Environmentalists stand up to Obama, win bigby Glenn Hurowitz
Under intense
pressure from green groups and their members, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid
(Nev.)
announced Friday that Republican proposals to gut the Clean Air Act and Clean
Water Act were off the table in budget negotiations.
"Neither the
White House nor Senate Leaders is going to accept any EPA riders," Reid said.
Reid's pledge follows 48 hours of intense pressure on the
White House from major green groups, marking the first time many large
environmental organizations have so openly and loudly targeted Obama and Reid --
and it produced extraordinarily rapid results.
Indeed, as
recently as Wednesday, the Associated Press had reported that Obama was
insisting that congressional Democrats swallow rollbacks to
EPA's authority to crack down on climate emissions, mountaintop-removal coal
mining, and Chesapeake Bay pollution as the price for passing a budget deal.
When
asked about the report, the White House refused to issue a veto threat against
the rollbacks, and last Tuesday, Reid told reporters, "We're happy to look at
the policy riders. There aren't many of them that excite me. But we're willing
to look at them. In fact, we've already started looking at some of the policy
riders."
That attitude
began to change when environmentalists decided they'd gone too far:
"Obama to Sell
Out the EPA?" -- Sierra Club email blast from Conservation Director Sarah
Hodgdon"Tell Obama
& Reid: Don't Cave to Polluters" -- League of Conservation Voters (LCV)
Executive Director Gene
Karpinski"At EDF, our position is that children's health should not be a
bargaining chip." -- Environmental Defense Fund President Fred Krupp
The last quote
was particularly striking given EDF's reputation as the ultimate insider in the
environmental movement, and probably the green group with the closest ties to
the administration.
And Energy
Action, the organizers of the upcoming Powershift youth climate conference,
showed
that environmentalists weren't just cyber-angry; they were actual angry,
announcing that "thousands of young, forgotten Obama voters," were going to
protest Obama
outside the White House on April 18.
By Friday, the
White House was beginning to back off, and Reid's statement seems to have ended
the debate, at least for now.
Nonetheless,
it's still open to question to what extent the environmental movement will
learn from this win. Although Democratic leadership seems to be standing up for
the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, those are hardly the only attacks on the
environment emanating from the White House and its Democratic allies. Last week
alone, the administration announced a massive
expansion of coal mining that will produce pollution equivalent to that
emitted by 300 coal fired power plants in a year, and has been rushing to issue
new permits to drill offshore in the Gulf of Mexico -- hardly less egregious
than the contemplated EPA rollbacks.
Meanwhile, a
range of Democrats have been following the White House's lead and rushing to
embrace the fossil fuel industries and other polluters. Democrat Sens. Debbie
Stabenow of Michigan (LCV score 100) and Max Baucus of Montana went so far as
to issue
their own bills to gut the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases.
Over in the
House, during a hearing of the House Foreign Affairs Western Hemisphere
subcommittee, New Jersey Rep. Albio Sires (D) surprised greens by expressing
support for the Keystone XL pipeline, which would bring ultra-dirty oil
from Canada's tar sands to the United States, while panel Chairman Eliot Engel
(D-N.Y.) declined to take a position.
Whether or not
these Democrats face the kind of intense pressure and protests that the White
House did over the EPA rollbacks will tell whether this has been a true
learning moment for greens and the broader environmental movement. In the past,
on those few occasions when environmentalists have been forced to sorta stand
up to Democrats, there's been a tendency for confrontation-averse greens to
creep back into our fawning shell once we win rather than to learn from the
experience.
But the huge
nature of this victory may be different -- and we may have a chance of making
Democrats believe that this movement has a backbone made of something other
than organic jello.
Glenn Hurowitz
is a Senior Fellow at the Center for
International Policy and you can follow his Twitter feed about forests,
climate, and wildlife @glennhurowitz
http://www.grist.org/politics/2011-04-01-environmentalists-stand-up-to-obama-win-big
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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