Koch Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-KS) — who is deeply indebted to Koch Industries for more than $100,000 in donations — is outspoken against clean energy investment. Recently, he celebrated when the Senate failed to extend the wind energy tax credit in a 49-49 vote. However, he is celebrating the threat to 37,000 jobs in the relatively young industry, when the production tax credit is set to expire at the end of the year.

Even as the oil industry enjoys $4 billion in subsidies a year, Pompeo lamented the cost of the production tax credit, claiming the wind industry would be fine on its own:

“The program has been around an awfully long time and it’s time to let that industry stand on its own two feet. And I’m confident that they’ll do it,” he said. “There’s great, creative engineers and innovators in the alternative energy field, and I’m confident they’ll be successful.”

It now costs the government more than $1 billion a year to hand out 2.2 cents per kilowatt-hour of wind power — and enough is enough, says Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.).

“We’ve been subsidizing some of these industries with tax credits for multiple decades, and every time they get to the end of the line, they get within a year, they say, ‘If you just give me’ — fill in the blank — ‘one more year, four more years, that’s all I want. Just a little more time,’” said Pompeo, who is leading a charge against the PTC and other energy subsidies.

“What history would demonstrate is they would continue to come back to the federal trough and ask for more time yet again at the end,” he added.

History has shown that the three times the production tax credit expired, wind investments dropped. Meanwhile, Big Oil has benefited from 100 years of consistent tax breaks, even though the industry had a record-high year of $137 billion profits. And Pompeo, who benefits from these profits, has made clean energy his punching bag.

Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Koch)

Liberal blogs and publications have published countless slanted pieces on Koch Industries, heavy on innuendo and light on facts.

The Obama administration has long been criticized for maintaining a de facto “enemies list” of its perceived political opponents, whether they are respected Supreme Court justices, disfavored reporters or private citizens who just want to keep their own doctors. The Democrats’ obsession with the Kochs as a political target is, indeed, additional evidence of a truly Nixonian approach to politics.

That the Obama administration and its allies use private citizens as symbols to be attacked and vilified is unfair and deeply threatening to our civic life and the rule of law.

In fact, the Koch brothers have made themselves very public figures. After Charles Koch founded the Cato Institute in 1977, David Koch ran for vice president on the Libertarian ticket he bankrolled in 1980. In person and through their latest front group, the astroturf organization Americans for Prosperity, the Kochs have “attacked and vilified” the Obama administration to a level that approaches “obsession”:

Charles Koch: Obama Is ‘Greatest Assault On American Freedom.’ In his letter inviting fellow conservative millionaires and billionaires to a secret Palm Springs retreat in January 2011, Charles Koch accused President Obama of “the greatest assault on American freedom and prosperity in our lifetimes.” [ThinkProgress]

Charles Koch: Obama Is ‘Saddam Hussein.’ At another secret retreat in the fall of 2011, Charles Koch compared President Obama and the 2012 elections to Saddam Hussein and the Iraq War. “We have Saddam Hussein, this is the Mother of All Wars we’ve got in the next 18 months. For the life or death of this country.” [Mother Jones, 9/6/11]

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ThinkProgress filed this report from the Defending The American Dream Summit in Washington DC

The Koch brothers and the foundation they fund, Americans for Prosperity, are among the biggest backers of the right’s anti-environment movement, pushing for the repeal of environmental laws and regulations on both the state and federal level. Those efforts continued at AFP’s annual Defending the American Dream Summit this weekend, as attacks on the EPA came from seemingly every prominent speaker and in multiple panels.

Former pizza magnate Herman Cain (R) drew some of his largest cheers when he declared that the EPA “needs an attitude adjustment,” while former Gov. Mitt Romney (R-MA) decried the burden of federal regulations on job creation. But while Romney has insisted in the past that Republicans aren’t “anti-regulation” and other conservatives have insisted that the party doesn’t want to defund the EPA, Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-KS) — the Congressman from Koch — made it clear during an environmental panel that that was exactly his goal:

POMPEO: We’re trying. Indeed, I personally tried. … We’ve got a Senate that has a deeply different worldview, and there my bill sits. We won’t be able to slow down the growth of the EPA dramatically until we change the view of folks in Congress, and I speak mostly of the Senate here, and we get a new leader in the White House.

Watch it:

Pompeo is hardly the only Republican to state plainly that defunding the EPA is one of the GOP’s primary goals. In July, Rep. Mike Rogers (R-AL) said the EPA “would be discontinued” if the GOP gained control of the Senate and the White House.

Pompeo, however, seems perplexed that President Obama and House and Senate Democrats aren’t willing to do the Kochs’ bidding by joining him in his anti-environmental campaign. Perhaps that’s because they have no desire to aid the efforts of what Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) called the “most anti-environmental House of Representatives in American history.”

Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-KS), the top Koch Industries man in Congress, is continuing his assault on the Environmental Protection Agency and its mission to protect the public welfare from toxic polluters. Pompeo has introduced legislation (HR 2876) to kill the Environmental Justice Eco-Ambassador Program, a small graduate student internship program that deals with the connections between economic disparities, discrimination, and environmental health. According to Pompeo, the program is part of the Obama administration’s plot to “indoctrinate” students “to act as tools of this Administration’s radical policies“:

At a time when millions of Americans cannot find work and are saddled with record deficits and crippling environmental regulations, spending $6,000 of taxpayer money per student to act as tools of this Administration’s radical policies is clearly not acceptable — nor is it ever the role of the federal government to indoctrinate.

“The requirements outlined the EPA’s stated desire to recruit and hire, at taxpayer expense, only those college students who are ideologically in line with the Obama Administration’s radical environmental policies,” Pompeo claims.

But the “radical” requirements are simply as follows:

Applicants must have previously been involved and/or have a strong interest in environmental justice, social justice issues and/or environmental health disparities in an academic, volunteer and/ or employment setting.

Quite simply, Pompeo believes that justice is a radical ideology, based on willful ignorance of reality. Children living in poverty have higher exposure to toxic chemicals. Neighborhoods near toxic waste facilities are disproportionately minority and poor. Although this internship is a new program, the EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice was established under President George W. Bush, not President Obama.

Although Pompeo claims the federal government should never “indocrinate,” he is a co-sponsor of the Sanctity of Human Life Act, which decrees that “human life shall be deemed to begin with fertilization.”

Pompeo’s legislation would also forbid EPA spending on student “programs related to the study of greenhouse gas emissions.”

His bill is co-sponsored by Reps. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), John Carter (R-TX), Gregg Harper (R-MS), and David McKinley (R-WV).

Last night, Congressman Mike Pompeo (R-Koch) proposed an amendment to the Continuing Resolution (H.R. 1) that would “sharply cut funding for an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) program that collects data on industrial greenhouse gas emissions.” The $8.4 million cut would leave funding for the registry at $3.2 million, unless the EPA shifts funds from another program to the registry.

Toeing a fine line between conspiracy theorist and Koch Industries profit protector, Pompeo took the house floor where “he called the registry part of an EPA plot to destroy U.S. jobs“:

EPA would, I am sure, tell you that they are simply collecting a little bit of data on greenhouse gases, that this registry is simply a very innocent effort to learn a little bit more about who is emitting greenhouse gases — who or what.

But this data is the very foundation of the EPA’s effort to pursue its radical anti-jobs agenda. Indeed, continuing the greenhouse gas registry at currently funded levels will permit the EPA regulatory nose inside the job-destroying tent. We cannot head down this path.

The amendment passed in a 239-185 vote.

Despite the Koch-approved rhetoric, even fellow Republicans found the bill to be poorly crafted. Congressman Mike Simpson (R-ID) – who apparently is incredibly frightened by the EPA’s quest to keep our air clean — originally supported the amendment, but after talking to businesses, decided to vote nay, because the business community “told him the greenhouse gas registry was a useful compliance tool for them.”

Pompeo is the congressman “spawned by ‘Kochtopus‘” and “essentially a subsidiary of the Koch brothers’ business empire.” He made his fortune off of a Koch backed company, sidled up to Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity in his 2010 campaign, signed the AFP anti-climate change pledge, took more campaign contributions from Koch Industries than any other candidate in 2010, and hired on an ex-Koch lobbyist to be his chief of staff. In fact, Koch Industries even ranked at top of Pompeo’s campaign contribution list, outpacing the second top contributor by $60,000.

So it’s no surprise that the Congressman from Koch took to the House floor to champion one of Koch Industries’ top causes – stripping the EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gases. Pompeo earned a plush position on the House Energy and Commerce Committee From Koch, and quickly went to work to do the big polluter’s bidding.