It seems to be official: in possibly less than a week, we’ll see a major showdown in the US Senate over whether the EPA will retain its recently secured authority to regulate major carbon sources. Now’s the time to get out your cell phone and call your senators, folks – to call this one huge would be an understatement.
As soon as January 20th, the Senate may vote on the “Murkowski Amendment,” an amendment to a must-pass debt bill that otherwise has nothing to do with the climate. If passed, the amendment would prevent the EPA from regulating greenhouse emissions from major sources like coal plants. Every US Senator in the country needs to hear from their constituents that this kind of climate policy backpedaling is unacceptable. Call senators offices RIGHT NOW – you can find the DC phone numbers for every member of the Senate here.
After making a phone call to your own senators, you might consider joining this Facebook page created in response to the Murkowski Amendment, and inviting others to join as well. The page will be used to contact all who join it, and remind them to contact their senators.
Though ostensibly sponsored by Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, it appears that the real behind the Senate effort to disable the Clean Air Act may be none other than climate enemy number one, Oklahoma’s James Inhofe. We can’t let the Senate’s foremost global warming denier convince the Senate to shelve EPA’s authority to use the Clean Air Act effectively.
This kind of attack on existing environmental law – attaching a hideously anti-environmental amendment to a bill that has to pass and is otherwise completely unrelated to climate legislation – is the sort of nightmare we grew used to dealing with during the Bush years. It’s ironic that at the dawn of 2010, which should be a landmark year for climate and clean energy legislation, we should have to spend our time beating down something like the Murkowski Amendment. However, there’s a bright side: this is our chance to get it out in the open, early in the year, that crippling the Clean Air Act is unacceptable.
Let’s beat back this monster firmly and forcefully, and send a clear message to the US Senate: no messing with the Clean Air Act.
This the biggest step the Obama administration has taken to stop climate change and if the Senate overturns this, just think how badly that will reflect on their power to pass real climate legislation. Get involved on this one folks.