If anything negative can be said about Sen. Jeff Merkley’s smackdown of Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s sponsorship of Senate Joint Resolution 26, what critics rightly call the "Dirty Air Act," it’s that he was too gentle. And he was too nice in not calling out Blanche Lincoln, Mary Landrieu and Ben Nelson, the three Democrats who, along with 35 Senate Republicans, joined Murkowski’s resolution of idiocy.
Simply put, it would stop the Environmental Protection Agency from taking action to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.
Wrote Merkley in the online environmental magazine, Grist:
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Sen. Jeff Merkley |
Decades of scientific research has proven that carbon pollution is harmful to human health and causes global warming. ... The EPA’s endangerment finding—as required by the Clean Air Act—found that carbon pollution endangers the health of millions of American families and future generations. This resolution would block the EPA’s ability to regulate unsafe air pollution and would continue to allow our nation’s considerable contribution to global warming to go unchecked. What’s worse, this resolution aims to politicize an independent agency and prevent it from protecting the health of our citizens and our communities.
While supporters of this misguided resolution try to tout its supposed positive impact for our economy, it would actually harm our economy by helping maintain our dependence on foreign oil, hamstringing EPA’s ability to promote clean energy options, and negatively impacting our nation’s clean energy jobs industry. This resolution encourages big polluters to continue polluting, and discourages one of the fastest-growing industries in America: clean energy. ...
Plainly put, this dangerous resolution has the best interest of big energy industries in mind, not the health and welfare of the American people or our environment, and not the clean energy job creation we urgently need right now.
What this amounts to is just another form of climate change denierism, an effort to extract scientific assessments from policymaking in favor of polluters, those companies that the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday are now free as never before to inundate the nation with propaganda that challenges science in the name of profit no matter who gets harmed in the process. But while the Senators can, with enough votes, outlaw EPA’s authority to take action against greenhouse gases, they cannot outlaw climate change. As the Goddard Institute for Space Studies announced Thursday, 2009 tied with several other recent years as the second warmest year on record (after 2005) and marked the end of the warmest decade in recorded history. S.J. Res. 26 can’t change that.
As the ranking Republican on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, you would think that Murkowski would get it. Given that her state is being affected so far more than any other by climate change and will, arguably, suffer most in the future, Alaskans have a lot at stake in any amelioration EPA regulations might produce. The Senator herself has in the past spoken about the negative impacts of global warming in Alaska, in contrast to the screechings of Congressman Don Young and former Sen. Ted Stevens.
How much does her stance have to do with being near the top of the list of Senators receiving campaign cash from utilities, oil and gas companies, mining operations and pipeline builders? How much does it have to do with working hand-in-glove with energy-industry lobbyists? Murkowski has argued that she merely wants a time-out while broader legislation is crafted. But, as The New York Times pointed out in an editorial this week:
Judging by the latest and daffiest idea to waft from Ms. Murkowski’s office, she may not want a bill at all. Last fall, the Senate environment committee approved a cap-and-trade scheme that seeks to limit greenhouse gas emissions by putting a price on them. The Democratic leadership’s plan is to combine the bill with other energy-related measures to broaden the base of support; by itself, it cannot pass.
Knowing that the bill is not ripe, Ms. Murkowski may bring it up for a vote anyway as an amendment to the debt bill. Why? To shoot it down.
Over the nearly 40 years since Richard Nixon signed the EPA into law, we’ve come to expect not just anti-scientific but brain-dead moves on the environment from more and more Republicans as moderates were squeezed out of the party. That they have collected some Democratic enablers along the way is no more surprising than it is infuriating. Presumably, since this resolution doesn’t require 60 votes to keep from becoming reality, it will fail. But don’t take a chance. Ring up your Democratic Senators.
And sign the petition against the Dirty Air Act here.