You’d think that with emotions running high over the Gulf of Mexico oil spill’s first anniversary, a preposterous United Nations motion to guarantee inalienable rights for “Mother Earth,” and a shamelessly extravagant Earth Day celebration upon us, the Big Green lobby would be standing triumphant on Capitol Hill. Instead, an unidentified “longtime Democratic strategist” recently told Politico that Big Green funders ought to ask for their money back or start suing for political incompetence.
Sierra Club and Environmental Defense Fund lobbyists are horrified at having to play defense against politicians who don’t fear them – and even three senators who won in November on anti-green platforms, most notably Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., who fired a high-powered rifle bullet through the House’s cap-and-trade bill in a TV ad.
The weakening of Big Green’s political clout showed glaringly in President Obama’s Georgetown University energy policy speech early this month. Obama embraced a “clean energy standard” that included nuclear reactors, despite Japan’s earthquake and tsunami crisis, clean coal, despite enviro rants that it’s all dirty, natural gas, despite the controversy over hydraulic fracturing – and not a word about defending Environmental Protection Agency climate change rules, which could still come under attack in the Senate.
Another sign of environmentalism’s fading popularity – aside from a Rasmussen poll this month showing 50 percent of Americans ready to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to lessen dependence on foreign oil – is the power shift at the top of the executive office and the fading army of grunt hall-hiking, lobbyists at the bottom.
The president himself lost his iconic “climate czar” with the departure of former EPA boss Carol Browner in March. Obama was also stung by the abolition of her position by Congress in its mid-April budget agreement, and semi-pleased with Browner’s replacement, her not famous deputy, Heather Zichal, whose office has been relegated to Obama’s Domestic Policy Council.
Then there’s the generational divide. The Sierra Club’s veteran Executive Director Carl Pope was replaced early last year by 38-year-old Michael Brune, who was in diapers when Pope hired on. Brune comes from the foundation-funded, civil disobedience hooligans at the Rainforest Action Network.
Phil Radford, 33, took over as executive director of Greenpeace USA from aging John Passacantando in April and Erich Pica, 34, replaced 68-year-old ultra-leftist Brent Blackwelder as president of Friends of the Earth in September.
All three outfits lost their institutional memory and gained fluffy sloganeers puffing their future as weather control wizards and fossil fuel demolishers.
Jessy Tolkan, now executive director of the 50-group Energy Action Coalition, “the hub of the youth climate movement,” at 28 has become “that old lady” who registers high-school kids to vote and recruits anti-corporate protesters among college freshmen.
Key congressional staffers said they haven’t seen many environmental lobbyists strutting in the door since the Senate let the cap-and-trade bill die in 2009 and the Tea Party invaded in 2010.
One longtime staffer said it was almost like the one shining chance that Big Green had to actually take total control of the American economy went poof before their eyes – and deflated their overblown egos as well.
Perversely, the climate change lobby as a whole simultaneously gained 140 corporations that decided they should jump into the debate on Capitol Hill, some to protect themselves from CO2 bans, others to beg subsidies for “clean energy” businesses.
But don’t count Big Green out yet. The Nature Conservancy, for example, spent $5.4 million of your tax dollars on lobbying in 2009, according to their most recent Internal Revenue Service Form 990, which also reported that they received $105 million in government grants.
Examiner Columnist Ron Arnold is executive vice president of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise.
