Common Loons are in jeopardy from toxic mercury pollution that contaminates fish they eat

Sen. Inhofe is pushing a bill that would revoke the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to limit mercury pollution under the Clean Air Act. Quite simply, it would be an act of politicians taking wildlife and public health protections out of the hands of EPA scientists. The National Wildlife Federation has been pushing for new mercury standards since the Clinton administration. After 13 years of delay and debate, the EPA’s new rule will prevent 11,000 thousand premature deaths, 4,700 heart attacks, 130,000 cases of childhood asthma and 6,300 cases of acute bronchitis. Over 900,000 Americans have spoken out in support of it.

One of them was Brenda Archambo, the National Wildlife Federation’s outreach consultant in Michigan (transcribed section starts around 9:30):

Click here to view the embedded video.

Brenda Archambo: Last year, the sportsmen’s community joined together and about 330 sports organizations across the country representing several hundred thousand members spoke up on behalf of the Clean Air Act and the reduction of mercury for our outdoor heritage and our hunting and fishing heritage, urging our members of Congress to please look seriously at this rule and in defense of the Clean Air Act.

Sen. Barrasso: Ms. Archambo, Sen. Lautenberg just made a comment about enemy of good and the perfect and some of the things I talked about a little earlier. I had mentioned in my opening statement the Senate had an opportunity  to reduce mercury emissions by 70% back in 2005. Would Michigan lakes, sturgeon, sportsmen, familes had been better off had those reductions already gone into effect when they had an opportunity to pass that back  in 2005?

Brenda Archambo: Absolutely, but going forward – I understand history is important, but I’m looking out in front, where we go next.

Sen. Barrasso is referring to the infamous “Clear Skies” initiative, the Orwellian name given to President George W. Bush’s effort to gut Clean Air Act protections. It was written by James Connaughton, who lobbied for big polluters before joining the Bush White House and does so again today. Among the bill’s main sponsors in Congress were two of Big Oil’s All-Stars, Sen. Inhofe and Rep. Joe Barton. The National Wildlife Federation fought hard against the Clear Skies Act and ultimately a bipartisan group of senators joined together to stop it.

Now here’s how Sen. Inhofe’s Environment & Public Works Committee staff misrepresented Brenda’s testimony on their site: “Would Public Health and the Environment Be Better Off Today If President Obama Voted in Favor of Clear Skies? National Wildlife Federation Says: ABSOLUTELY.” How do you get that from what Brenda said? Zero mention of President Obama. Zero endorsement of Clear Skies.

“The Senate EPW minority staff is shamefully twisting my words,” Brenda says. “I was for reducing mercury pollution in 2005, and am for reducing mercury pollution today. To imply that I supported gutting the Clean Air Act in the process brazenly misleads the public.”

It’s clear what Sen. Inhofe and his staff are really trying to do here. They’re manipulating Brenda’s testimony in a ham-handed attempt to embarrass the White House.

An odd part of Sen. Inhofe’s attack: He’s essentially saying a 70% reduction in mercury emissions would’ve been just dandy, but the 91% reduction proposed by the EPA would destroy the economy. Is that really such a huge difference? Or is he just playing politics with public health?

Sen. Inhofe’s dirty tactic here is a huge tell that he knows what a lousy hand he’s got. He and a handful of America’s worst industrial polluters are up against nearly a million Americans who’ve said loud & clear they support strong mercury standards.

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Let your senators know you oppose dirty attacks on clean air standards. Please email your senators right now asking them to stand up for wildlife and public health.

Sen. Jim Inhofe: Big Oil's MVP

When the city engineer refused to budge on Inhofe’s plan to move the fire escape on his mansion, it fueled his political ambitions.

“So I told him I was going to run for mayor and fire him,” he said. “And I ran for mayor and I fired him.”

Published by right-leaning WND Books, a division of WorldNetDaily, the book establishes Inhofe as an opponent of environmental regulations of all stripes long before 2003, when he famously told the Senate that climate change was “greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.”

It’s odd to see Sen. Inhofe’s book published by such an extremist organization as WND Books, featured alongside such esteemed authors as … Jack Abramoff, whose book is part of his efforts to pay restitution to his victims.

But back to Sen. Inhofe. It’s a strange case to make and a completely upside down way to make it – like saying since you don’t like paying taxes to fund the fire department, you’re now on a crusade to prove fire doesn’t exist:

Joe Mendelson, director of global warming policy at the National Wildlife Federation, said Inhofe’s admission that he is against regulation in almost every instance suggests that he arrived at his scientific skepticism through something other than an impartial look at the facts.

“He sort of comes at it from ‘I am an anti-regulatory person, and therefore if there is something out there that may require a government response to address, I’m either going to ignore it or poke holes in the science so I don’t have to get the regulation,’” he said.

Mendelson also disagreed with Inhofe that environmental regulation threatens personal freedom.

“The impacts of the pollution actually do impede our freedom,” he said. “Our freedom to breath healthy air, our freedom to ensure that our family or our property is actually safeguarded from harm.”

Even though Sen. Inhofe delights in bashing high-profile climate activists, from Al Gore to Leonardo DiCaprio, he has another confession: Being a climate denier makes Sen. Inhofe a celebrity too, and he loves every minute of it:

“I was only in Copenhagen for three hours, but they were the most exhilarating three hours of my political life,” he writes. [...]

“I know it sounds strange to say it, but the experience was really quite enjoyable,” he writes. “I will always remember all those people in the room — hundreds of them — and all the cameras. And they all had one thing in common: they all hated me.”

Sen. Inhofe’s story reminded me of the Esquire Copenhagen profile of his former press secretary, Marc Morano, and how Morano’s fight for “freedom” finances his lavish lifestyle.

Also this week — updates on tar sands, heat waves & a climate denier’s flip-flop. Watch this week’s NWF Climate Capsule! (Don’t worry if you haven’t seen Inception yet, no spoilers. In fact, if you watch the Capsule, you’ll probably be even more confused about what Inception is all about.)

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So why do climate deniers like Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) think they can keep trotting out hacked climate emails as proof of anything other than a massive industry-funded campaign to block America’s path to a cleaner, more secure energy future?

As I live-blogged at DailyKos, yesterday’s Senate Environment & Public Works Committee hearing had less to do with the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget than it did rehashing the same old science denial. There was very little debate about the EPA’s actual budget, never mind solutions to our inter-connected economic, energy & climate crises.

Inside the hearing room, youth climate activists wore Dirty Air Act masks to protest Inhofe’s obstructionist efforts. Once again, he earned his place as Big Oil’s MVP.

But has Inhofe gone so far off the denial deep end that he’s now merely a sideshow? A moment near the end of the hearing was revealing. Committee Chair Barbara Boxer (D-CA) gave him time for one final question. But instead, Inhofe went off on a rambling, five minute rant about how all those NASA scientists are wrong and his friends at Big Oil front groups are right. As he concluded, he looked up at EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson & realized he still had to at least pretend he cared about what the witness had to say, blurting out, “So … that’s my question.”

The hearing room erupted in laughter.

Every day it seems we’re learning more — more about the revolving door between the Bush administration & polluter lobbyists, more about their influence with Senators and their staffers, and more about who’s really pulling the strings on efforts to block climate action — Big Oil’s MVP, Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK).

Some of the best reporting this week has come from Juliet Eilperin at the Washington Post’s Post Carbon blog. Earlier this week, Eilperin had reported that polluter lobbyists were helping staffers for Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) write legislation to strip environmental protections:

The maneuvering comes as The Washington Post has confirmed that two Washington lobbyists, Jeffrey R. Holmstead and Roger R. Martella, Jr., helped craft the original amendment Murkowski planned to offer on the floor last fall. Both Holmstead, who heads the Environmental Strategies Group and Bracewell & Guiliani, and Martella, a partner at Sidley Austin LLP, held senior posts at EPA under the Bush administration and represents multiple clients with an interest in climate legislation pending before Congress.

And today, even more about the close working relationships between polluter lobbyists & Senate staffers:

More details have emerged about the involvement by two lobbyists–who were senior Environmental Protection Agency officials during the George W. Bush administration–in crafting an amendment Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) tried to offer in the fall in an effort to bar the EPA from regulating greenhouse gases on its own.

Murkowski’s staff director on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, McKie Campbell, and her energy staffer Colin Hayes, convened a meeting on Sept. 23 with aides to a handful of centrist Democrats to brief them on the final version of the amendment, according to participants and sources familiar with the session. The two lobbyists, Bracewell & Giuliani’s Jeffrey R. Holmstead and Sidley Austin’s Roger Martella Jr., called in by phone and walked the staffers through the changes that had been made to text, to reassure the staffers that Murkowski’s amendment would not block the EPA from issuing new curbs on greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles in 2010 even as it would bar the agency from imposing those limits on power plants. [...]

The meeting, which took place in Hart Senate Office Building 370 at 8:45 am, included two aides to James M. Inhofe (Okla.), the top Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. Before leaving the room, participants were asked to turn in the documents Murkowski’s aides distributed, confirmed Inhofe spokesman Matthew Dempsey.

Holmstead and Martella dominated the opening of the meeting by describing how the revised amendment had answered the attacks lodged by some Democrats and environmental groups, a source said.

The two men are both experts in the Clean Air Act, and represent clients with a financial stake in climate legislation moving through Congress.

Why did Murkowski’s aides not want the documents to leave the room? And why, later in the article, does Holmstead issue a classic non-denial denial? “I have no memory of playing a major role in that call.” Not I did not play a role, but I don’t remember — leaving himself lots of wiggle room.

The stories shed new light on Sen. Murkowski’s push to strip the EPA of its Congressionally-granted, Supreme Court-approved authority to regulate global warming pollution. As Joe Mendelson, global warming policy director for the National Wildlife Federation, told Greenwire (sub. req.), the Murkowski amendment was “crafted by big polluters
for big polluters.”

Why would senator from Alaska, called the poster state for global warming, put polluters’ interests ahead of her home state’s climate concerns? In the current campaign cycle, Sen. Murkowski is Congress’ #1 recipient of electric utilities’ money and the #4 recipient of Big Oil money.

Despite this week’s revelations, Senators Inhofe & Murkowski could still try to bring to the floor their amendment to gut the Clean Air Act. Your senators need to hear from you. Email your senators right now and ask them to stop this polluter-fueled push to undercut the EPA’s efforts to protect people, wildlife and our natural resources from the worst effects of global warming.

Photo via Flickr’s CelticDivaAK