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Stories tagged with “Earl Blumenauer”

Climate Progress

Climate Hawks Tell Super Committee To Kill $122 Billion In Oil Subsidies

By Brad Johnson on Oct 17, 2011 at 4:38 pm

A group of 35 progressive climate hawks in the House of Representatives want the special deficit committee to end Big Oil subsidies worth $122 billion over the next 10 years. In a letter to committee chairs Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) and Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA), Reps. Peter Welch (D-VT), Earl Blumenauer (D-OR), and 33 other House Democrats ask for the end of the subsidies because “the United States can no longer afford to give away billions of dollars every year to corporations earning billions of dollars in profits”:

In the current budgetary environment, the United States can no longer afford to give away billions of dollars every year to corporations earning billions of dollars in profits and costing American taxpayers twice: at the pump and through the tax code. We urge the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction to consider eliminating subsidies for fossil fuels as an excellent source of deficit reducing savings. According to a coalition of organizations, eliminating subsidies to the fossil fuels industry could reduce our national debt by up to $122 billion over ten years.

Welch and Blumenauer are members of the House Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition. Their letter adds their support to the request made by leaders of 52 national and state organizations on Oct. 5 to the super committee to end “government handouts to the oil, coal and gas industries.”

The list of subsidies includes:

$43.5 billion in federal tax subsidies to oil and gas companies
$2.5 billion in federal tax subsidies to coal companies
$1.3 billion tax credit for refineries
$9.5 billion in royalty-free oil and gas leases
$52 billion in “last in, first out” accounting for inventories, a tax credit that disproportionately helps the oil and gas industry
$10.5 billion dual capacity tax credit, which also largely benefits oil and gas companies

Ending these subsidies would not only help restore fiscal health to the nation, but also take a small step towards repairing the health of the planet’s climate. The fiscal committee needs to go farther and place an explicit price on carbon pollution so that fossil companies pay for their pollution, instead of future generations.

Climate Progress

Climate Hawk Earl Blumenauer Leads Charge Against Keystone XL Corruption

By Brad Johnson on Oct 6, 2011 at 3:26 pm

Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR)

Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR), one of the top climate hawks in the U.S. Congress, is calling on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to reject the proposed Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. The signatories raise the specter of corruption in the use of a former Clinton campaign official as TransCanada’s top lobbyist. In a letter signed by several fellow House Democrats, Blumenauer “says newly released emails of exchanges between the State Department and TransCanada have tainted State’s review of the project”:

Rather than acting as fair arbiters of TransCanada’s application to build a massive pipeline across environmentally sensitive areas of the United States, State Department officials appear to have acted as little more than cheerleaders for the company’s bid.

Blumenauer’s co-signers are Reps. Barbara Lee (D-CA), Tim Ryan (D-OH), Jackie Speier (D-CA), Peter Welch (D-VT), Steve Cohen (D-TN), and Maurice Hinchey (D-NY). They also express concern that the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) developed by a TransCanada contractor for the State Department is flawed and inadequate.

“Given the significant risks of this pipeline route to our nation’s precious groundwater resources, and the serious questions recently raised regarding the impartiality of the EIS process, we encourage the Department of State to reconsider the decision not to evaluate alternative pipeline routes, and request that you find this proposed route not in the national interest,” they conclude.

Activists are planning an #OccupyStateDept protest and rally beginning tonight and continuing through Friday, when a public hearing on the pipeline will be held in Washington, DC.

Text of letter:
Read more

NEWS FLASH

Blumenauer: ‘The Jihad Against Climate Change Continues’ | “The jihad against climate change continues for my friends on the Republican side of the aisle,” Rep. Earl Blumenaur (D-OR) said on the House floor this afternoon, criticizing the anti-climate provisions of the FY 2012 Interior and Environmental Agencies Appropriations Act (HR 2584) now under debate. “And it’s ironic. when people can barely walk outside in Washington, DC., where we’re dealing with drought, flood, wildfires, extreme weather events across the country. And the scientists tell us that it’s related to human activity. This budget reduces our ability to deal with climate change and extreme weather events.”

Related Posts

By Brad Johnson on Jul 25, 2011 at 4:00 pm

NEWS FLASH

BREAKING: Rep. Earl Blumenauer calls for ‘immediate and complete’ U.S. investigation of News Corp. | Rep. Blumenauer (D-OR) writes: “I am deeply concerned that the breadth of the alleged crimes and the seeming indifference to illegal activities at News of the World may be indicative of a patter of corruption at News Corporation. The pace at which this wide-ranging scandal is unfolding suggests that we may have only scratched the surface of potential illegal practices at the company.” Read the whole letter HERE. Blumenauer is at least the eighth member of Congress who has called for a federal investigation of News Corp.

Yglesias

Earl Blumenauer’s Carbon Audit

By Matthew Yglesias on Dec 11, 2009 at 10:01 am

blumenauer

Earl Blumenauer deserves major props for having inserted a provision into the TARP bill last fall calling for a comprehensive “carbon audit” of the U.S. tax code.

This is important for a lot of reasons. One is that you have people like Ross Douthat out there saying they’re worried that even if anthropogenic climate change is real, mitigating it may not pass cost-benefit scrutiny. I don’t think that claim is nearly as plausible as those who put it forward like to make, but it is true that the costs of emissions reductions are an important consideration. But what’s frustrating about the conversation is that when we talk about costs we oftentimes just assume that all we can do is take the baseline policy environment we have, and then plop emissions reductions on top of it. As if the pre-existing status quo already constituted optimal growth policy or something.

But of course that’s not right. The American Clean Energy and Security Act would reduce emissions at remarkably low cost but in part the cost would be low because the reduction targets aren’t all that ambitious. It would be an excellent start—indeed, it would be the single most important piece of environmental legislation in the history of the world—but it will be necessary to go further. And to get deeper cuts, you really need to wring the inefficiencies out of the current system. Removing economically distorting tax subsidies makes the economy grow faster rather than slower. And removing distorting tax subsidies that encourage greenhouse gas pollution obviously reduces greenhouse gas pollution. So scouring the tax code for win-win opportunities is enormously useful.

Yglesias

Rep Earl Blumenauer Discusses Bicycle Policy

By Matthew Yglesias on Dec 10, 2009 at 3:58 pm

If you ride a bicycle for practical purposes—getting around town, rather than for sports or recreation—then congressman Earl Blumenauer from Portland has your back. In this video, he rides around New York City and looks at recent improvements to bicycle infrastructure there:

And Megan McConville writes about a new federal initiative he’s involved with:

Last night in Washington, DC, the Brookings Institution and the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) kicked off Cities for Cycling, a new effort to catalog, promote and implement the world’s best bicycle transportation practices in American municipalities. As Brookings’ Metropolitan Policy Program Director Bruce Katz put it in his introduction, the event was host to a rock star panel, with Representative Earl Blumenauer (D-OR), New York City Department of Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, and David Byrne, former frontman of the band Talking Heads and long-time cycling advocate.

At any rate, if you bike and you don’t live in Portland, you really ought to get in touch with your congressman and register your existence with his or her office. It’s great that Blumenauer leads on this, but there’s no city in America whose congressional delegation is indifferent to the state of its highways, and there are many towns and cities all across the country whose elected officials are indifferent to the state of their bicycle infrastructure.

Media

Rep Blumenauer Challenges George Will to a Debate on Portland

By Matthew Yglesias on May 20, 2009 at 10:01 am

blumenauer-1

Hot in my inbox, a statement from Representative Earl Blumenauer (D-OR), who represents Portland in Congress and is one of the main leaders on transportation policy in the House, responding to George Will’s cranky anti-Portland column:

“In his article, Mr. Will proves that he is mired in a one-dimensional past, one that the city of Portland has successfully overcome. He opposes policies that will provide Americans with more choices while saving them money, creating jobs and protecting the environment. In Portland we have been able to increase productivity, boost our economy, and invest in our city’s resources by taking a well-rounded approach to transportation. Secretary LaHood shares this comprehensive view on transportation options for our nation—its not about behavior modification its about giving Americans the freedom to choose more than just the highway or byway.

Rather than pontificate about practicality from a far, I challenge Mr. Will to come experience Portland, and then debate the facts, the future and the visions we offer. I am proud to defend the Portland model so painstakingly developed and implemented over the last 1/3 of a century. Maybe he will understand why young well educated people move here without jobs and older, well established business and professional people won’t leave for jobs that pay more. We will be happy to buy his plane ticket and give him a bottle of Oregon pinot to die for.

I’m mostly wondering what Newsweek intends to do about the large, material factual error in Will’s column. When Will penned an error-ridden Washington Post column on climate change, the Post steadfastly refused to issue a correction and key Post personnel defended Will’s right to lie in the Post’s pages. Strangely, during the weeks of ensuing controversy the Post ran several opinion pieces that, accurately, pointed out that Will was misleading people and some of the Post’s news personnel offered similar comments. Still, Will’s editors and the Post opinion section continued to stand solidly behind the principle that accuracy isn’t important to them—at least as long as George Will is the author.

Newsweek is an editorially separate entity, but also owned by The Washington Post Company. Perhaps the Post’s decision to greenlight lying led Will to believe he could get away with similar misrepresentations in Newsweek. I’ll be interested to see if that proves to be the case.

Climate Progress

Stumped By Science: Michele Bachmann Calls CO2 ‘Harmless,’ ‘Negligible,’ ‘Necessary,’ ‘Natural’

By Brad Johnson on Apr 24, 2009 at 10:59 am

On the House floor on Earth Day, April 22, 2009, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) argued that the threat of manmade global warming doesn’t make any sense because “carbon dioxide is a natural byproduct of nature”:

Carbon dioxide, Mister Speaker, is a natural byproduct of nature. Carbon dioxide is natural. It occurs in Earth. It is a part of the regular lifecycle of Earth. In fact, life on planet Earth can’t even exist without carbon dioxide. So necessary is it to human life, to animal life, to plant life, to the oceans, to the vegetation that’s on the Earth, to the, to the fowl that — that flies in the air, we need to have carbon dioxide as part of the fundamental lifecycle of Earth.

Watch it:

Rep. Blumenauer (D-OR), later in the evening, demolished Bachmann for “making things up on the floor of the House”:

My good friend, the gentlelady from Minnesota, doesn’t think there are any problems with the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It’s interesting to listen to her say that something that was naturally occurring simply couldn’t be harmful, ignoring the fact that we have the highest concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for 2/3 of a million years.

The consensus of the scientific community — not people making things up on the floor of the House — is that this has been profoundly influenced by human activity, starting with the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, where we started consuming huge quantities of coal, burning fossil fuels, accelerating that over time. The consensus of the scientific community is that this is in fact a serious problem.

Furthermore, attempting to repeat the goofy denier talking point that carbon dioxide makes up only a fraction of the atmospheric content and thus isn’t of concern, Bachmann errs wildly. She claims that carbon dioxide makes up “three percent of the atmosphere,” when in fact it only comprises 0.04% — off by a factor of a hundred. As Blumenauer pointed out, CO2 levels are significantly higher than they’ve been throughout human history. Only a hundred years ago, CO2 concentrations were only 0.03%. Of course, when it comes to the greenhouse effect, only global warming gases are relevant. And carbon dioxide is the predominant greenhouse gas.

But Bachmann hasn’t ever been one to let her political rants be constrained by the facts.

Transcript: Read more

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