Not a Great Day for Those of You with Lungs
Our political pundits here in the U.S. tell us the Republicans are very likely to take back control of our Senate in today’s elections, granting them complete power over both houses of Congress. This means that our most important law-making committees surrounding energy and the environment will soon be made up of people like Fred Upton (R-MI), James Inhofe (R-OK), Ted Cruz (R-TX), Ron Johnson (R-WI), Mike Enzi (R-WY), Mitch McConnell (R-KY), and John Cornyn (R-TX): stanch climate change deniers, and sworn enemies of environmentalism.
The oil companies are celebrating, but it’s a very dark day here for anyone who cares about the future of this planet.
Time to remove myself even further from the business model that supports this. I say once again, relying on the government will not work. We have to do this ourselves individually. It is up to us. I imagine we will see a hard push for the Keystone pipeline, underfunding or total defunding of the EPA, reduction or total removal of any kind of green energy tax credits at the same time as enhancements of credits for dirty fuel companies.
Craig,
They don’t have complete control. The democrats can filibuster just as easily as the republicans did, and President Obama can veto anything that gets through the “Blue Wall”.
I do think that the Keystone pipeline will move forward – that’s one of the negotiating pieces Obama has been dangling in front of the GOP for 6 years, and they can’t afford to literally pass nothing, so they’ll negotiate on something and get the Keystone going… But of course that’s actually a net good for the environment, not bad.
Other than a negotiated bill or two, I suspect we’ll have 2 years of nothing getting done. In truth, that’s what we would have had if the democrats had held the Senate.
As long as the GOP is dedicated to hindering American progress, there’s little that can be done to overcome them without a filibuster proof senate and control of the House. We didn’t have that prior to yesterday, and we won’t have that in January… It was a bad day, but not much has changed.