ALEC Exposed: Warming Up to Climate Change
-
-
- love_is_my_religion
- added this
Last December, almost like clockwork, Republican legislators in state houses across the nation sounded the alarm about an "out of control" Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). What had the EPA suddenly done to earn such criticism? The EPA had dared to take the first baby steps towards regulating greenhouse gas emissions.
Earth Egg
By January 2011, Indiana became the first state to pass a resolution urging Congress to prohibit the EPA from regulating greenhouse gas emissions (by defunding the EPA if necessary), to impose a two year moratorium on any new air quality regulations, and urging the federal government to complete a study identifying all planned regulatory activity by the EPA and its impact on the economy, jobs, and American economic competitiveness.Between February and May, 13 other states passed similar resolutions (AL, IA, KS, KY, MI, MO, MT, ND, PA, TX, UT, VA, and WY). Six more states had resolutions introduced that never passed (AK, FL, IL, MN, OH, and OK). Because the Center for Media and Democracy has now launched the ALEC Exposed archive, we can now trace the emergence of this rash of legislation to the bill factory know as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).
ALEC and Kyoto
ALEC's campaign against any regulation of greenhouse gases began long ago, when the U.S. was in the midst of debating the Kyoto Protocol, an international effort to rein in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to control the climate crisis. In the spring of 1998, ALEC ratified a model resolution for states to pass calling on the U.S. to reject the Kyoto Protocol and banning states from regulating greenhouse gases in any way. With ALEC friend George W. Bush entering the White House in 2001, the energy interests that sit on ALEC's Energy, Environment, and Agriculture Task Force - easily got their way on keeping the U.S. out of Kyoto.
Continued>>http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/07/27-0
-
- groups:
- Community, Green, Culture, Earth and Science, 8 more
-
- tags:
- Climate Change
-
-
coolplanet
-
As a gardener all of my life I can tell you from experience that the only plants doing very well in this extreme climate are weeds and poison ivy, at least here in my neck of the woods.
- 10 months ago
-
coolplanet
-
-
Milieu
-
IRS needs to REMOVE the tax exempt status of ALEC.
- 10 months ago
-
Milieu
-
-
Wetdog
-
Milieu:
And declare them a terrorist organization.
- 10 months ago
-
Wetdog
-
-
WNYmathGuy
-
Wetdog:
I was going to call your comment extreme, but I think I could hear al-Qaeda clapping gleefully wile sitting half way round the globe in my house when BP was trying to spin their Gulf of Mexico spill as a manageable event. No terrorist could cause the amount of property damage or deaths of innocents that an energy company can. And that's just the stuff that is easy to measure.
- 10 months ago
-
WNYmathGuy
-
-
Wetdog
-
WNYmathGuy:
We are on the same page.
We need to get rid of the use of coal and petroleum for MANY, MANY reasons.
All we do with coal is boil water. We can boil water with natural gas. If we just do that, we don't have air pollution, we don't have lead, arsenic, sulphur, cadmium, bromine and mercury being pumped into the air by the ton, we don't have strip mines, acid leaches, and we don't have mountains of soot.
And, even though natural gas is a fossil fuel, we produce less than 1/2 of the CO2 being emitted using coal.
And if we use natural gas instead of petroleum, we cut CO2 emissions 1/3.
Combine the two, and you get an overall reduction in the neighborhood of 40% in CO2. And that is still using a fossil fuel. Natural gas.
And natural gas is methane, it is also a biofuel. We can make it out of anything, even sewage and landfills.
- 10 months ago
-
Wetdog
