This is so ridiculous:
House Republicans rejected amendments offered Tuesday by Democrats that called on Congress to accept the scientific consensus that climate change is occurring, that it is caused in large part by human activity and it is a threat to human health.
The amendments, offered at an Energy and Commerce Committee markup of legislation to block Environmental Protection Agency climate change rules, are part of an effort by House Democrats to get Republicans on the record on climate science.
Committee ranking Democrat Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) offered an amendment Tuesday that called on Congress to agree that climate change is occurring. The amendment failed on a party-line vote of 20-31. No Republicans voted for the amendment.
Well, they can’t open the door to legislation that might harm their polluting benefactors.
Tweeted
Apparently the Rep leadership cannot process anything more than an illgotten vote.
Boo:
It’s O/T but I hope you have a post about this:
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/grand-bargains-and-adult-conversations.html
coming up. And I am just using Digby’s link because I don’t want to give those link to in the piece any traffic.
I know, rather than investing in clean energy technologies that would protect the environment and provide for our children, let’s spend trillions on maintaining an unsustainable status-quo in the middle east so that the extraction industry can get filthy rich and the economy is dependent on the stability of corrupt and hopelessly outdated regimes. Then, when there are inevitable oil price shocks and brokers get rich speculating, self serving employees of the extraction industry can complain about how regulation is preventing the exploitation of dangerous deep water oil fields that at best would supply less than 1% of our daily oil needs.
And then free market assholes can tell us how subsidies for the wildly profitable oil industry are actually tax relief and hence can’t possibly be cut while brazenly crushing funding for things like children’s food assistance.