even in the Senate bill, for the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to fully deliver the conservation programs.
We’re happy to report that both budgets continue support for some key rural development programs including the Value-Added Producer Grants. The Senate budget also continues to fund important sustainable agriculture research, education and extension including the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education program—the cornerstone program that has funded research on sustainable agriculture systems over the past 25 years.
A Long Haul That Isn't Over
Following the Fourth of July holiday, Congress will pick up where they left off and will—for better or for worse—decide the fate of U.S. agriculture for the next five years.
We won't let our guard down, and will continue to let readers know when opportunities arise to put the pressure on policymakers in Congress to pass smart legislation that is responsible to taxpayers, farmers and consumers—now and for future generations.
Visit EcoWatch’s FARM BILL and SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE pages for more related news on this topic.
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350.org
It's Feb. 13, and just over an hour ago 350.org and a coalition of more than 30 progressive groups, environmental campaigns, businesses and blogs launched a 24-hour drive to send more than 500,000 messages to the Senate opposing the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. The timing is crucial—starting today, oil-soaked Republicans are going to be attempting to saddle a transportation bill with an amendment that would override President Obama's decision to reject Keystone XL and push approval of the project.
The push is off to an incredible start. In just the first hour of emails and Facebook posts, we've rocketed by 100,000 signatures. Dozens of groups have yet to go out with their email blasts yet and social media is just beginning to light up.
"The environmental movement is well wired and well connected, and it's got lots and lots of young people who are ready to use social media in powerful ways," 350.org founder Bill McKibben told reporters on a conference call this morning. "More than any day before, the next 24 hours will take the environmental movement deep into the wired age."
Earlier this morning, Robert Redford put up a post on Huffington Post that caught on like wildfire. Activist Naomi Klein has been rallying her 100,000+ Twitter followers for hours. Blogs like Grist.org have gotten in on the fight, with multiple posts and graphics to inspire the cause. Donors have stepped in to sponsor online ads at places like Daily Kos and other progressive sites.
"It's really moving to see what's going on," said Bill. "We're up against the most profitable enterprise on earth and they have all the money they could ever want, so we've had to find different currencies to work in all year. We've spent our bodies—some of us on this call have been off to jail. We've spent our time and energy—tens of thousands have surrounded the White House last fall and protested in every Congressional district in the country. Now, for the next 24 hours we're spending our pixels and our keystrokes."
While the next 24-hours' concentrated burst of online activism is a new development for the Keystone XL fight, social media has been key to the struggle since the very beginning. The fight against the pipeline sprang onto the national landscape last summer, when Bill McKibben and a group of other indigenous and environmental leaders wrote a letter inviting people to come to Washington, D.C. during the last two weeks of August and take part in a sit-in at the White House. The letter quickly spread across Facebook and Twitter and sign-ups began flowing in. As Linda Capato, one of the national organizers of the sit-in, has said, the sign-ups for the sit-in practically took care of themselves. People soon started ride-boards to coordinate travel to Washington, D.C. A Facebook group of arrestees soon sprang up. Videos and photos from the protest spread like wildfire. And by the end of August, when the last of 1,253 people had been taken away from the White House in handcuffs, Keystone XL had become the most prominent environmental fight in a generation.
"The Keystone XL fight has galvanized our 2.5 million members more than any other issue," the President of CREDO Mobile, Michael Kieschnick told reporters on the call this morning. "That's because they know the stakes."
Michael Brune, the executive director of the Sierra Club, echoed the point. "Our members are fired up about this. When we've been sending out Keystone XL emails, we've been seeing higher response and open rates than about anything we've been doing on any issue over the last couple years."
The levels of enthusiasm led to more powerful offline action last fall. Pipeline protestors, largely coordinating over twitter and small email list-serves that sprung up across the country, managed to meet President Obama at every campaign event he did after August. In Colorado, a Native American leader interrupted the president's speech and pushed him on the pipeline. "I hear your concerns and we're looking at them closely," the president responded, in a video that quickly spread far and wide. The offline action culminated on Nov. 6, when more than 12,000 people completely surrounded the White House to protest Keystone XL. A few days later, President Obama did what months ago had seemed unthinkable—he rejected the permit and sent the pipeline back to the drawing board.
Now, environmentalists are mobilizing to protect that victory as Senate Republicans team up with Big Oil to try and resurrect the project. The latest online surge came together in just a few days and is a powerful show of force, as well as nimbleness on the part of environmental and progressive groups.
"In a sense, this push is representative of some of the generational transition that's underway in the environmental movement," explained McKibben. "There's a generation that's savvy in all sorts of different ways to make politics work and bring new voices to the floor. The young people across these organizations have made this thing happen over the last 72 hours, which is when we started sending out the call about this. It's amazing the coordination they've had underway. At some level, it's not surprising, the motivation is not that different than what led to the fight against PIPA and SOPA a few weeks ago. This is the environmental movement's equivalent and it's going to be large."
There's no guarantee the effort will work, but it's an amazing thing to watch unfold.
As Bill put it, "It's important to remember that we've been behind since the very beginning of this fight. The National Journal ran a poll of its 'energy insiders' last summer and 97 percent of them said there was no way the president would reject the pipeline, but he did. No kidding, we're at a disadvantage in the Senate. That's because we don't have as much money as the other side and can't make campaign contributions and so forth. But what we do have is numbers. Money power may still find itself on the short end of the stick against people power."
For more information, click here. To email your Senators, click here.
Defenders of Wildlife
Conservative politicians have always wanted to open the Arctic refuge to drilling for the Big Oil companies. The transportation bill and the professed need for revenue is just the latest excuse to push something they have wanted for a long time.
The funding issue is a scam. Even the most generous revenue estimates from this reckless expansion of drilling will not be enough to fund proposed transportation projects in the bill. In addition, what small amounts of revenue might be generated would not be seen for ten years as oil companies will still need to explore, apply for drilling permits and start development. That’s too late to pay for transportation projects starting next year.
This giveaway to Big Oil will expose millions of acres of America’s pristine land and water to dirty and dangerous oil and gas development from which they may never recover.
Jamie Rappaport Clark, president and CEO of Defenders of Wildlife, said:
“Just in time for Valentine’s Day, House leaders in Congress have come out with a sweetheart deal for their Big Oil allies. Opening the Arctic refuge to drilling has been a long-standing priority of the backwards-looking, drill first crowd and the transportation bill is just the latest excuse to do so. The proposed revenue from this deal won’t even materialize for years, making this one of the most disingenuous refuge-drilling schemes we’ve ever seen, to say nothing of the environmental destruction it would cause.
“Instead of sacrificing some of America’s most pristine wilderness and waters for the profit of Big Oil, Congress should focus on coming up with real solutions to fund the transportation projects that will decrease our addiction to oil and keep our country moving.”
Take Action. Ask your representative to oppose this bill and protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the wildlife that call it home.
For more information, click here.