The House of Representatives holds the title of the most anti-environment House in congressional history. Led by Republicans, the House has voted against the environment 247 times in the last 18 months, averaging one anti-environmental vote for every day the House has been in session.

The newest report, released by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Ed Markey (D-MA), finds that many of these votes have directly benefited the oil and gas industry. According to the report:

• One out of every five votes has either rolled back protections for public lands, clean air, clean water, or enriched the oil industry.
• There were 77 votes undermining Clean Air and public health protections, including new EPA regulation of mercury toxins.
• Another 39 votes would weaken public lands protections, 37 votes to block climate change action, and 31 votes against Clean Water Act protection.
• The House voted to enrich the oil and gas industry 109 times, a total 44 percent of its anti-environment votes. There were 38 votes to prevent clean energy deployment and 12 votes to expedite review of the Keystone XL pipeline.

Republicans have close ties to the industries seeking to roll back environmental protections. House Republicans have received 8o percent of the oil industry’s campaign contributions over their careers, according to a ThinkProgress analysis of Center for Responsive Politics data. House Republicans have taken $38 million from the industry throughout their careers. By comparison, House Democrats have taken nearly $9 million, meaning Republican members have received more than four times as much of oil’s dollars as Democratic members. Meanwhile, coal contributions to Congress are on track this year to beat a record $8.1 million spending, and House Republicans have taken 85 percent of the coal industry’s cash.

After slashing key clean energy programs 13 times in recent weeks, the GOP will continue their sterling track record with a series of bills that protect their donors’ interests ahead of public health, public lands, and clean air. According to Markey, these bills count as “one of the largest fire sales of America’s taxpayer-owned land in history while attacking the bedrock environmental laws that protect our water, our air, and our people.”

Speaking at the Center for American Progress Action Fund today, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) said he believes a price on carbon pollution can provide a unique solution to both the country’s fiscal challenges and its looming climate crisis, uniting climate and deficit hawks. His presentation put the challenge to Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), the House Republican budget chief, who has claimed that Congress has a “moral obligation” to reduce the country’s debt. With former Republican congressman Wayne Gilchrest (R-MD), Waxman explained how tackling climate pollution can address fiscal, energy, environmental, and economic challenges simultaneously:

A price on carbon can give you a substantial amount of money to help deal with our fiscal problems. A price on carbon can move us away from our reliance on fossil fuels which add to the greenhouse gas emissions in our climate, and by doing that we can become less dependent on oil. We would be able to be a challenger in the economic future of clean energy.

Watch it:

“Do people want to cut Medicare and Medicaid?” Waxman asked. A rising price on carbon pollution, Waxman said, could raise over $1 trillion over several decades.

Gilchrest rebuked Ryan for ignoring the climate crisis in his depiction of the “defining moment“:

Paul Ryan said this is a defining moment for future generations as far as a fiscal sense for reducing the deficit. This is a defining moment on the planet of seven billion people extracting resources faster than they can be replaced, becoming a geologic force by pumping more carbon dioxide in decades than nature is able to store in the earth over millions of years. The defining moment is realizing that the market, capitalism, our civilization is actually a subset of the earth’s ecosystem. We’re not independent of the living machine that gives us life on earth. We’re dependent on it.

“The U.S. is facing a range of unprecedented fiscal and environmental challenges,” said Waxman. “We’ve got a confluence of events happening all at once.”

Waxman and Gilchrest recently co-authored a Washington Post op-ed with Reps. Ed Markey (D-MA) and Sherry Boehlert (R-MD) calling for climate-change policies to be considered for deficit reduction.

House Energy and Commerce ranking member Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) slammed Republicans for taking the extreme step of issuing subpoenas to the White House for all communication related to the solar company Solyndra. At the committee’s business meeting, Waxman noted that the Republican chairs, Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI) and Cliff Stearns (R-FL), rejected offers from the White House Counsel to offer all communications related to specific accusations lobbed by critics of the Department of Energy loan guarantee to the bankrupt solar company. “Our focus should be jobs,” he said:

Apparently what the committee really wants is a confrontation with the president, not information for the investigation. No wonder the public holds this Congress in such low regard. Our focus should be jobs. Our attention should be on rebuilding our economy, not manufacturing controversies with our president.

Watch it:

Waxman also criticized the extraordinary decision to subpoena the White House, something he never did as chair of either the House oversight committee or energy committee during the Reagan and Bush presidencies. With the House in Republican hands, public approval of Congress has plummeted to 9 percent.

Participating in the progressive “filibreather” against the FY 2012 Interior and Environmental Agencies Appropriations Act (HR 2584), Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) criticized its anti-climate provisions. Waxman attacked the Republican leadership for passing legislation earlier this year to reverse the Environmental Protection Agency finding that climate pollution threatens public health. He also called out the Obama administration and the national news media for failing to explain the scientific threat of global warming and extreme weather, since it is something his “colleagues here in the House of Representatives” need to learn:

This year, we witnessed weather disaster after weather disaster. There have been massive floods, record-breaking fire, record-breaking droughts and now record-breaking heat waves. Yet earlier this year the House passed a bill that repealed EPA’s scientific finding that climate change is occurring. It’s caused by man and is a serious threat.

We don’t hear about the connection between these weather events and climate change and carbon emissions. We’re not hearing from it when we watch the daily news shows and we’re not hearing it from this administration. I just sent recently a letter to Secretary Chu, the Secretary of Energy, a Nobel Prize winner, asking him to speak out. We need to educate the American people so we can educate our colleagues here in the House of Representatives.

In this bill, the Republican majority wants to block EPA from issuing regulations to reduce carbon emissions from power plants and oil refineries that are causing this catastrophic climate change. The majority also wants to block regulations to cut carbon pollution from motor vehicles, even though these regulations help break our dangerous dependence on oil, save American families money and clean the air we breathe. This house can deny science, we can amend our nation’s laws, but we cannot rewrite the laws of nature. The longer we ignore the scientific reality that our actions are destabilizing the environment, destabilizing our climate, the more costly and disruptive our response will need to be and the more we endanger our children’s future.

Watch it:

“When we were debating carbon regulations earlier this year my colleagues on the other side of the aisle claim that they supported reductions in what they call ‘real air pollution,’ whatever that means.” Waxman continued. “But it turns out they’re gutting those protections as well.”

Rep. Jay Inslee (D-WA), with some of the climate science literature.

This morning, top representatives of the scientific community tried in vain to reach fossil-fueled Republicans with the facts about the threat of global warming. In a hearing convened by the energy committee’s subcommittee on energy and power, chaired by Rep. Ed Whitfield (R-KY), climate scientists clearly explained how years of research involving thousands of scientists in dozens of fields of expertise have come to the ineluctable conclusion that fossil-fuel pollution is threatening humanity.

Dr. Christopher Field, the co-chair of IPCC Working Group 2, detailed how observed increases in temperature and changes in climate have already begun to decrease crop yields, with much worse to come as temperatures rise. Dr. Richard Somerville, an IPCC coordinating lead author, explained that “urgent action is needed if global warming is to be limited to moderate levels.” Dr. Knute Nadelhoffer, director of the University of Michigan Biological Station, described the disturbing changes to the Great Lakes and Arctic regions that are happening now. Dr. Francis Zwiers, another IPCC coordinating lead author, explained that it is very likely that human influence has doubled risks in extreme flooding events.

The response from the majority party was an embarrassment to the institution of Congress and to the American people. As if the hearing were a drinking game of debunked global warming myths, the Republicans on the committee uniformly pretended they were wading into some grand scientific debate, whose proponents just wanted to take America’s energy away. Rep. Lee Terry (R-NE) took a brave stand against the secret plot to ban nitrogen. Whitfield cited the canards of the Minoan warming period, the Medieval warming period, and growing Antarctic ice. Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-VA) competed with Whitfield, spinning tales of Vikings, global warming on Mars, and global cooling.

Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) baldly asserted, “There is dispute whether man is the cause of global warming.” However, not even the conservative climate scientists the Republicans called — Dr. John Christy and Dr. Roger Pielke, Sr. — dispute human influence on global warming. Their testimony consisted of misrepresenting the IPCC and making dire warnings of the economic consequences of reducing the United States’ dependence on coal and oil.

At the end of the hearing, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) gave Whitfield a chance to go back from the precipice of science denial. He asked Whitfield to delay consideration of the Upton-Inhofe bill to overturn the EPA climate rules, including the scientific finding that global warming pollution is a threat to public health. Whitfield rejected Waxman’s offer, saying that his subcommittee will markup the science-prevention act on Thursday.

Speaking at the Center for American Progress Action Fund today, House energy committee ranking member Henry Waxman (D-CA) railed against the toxic influence of Koch Industries on efforts to fight global warming. Waxman, who fought polluters to pass the Clean Air Act of 1990, is dismayed by the level of outright science denial among the Republican Party today, exemplified by their votes to slash and burn environmental protection, and the Upton-Inhofe bill to reverse the scientific finding that carbon pollution threatens public health:

It apparently no longer matters in Congress what health experts and scientists think. All that seems to matter is what Koch Industries think.

Watch a compilation of Waxman’s remarks:

“Science denial, partisanship, and the rising power of special interests are deeply intertwined,” Waxman said, “and they feed off each other.” He explained the vicious circle fueled by Koch Industries, the private petrochemical conglomerate, and the Republican Party. “Koch Industries benefits immensely from the rollback of EPA regulations, so it backs Republican candidates who advocate this position. And it funds groups that attack science and it organizes anti-regulation demonstrations. Republican strategists see a partisan advantage in attacking efforts to address climate change, so that leads to a growing acceptance of science denial.”

In the question-and-answer period, Waxman was asked why industry is split on climate change, with some companies supporting action, and others opposed. After discussing how he has worked with coal and oil interests to bring them on board to action, he returned to David and Charles Koch:

The Koch brothers, I think, are unique, because they’re not just interested in their financial well-being, they’re interested in ideology. They are uniquely involved in the right wing of this country. They are financing the Tea Party movement, and the Republican Party, and they’re making the politics pay off for them both ideologically and economically.

“So there are industries that we’re never going to completely satisfy,” Waxman concluded. “We’ll do our best to hear their concerns and try to be responsive to them. But if their position is nothing, no way, no how, it’s hard to compromise with that kind of position.”