Environmental Bills in the U.S. Congress

If you have a few extra minutes and you don’t mind being sickened, here’s a report from the League of Conservation Voters that consists of only two parts.  It:

• Lists the 35 most important bills related to environmental issues that were introduced onto the U.S. Congress in 2012, and

• Follows with a large table that displays each senator’s and representative’s vote on the matter.

Here’s a particularly disgusting excerpt:

Representative Bill Johnson (R-OH) (pictured) sponsored H.R. 3409, the so-called Stop the War on Coal Act of 2012, a sweeping giveaway to the coal industry that would gut bedrock environmental protections and severely threaten the health of the American people. H.R. 3409 would prevent the Secretary of the Interior from issuing a rule protecting streams from mountaintop removal mining, which has been linked to severe health impacts, including elevated incidences of birth defects. The bill would also give polluters a free pass to spew unlimited amounts of carbon pollution; block fuel efficiency and greenhouse gas standards for cars; halt Clean Air Act protections for smog, soot, and mercury pollution that would prevent thousands of premature deaths and hundreds of thousands of asthma attacks; leave communities at risk from toxic, arsenic-laden coal ash; and gut the core of the Clean Water Act, the federal “floor” of water quality standards that states must meet. On September 21, the House approved H.R. 3409 by a vote of 233-175 (House roll call vote 603). NO IS THE PRO-ENVIRONMENT VOTE. The Senate took no action on this legislation.