Originally posted on The MarkUp.
On Thursday, House Republicans issuedtheir roadmap for the midterm elections and the next legislative session. It's called the "Pledge to America," but on energy issues, it sounds more like a pledge that makes powerful promises to the oil and gas industry.
The documentsays, "We will fight to increase access to domestic energy sources and oppose attempts to impose a national ‘cap and trade’ energy tax."
That's it. That's all the platform says about America's failed energy policy and the crisis of global warming.
I could understand if the GOP was pushing for a different energy and climate policy than this administration. I could understand if they wanted to try a new mechanism for reducing carbon emissions -- despite the fact that cap and trade is a market-based model first signed into law by a Republican president and GOP majority vote. I could understand if they wanted to try other ways to reduce our dependence on oil or to make the U.S. more energy efficient.
But I cannot understand the complete failure to address one of the biggest environmental, public health and national security risks of our time. I know some Tea Party and GOP candidates deny the existence of climate change, but that doesn't make the problem go away. We should have learned that from previous generations of deniers who wanted us to do nothing about leaded gasoline, or about smog or about acid rain. We didn't make progress until we ignored the deniers and got to work.
How is burying your head in the sand a visionary pledge to Americans?
I shouldn't be surprised by this failure of leadership. After all, this party platform was literally written by a former lobbyist for the oil and gas industry. Author Brain Wild was a Hill staffer and assistant legislative director for Vice President Cheney. Then, he went to work for a lobby shop that had a $1.3 million contract with Exxon Mobil, $800,000 from Anadarko Petroleum, $740,000 from AIG and $625,000 from Pfizer.
As Sam Stein reports, those associations may win favor in GOP circles, but you can't escape the conflicts of interest they raise.
We've tried this before. We spent the past decade letting the polluters call the shots, and it didn't end up too well: the BP oil spill.
If someone drives a car off the road, you don't give them the keys again.
Still, there is something a little desperate about the way GOP leaders are trumpeting their supposed agenda. These people are likely to be replaced by more extreme Tea Party favorites and so they're trying to echo the Tea Party agenda to stave off their own demise.
Come November, my guess is that Representative Boehner and his colleagues will be so tied up with the civil war within the Republican Party; they won't have much time for doling out giveaways to the fossil fuel industry.