Environment

Many of the environmental problems we face are political – a result of an energy policy that is rigged to favor special interests.

• The United States is 5% of the world’s population, yet consumes 25% of the world’s fossil fuels.
• More than 1,000 toxic Superfund sites remain dangerous due to lack of Congressional funding for clean-up.
• The United States remains oil-dependent, neglecting to invest in or support research and development of renewable energy alternatives.
• The oil and gas industry has given millions to candidates and parties to continue America’s dependence on fossil fuels.
• The energy sector as a whole gives multiple millions to campaigns each year, dwarfing the contributions from environmentalists.
• The race to provide more energy has led to energy companies threatening the water supply and destroying millions of acres with unregulated hydraulic-fracking techniques.
• Climate change deniers in Congress have blocked U.S. action to reduce climate change.

Disasters like the BP oil spill and others are the result of lax regulation by Congress and state legislatures that each year take millions from people representing oil and other energy companies

“Congress submits to the pressure of timber, oil, chemical, agribusiness and other big-money interests by trying to weaken environmental safeguards,” said former Sierra Club President Chuck McGrady. “The main reason many politicians side with the polluters is their never-ending need for campaign cash. Public campaign financing will eliminate the influence of donors who want to weaken environmental laws, and it will shift power back to voters and volunteers.”

There is hope…

Publicly financed campaigns, Fair Elections allows environmental advocates who lack financial support from big energy to run for office and help inform the debate on energy policy and environmental stewardship. With Fair Elections politics no longer can be dominated by oil, gas and energy company contributions to politicians.

IN DEPTH…

Dirty Air / Clean Money

By Jay Mandle

The United States political system must confront the issue of global climate change. As reported this month in a “Summary for Policymakers” issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the “warming of the climate is unequivocal” and there is “very high confidence” that this climate change is caused by human activity.

This document makes crystal clear that climate change inevitably will cause great damage. As one of the authors puts it in an on-line discussion, between now and 2100 we will see “more of what we already have signs of, but much bigger: more severe and long lasting droughts, heat waves and wild fires, especially in S[outh] W[est] U.S. Risk of bigger and more intense hurricanes. Heavier rainfalls. Heavier dumps of snow episodically. More humidity…”

A rough and ready translation of this is that the costs of climate change will take three distinct forms. The first will be the need to deal with the serious dislocations caused by global warming. There will be an increasing number of storms, fires and hurricanes, andthe need to pay for the evacuation and resettlement of entire communities.  Second, very large expenditures will be required to develop alternative energy technologies to reduce or eliminate greenhouse gases. Third, individuals now working in industries that utilize polluting technologies will have to be retrained and supported in transition to new occupations. Obviously, in combination these costs will be staggering.

However, the economic elite in this country – the people who principally provide the funding for political campaigns and therefore set our political agenda – have been in a state of denial in the face of this coming crisis. As recently reported in The New York Times, a survey of 101 CEO’s revealed that only 4 percent were “extremely concerned” and another 14 percent “somewhat concerned” by the economic implications of global warming.3 To appreciate the extent to which the CEO’s are out of touch with this problem compared to the general population, a survey of first year students in four year colleges and universities found that 77.0 percent agreed that “the federal government is not doing enough to control environmental pollution.”

Even among those few CEO’s who have gotten the message that global warming is a serious problem, there has been an inadequate response. As a case in point, the Electric Power Research Institute, the utility industry’s think tank, holds out the possibility that by the year 2030 greenhouse emissions could be reduced to the levels that prevailed in 1990. To pay for the research to develop new environmentally-friendly technologies, this institute would raise consumers’ electricity rates by $2 billion a year. Private investors, they argue, would then “be willing to finance deployment of the technologies, because they could earn an attractive profit.” In short, consumers pay for the environmental clean-up, but firms profit. In this scheme, the adjustment costs associated with climate change are placed squarely on the backs of ordinary citizens.

Obviously it is better for the business community to begin to acknowledge the problem of global warming than to ignore it. But industry’s determination to avoid financial responsibility is simply unreasonable. And its single-minded focus on new technologies entirely overlooks the increased likelihood of catastrophic natural disasters and thus is at best short-sighted. With an environmental change this vast, simple common sense suggests that all segments of society will have to share in addressing the problem.

With next to nothing being done to reduce the dependence by all politicians on big money donations, the corporate sector still remains the dominant voice in Congressional policy deliberations. For that reason the outlook for an effective and fair approach to environmental policy is bleak. Juliet Eilperin and Michael Grunwald report in The Washington Post that industry lobbyists are “not too worried” about legislation that Congress might pass concerning the environment, because “they do not think the House or the Senate can pass anything too stringent.

At root the problem here is that private funders provide the money needed for successful political careers. Those funders have been reluctant to address the issue of global warming, and when they have done so their plans are one-sided, benefiting themselves. Obviously the urgency of climate change means that we cannot wait until there is a publicly-financed Congress to tackle the problem. What we must do is both keep up the pressure for good environmental legislation and argue against the one-sided and incomplete programs that are likely to emerge from our corporate-responsive Congress. And while doing so, we can bolster the already strong case that a system of publicly funded “fair” elections is the only way to ensure that the biases of wealth do not continue to distort environmental policy.

Further reading:
Dirty Energy Money  http://www.dirtyenergymoney.com/