Tag Archives: action

Could the moral angle get Christian conservatives to care about climate change?

by BridgetBaccarini Posted on February 27, 2015

Could the moral angle get Christian conservatives to care about climate change?

By on 27 Feb 2015commentsShare

A majority of Americans think that fighting climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions is a “moral responsibility,” according to a new poll from Reuters. The news agency conducted the poll following a number of recent statements from Pope Francis casting climate change as a moral issue, since it will hit the world’s poor hardest. Reuters found:

Two-thirds of respondents (66 percent) said that world leaders are morally obligated to take action to reduce CO2 emissions. And 72 percent said they were “personally morally obligated” to do what they can in their daily lives to reduce emissions.

For comparison, that tracks with a recent report from the Yale Center for Climate Change Communication, which found that 64 percent of registered voters support imposing “strict carbon dioxide limits on existing coal-fired power plants to reduce global warming and improve public health.”

And, OK, “sure,” you might be saying. “This poll, like so many others, measures people’s willingness to talk the talk without walking the walk,” you might be saying. For, as Grist’s David Roberts reminds us, polls repeatedly find that Americans like stuff that sounds good. They may think that leaders are morally obligated to do stuff that sounds good too.

But here’s how this poll is useful: That Yale Center report found that even though 64 percent of voters support strict carbon regulations, only 40 percent of conservative Republicans and 23 percent of Tea Party Republicans do. Those folks also tend to be highly religious. If action on climate change can rise above knee-jerk politics to a religious — or moral — imperative, then there may be some chance of making progress. That seems to be what the Pope hopes, at least.

Of course, the Pope isn’t the only moral authority capable of making inroads with conservatives. Less than a quarter of Americans are Catholic (and half of American Catholics vote Democrat). But Evangelicals are gradually getting on board too. “The moral imperative is the way to reach out to conservatives,” Rev. Mitch Hescox of the Evangelical Environmental Network told Reuters. The issue may resonate in particular with young, religious conservatives, who, of course, will gradually replace the old ones.

“These are issues we’ve always grown up with and issues we’re used to hearing about,” 30-year-old evangelical leader Ben Lowe recently told Grist, saying his “creation care” movement, Young Evangelicals for Climate Action, is growing faster than the group can handle. “There’s been a great amount of growth within the last 10 years or so that cares a lot about understanding our biblical role to be caretakers of this planet. And a lot of Christians have questions about climate change and where they fit in on all of that.”

Share

Please

enable JavaScript

to view the comments.

Get stories like this in your inbox

AdvertisementAdvertisement

Originally from: 

Could the moral angle get Christian conservatives to care about climate change?

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, Landmark, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Could the moral angle get Christian conservatives to care about climate change?

Fossil fuel interests donated millions to Clinton charities. Is this a problem?

by YTVBrianna Posted on February 26, 2015

Fossil fuel interests donated millions to Clinton charities. Is this a problem?

By on 26 Feb 2015commentsShare

At the same time that Hillary Clinton was pushing to make it easier for major corporations — including oil and gas companies — to do business abroad, many of those same companies were donating to the Clinton Foundation, which she administers with her family. At least 60 companies that lobbied the State Department during Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state also donated a combined total of more than $26 million to the foundation, and played a role in philanthropic projects through the Clinton Global Initiative.

ExxonMobil and Chevron were among the donors to give to various Clinton groups and initiatives. So was Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil exporter, and Canada’s Foreign Affairs Department, which is tasked with promoting the Keystone XL pipeline.

From The Wall Street Journal:

As Mrs. Clinton prepares to embark on a race for the presidency, she has a web of connections to big corporations unique in American politics — ties forged both as secretary of state and by her family’s charitable interests. Those relationships are emerging as an issue for Mrs. Clinton’s expected presidential campaign as income disparity and other populist themes gain early attention. …

In some cases, donations came after Mrs. Clinton took action that helped a company. In other cases, the donation came first. In some instances, donations came both before and after. All of the companies mentioned in this article said their charitable donations had nothing to do with their lobbying agendas with Mrs. Clinton’s State Department.

Is this a big enough conflict of interest to concern environmentalists? Green groups disagree … or are silent on the topic. From Reuters:

“It’s hard to believe that [companies] don’t think they are getting something for their contributions,” said Ben Schreiber, head of climate and energy at Friends of the Earth, one of the largest environmental groups in the United States. …

Uncharacteristically, many green groups normally quick to attack politicians linked to oil and gas companies shied away from commenting on the Clinton Foundation’s relationship with these donors.

The Environmental Defense Action Fund had no comment because it does not have anyone with knowledge of the subject, a spokesman said. Another business-friendly green group, the Natural Resources Defense Council Action Fund, also declined, saying it would discuss the issues “when we have declared candidates.” The World Wildlife Fund had no comment.

While secretary of state, Clinton championed oil and gas development in Eastern Europe as a check on Russia — she even went so far as to fly to Bulgaria in an attempt to convince the government there to lift its moratorium on fracking. Meanwhile, many U.S. environmental groups have been pushing for domestic bans on fracking.

But at least some environmentalists understand that the issue has different implications abroad than it does at home. “Introducing fracking to produce natural gas in Eastern Europe was an element of national security — the less dependence those nations have on Russian gas, the better off they are,” Daniel Weiss, the League of Conservation Voters’ senior vice president for campaigns, told Reuters.

Another environmental litmus test for politicians — the litmus test of late — is the Keystone XL pipeline. But even as Barack Obama is shutting down Republican attempts to fast-track Keystone, Clinton is pointedly saying nothing at all. “You won’t get me to talk about Keystone because I have steadily made clear that I’m not going to express an opinion,” she said during a recent speech in Canada. “It is in our process and that’s where it belongs.” Her last statement on the topic came back in 2010, when, as secretary of state, she said she was “inclined” to approve the pipeline.

Yet on this, too, many activists are reluctant to take a hard-line stand. “Of course I wish she would say something, but I don’t go to bed at night worrying that Hillary Clinton isn’t talking about Keystone,” Bill McKibben — whose group 350.org helped make Keystone a key political issue — told National Journal. (McKibben also serves on Grist’s board of directors.)

Greens recently did get one encouraging sign from the presumptive candidate’s presumptive campaign. Former Obama top advisor John Podesta, who played a key role in hardening the administration’s stance on climate change and who staunchly opposes Keystone, has signed on to advise Clinton. So even if she doesn’t have an opinion on the pipeline at the moment, she’s got a powerful player on her team who certainly does.

Is Podesta’s influence enough to firm up Clinton’s wishy-washy record on dirty energy, and to counterbalance the coziness with the fossil fuel industry that six- and seven-figure donations might imply? That’s anyone’s guess, and one that environmental groups — at least at this early point — seem reluctant to make.

Share

Please

enable JavaScript

to view the comments.

Get stories like this in your inbox

AdvertisementAdvertisement

See the original post: 

Fossil fuel interests donated millions to Clinton charities. Is this a problem?

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, solar, solar power, Ultima, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Fossil fuel interests donated millions to Clinton charities. Is this a problem?

The Group Behind America’s Biggest Anti-Abortion March Now Says Birth Control Causes Abortions

by CarmineGraebner Posted on January 13, 2015

Mother Jones

Each year on January 22—the anniversary of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Roe v. Wade—the March for Life draws thousands of protesters to Washington, DC, for what organizers bill as “world’s largest anti-abortion event.” But this year, there’s an added wrinkle: Organizers of the march have spent the past six months arguing that birth control pills are a form of abortion.

March for Life Education and Defense Fund, the nonprofit that organizes the annual protest, identified oral birth control as a form of abortion in a lawsuit filed in July. With the suit, which is ongoing, March for Life is fighting for an exemption from the Affordable Care Act mandate that all private employers provide contraception coverage.

March for Life argues that covering drugs or medical devices that cause abortions would violate its founding principles. And it places hormonal birth control, which includes things like oral contraception and vaginal rings, squarely within that category. In its lawsuit, the group refers to these as “abortifacients,” a characterization with which most physicians strongly disagree.

Polls consistently find that a majority of Americans who oppose abortion have no moral objections to birth control. Most of those planning to attend the march probably have no idea that March for Life views birth control as immoral: March for Life doesn’t advertise its opinions on birth control in its promotional material for the protest, and the group’s website simply bills the march as a mass demonstration against “legalized abortion on demand.”

The group’s lawsuit seems to have been inspired by the Supreme Court’s June 2014 decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby. In that case, Hobby Lobby’s owners sued to avoid covering intrauterine devices and emergency contraception pills. A 5-4 conservative majority on the high court ruled in favor of the craft chain’s owners, saying that certain privately owned businesses don’t have to cover emergency contraceptives if the owners object on religious grounds.

The next month, the Supreme Court went even further: It allowed organizations with objections to paying for any kind of contraception—not just the types of emergency contraception that the court dealt with in Hobby Lobby—to bring lawsuits against the contraception mandate. March for Life Education and Defense Fund filed its lawsuit five days after that expanded ruling.

Writing for the majority in Hobby Lobby, Justice Samuel Alito agreed with the argument, made by Hobby Lobby’s owners, that some types of emergency contraception may cause abortions. March for Life makes a similar contention about hormonal birth control. Doctors and medical researchers, however, almost uniformly disagree with these assertions.

Birth control primarily works by preventing ovulation, making it impossible for a woman to conceive. But the pill also causes thinning of the uterine lining. This makes it more difficult for a fertilized egg to implant in the womb. Mainstream medical organizations argue that pregnancy begins when a fertilized egg is implanted in the womb. But in the view of some abortion foes, including March for Life, preventing implantation is tantamount to an abortion. March for Life’s attorneys go so far as to call the lawsuit a legal challenge to the “abortion-pill mandate.” (In fact, the abortion pill, a drug that can be used to terminate a pregnancy in its early stages, is not included under Obamacare’s contraception mandate.)

Jeanne Monahan-Mancini, the president of March for Life Education and Defense Fund, declined to comment on the ongoing lawsuit or its implications for the message of the group’s annual march. “The March for Life Education and Defense Fund believes that life begins at conception/fertilization,” she wrote in an email. “The organization is opposed to any drug or device that has a mechanism of action that can be life-destructive.”

Joerg Dreweke, a policy researcher with the Guttmacher Institute, a pro-abortion-rights think tank, says the March for Life lawsuit is part of a pattern of anti-abortion groups conflating contraception with abortion in a quiet effort to roll back both.

“Birth control is very much in the movement’s cross-hairs, and antiabortion advocates are working to stigmatize contraception by blurring the lines between contraception and abortion,” he wrote in a recent analysis. “Yet, the movement is doing this in a strategic and deceptive way…Antiabortion groups ignore and often contradict their positions when it might hurt them politically.”

As evidence of this, Dreweke pointed to the fact that the March for Life, in promoting its upcoming events, wasn’t also touting the radical claims in its lawsuit: “If you take their lawsuit at face value, it turns the March for Life into the March to Ban Birth Control.”

Link:  

The Group Behind America’s Biggest Anti-Abortion March Now Says Birth Control Causes Abortions

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Group Behind America’s Biggest Anti-Abortion March Now Says Birth Control Causes Abortions

Rejoice! New York is the biggest city to ban foam packaging

by HildredCouncil Posted on January 9, 2015

Foam party

Rejoice! New York is the biggest city to ban foam packaging

By on 9 Jan 2015 3:56 pmcommentsShare

This week, New York officially became the largest city in the U.S. to ban that squeaky ecological scourge: plastic foam, usually (incorrectly) known as Styrofoam. The everlasting stuff is finally getting less ubiquitous now that it’s been kicked out of at least 70 cities across the country. (OK, yeah, they’re mostly located in California).

Groundswell

Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg originally proposed the ban during a February 2013 State of the City address, but Mayor Bill de Blasio is seeing it through: If all goes as planned, it should roll out on July 1, preventing foam cups and containers and even packing peanuts from being sold in the Big Apple. (You’re still allowed to mail a package to New York full of foam peanuts, though.) Officials say it could eventually remove 30,000 tons of the stuff from streets and landfills and waterways.

Of course, the lobbying group Restaurant Action Alliance issued a statement in protest, saying that it’ll impose too significant of a financial hardship on small businesses and that New York should work on recycling the stuff instead. But guess what? It tried, and it can’t.

Plus, since New York is so huge, Sanitation Commissioner Kathryn Garcia has a good point: “Removing polystyrene from our waste stream is not only good for a greener, more sustainable New York,” she said, “but also for the communities who are home to landfills receiving the City’s trash.”

Right. Including that one really, really big community next door … you know, the ocean.

Source:
New York City to Ban Use of Plastic Foam Containers

, Huffington Post.

MAP: Which Cities Have Banned Plastic Foam?

, Groundswell.

Share

Please

enable JavaScript

to view the comments.

Find this article interesting?

Donate now to support our work.

sponsored post

In 2015, make a New Year’s resolution that will actually change the world

How the power of positive energy turns you into a climate superhero.

Get stories like this in your inbox

AdvertisementAdvertisement

Excerpt from:  

Rejoice! New York is the biggest city to ban foam packaging

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Rejoice! New York is the biggest city to ban foam packaging

Most Americans are clueless about how climate change will affect their health

by WoodrowMcCart Posted on December 16, 2014

Most Americans are clueless about how climate change will affect their health

By on 16 Dec 2014commentsShare

Americans aren’t thinking much about the effects climate change will have on their health, a new Yale study finds. But at least the White House is starting to.

Back in October, the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication surveyed 1,275 Americans about their views on global warming. Yesterday, the organization announced that very few of those they spoke to — only 3 in 10 — had thought a “moderate amount” or a “great deal” about how climate change will impact health. Most hadn’t considered the matter. Less than a fifth of all Americans could come up with a way in which climate change is affecting health, or could name which groups would be most vulnerable. (Of course, according to separate Yale survey, 19 percent of Americans don’t accept that climate change is happening at all.)

Even many respondents who recognized that climate change poses health threats didn’t understand which threats were likely to affect American communities in the next 10 years. For example:

Allergies? Correct answer: yes. Percent who said yes: 38%
Asthma? Correct answer: yes. Percent who said yes: 37%
Heat stroke? Correct answer: yes. Percent who said yes: 36%
The flu? Correct answer: no. Percent who said yes: 29%
Depression? Correct answer: yes. Percent who said yes: 26%
Ebola? Correct answer: no. Percent who said yes: 22%

Once the survey got them thinking about global warming and health, half of respondents said agencies like the CDC, FEMA, and NIH should be doing more to prepare for climate change … though only a third wanted to increase agencies’ funding to enable them to do so.

While these results are disappointing, they aren’t necessarily surprising: Climate change generally ranks among the least concerning issues for Americans, and its health effects, future and present, don’t get much play in the media.

But even if most Americans aren’t thinking about climate change, the Obama administration is trying to make sure that healthcare providers are. As part of its Climate Action Plan, the administration released a “climate resiliency guide” for the healthcare sector yesterday, detailing best practices. It makes a range of suggestions, from rebuilding hospitals to prepare for severe weather — making sure that backup electricity, water, and heat are available on-site — to having healthcare workers coordinate with urban planners on transportation to make sure that doctors and others can get to work during an emergency. Representatives of major healthcare organizations visited the White House yesterday to endorse the report and pledge to put its recommendations into practice.

Share

Please

enable JavaScript

to view the comments.

×

Get stories like this in your inbox

AdvertisementAdvertisement

Read more:

Most Americans are clueless about how climate change will affect their health

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, solar, solar panels, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Most Americans are clueless about how climate change will affect their health

The world is actually making some progress on fighting climate change

by ChristiCass Posted on December 9, 2014

3 Degrees of Devastation

The world is actually making some progress on fighting climate change

By on 9 Dec 2014commentsShare

Depending on your frame of mind, this might be good news or bad news. Ready?

A new projection unveiled at the Lima climate talks finds that the world is on track to warm by 3 degrees Celsius by the end of this century.

“But wait,” you, well-versed as you are in international climate policy, might say. “Didn’t international governments agree back in 2009 to not allow the world to warm by more than 2 degrees Celsius, thereby averting some of the worst effects of climate change? How is this good news?”

Here’s how: This study has come out every year since 2009, but this year’s projection of 3 degrees is the lowest it has ever come up with.

So, in short: We’re on track for more warming than we want, but less warming than we feared: Research had been indicating that we could be looking at something more in the range of 4 degrees, and possibly even as much as 5.4 degrees. That would be terrifying indeed.

The official goal in the U.N. climate talks is still to keep warming below 2 degrees, but even U.N. climate change chief Christiana Figueres has said that this current round of negotiations in Lima and the one next year in Paris would be unlikely to meet that goal. “We already know, because we have a pretty good sense of what countries will be able to do in the short run, that the sum total of efforts [in Paris] will not be able to put us on the path for two degrees,” she told Reuters.

But fixating on the 2-degree target during these negotiations misses the point, some argue. “What is key for success at COP-20 in Lima is not the achievement of some specific temperature (or GHG concentration) target, but rather building a sound foundation for meaningful long-term action,” Robert Stavins, director of Harvard’s environmental economics program, told Grist.

And this new projection from the Climate Action Tracker (CAT) project is encouraging because it indicates that countries may have started to lay that foundation. According to a policy brief put out by the project, the main reason that CAT is projecting less warming this year than it was last year is because China, the U.S., and the European Union have new, post-2020 emission-reduction plans.

(Click to embiggen)

Climate Action Tracker

The big caveat: According to the policy brief, “There is still a substantial gap between what governments have promised to do and the total level of actions they have undertaken to date.” If promises are kept, we might top out at 3 degrees of warming. If they’re not, we’re headed for 4. Furthermore, the CAT folks remind us, 3 degrees of warming by 2100 isn’t what we want — it would actually be pretty awful.

Ultimately, as Stavins points out, “such a projection, more than 80 years out, has value only as a benchmark, not as a forecast.”

So don’t pop the champagne yet: This climate-stabilizing work isn’t close to being done. But the CAT study shows that progress is gradually being made. And that’s a tiny bit of good news for a community of climate-watchers who could use some.

Share

Please

enable JavaScript

to view the comments.

×

Get stories like this in your inbox

AdvertisementAdvertisement

Source: 

The world is actually making some progress on fighting climate change

Posted in Anchor, Brita, FF, GE, Good Sense, LG, ONA, Ultima, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The world is actually making some progress on fighting climate change

Exclusive: Jay Leno Cancels Performance at Gun Lobby Trade Show Following Pressure from Newtown Group

by Elinor5620 Posted on November 19, 2014

Mother Jones

Update: Late Wednesday, Jay Leno said in a brief phone interview that he had called the National Shooting Sports Foundation to cancel his scheduled performance at the SHOT Show. He also said that he’d spoken with Po Murray of the Newtown Action Alliance to let her know. “I understand it’s Newtown, and of course I get it,” Leno told Mother Jones. “It’s just sometimes, mistakes get made.”

Gun control advocates aren’t laughing about Jay Leno’s next move.

On Tuesday, several gun violence-prevention groups called on the comedian to cancel his appearance at January’s Shooting, Hunting, Outdoor Trade Show (SHOT), an annual event put on by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, which is based in Newtown, Connecticut. A petition posted by the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence accuses Leno of “helping to legitimize a crass commercialism which values profit over human lives” by speaking to this group, which lobbied against the background checks bill in Congress following the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. The drive is backed by the Campaign to Unload, which pushes for divestment from gun companies, and the Newtown Action Alliance, founded by residents of the Connecticut town who support gun-safety legislation. Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, which has pushed corporate restaurants and retailers to take a stand against open-carry activists in their stores, has also launched a social media campaign against Leno.

“I’m not sure if Jay Leno has done his research and understands that NSSF is the corporate gun lobby and they spend a significant amount of money to lobby congressional leaders to not pass significant gun reform legislation,” says Newtown Action Alliance chairman Po Murray, whose children previously attended Sandy Hook. “It’s a disheartening as a Newtown resident to see him make this appearance at the SHOT Show. So we’re urging him to cancel his appearance.”

Seats for the event, held at the Venetian hotel in Las Vegas, go for $135 apiece. Leno’s publicist did not respond to a request for comment.

Read this article:

Exclusive: Jay Leno Cancels Performance at Gun Lobby Trade Show Following Pressure from Newtown Group

Posted in alo, Anchor, Cyber, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Exclusive: Jay Leno Cancels Performance at Gun Lobby Trade Show Following Pressure from Newtown Group

Public Evenly Split on Immigration Action

by SamualBuvelot Posted on November 18, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

So how does the public feel about President Obama changing immigration rules via executive action? Pretty evenly split, it turns out. According to a USA Today poll, Democrats want action now; Republicans want him to wait; independents are split down the middle; and the overall result is slightly in favor of waiting, by 46-42 percent.

In other words, pretty much what you’d expect. Politically, then, this probably holds little risk for Obama or the Democratic Party. Especially in light of this:

On one more issue, Americans are in agreement: The elections two weeks ago aren’t going to make Washington work better. Just 15% predict Obama and the new Congress, now under solid Republican control, will work together more closely to reach bipartisan compromises.

The American public is pretty politically astute, I’d say. They may not be up to speed on all the details of policymaking, but when it comes to the big picture, they know a lot more than the Beltway pundits seem to.

Link – 

Public Evenly Split on Immigration Action

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Public Evenly Split on Immigration Action

The Tom Steyer campaigns you haven’t heard about yet

by AntonioLarnach Posted on November 4, 2014

The Tom Steyer campaigns you haven’t heard about yet

By

4 Nov 2014 6:29 AM

Share

Share

The Tom Steyer campaigns you haven’t heard about yet

×

You already know about the huge amount of money being spent to get voters to care a bit more about climate change, and to prod those who already care into polling places today. Leading the charge, of course, has been Tom Steyer, the hedge-fund billionaire turned political moneyman who is forcing candidates for Senate and governor to address an issue they really, really don’t want to talk about.

But even though those congressional and gubernatorial races get the bulk of the attention, Steyer and like-minded donors have been active at the state level too. The New York Times’ Kirk Johnson reported recently on Steyer’s spending in Washington state:

The effort by a California billionaire named Thomas F. Steyer to bolster global climate change measures in Washington has turned the battle over the State Senate into one of the most expensive legislative elections in state history.

Money has poured into the handful of legislative races that Mr. Steyer’s political action committee identified as central to shifting the Senate’s leadership from a Republican-led coalition to a Democratic majority that would support the ambitious climate goals set by Gov. Jay Inslee, a Democrat.

… The Democrats need a net gain of two seats to achieve a Senate majority, and Mr. Steyer’s political action committee, Nextgen Climate Action, has contributed $1.25 million to that goal.

“We want to make climate change a local issue,” a spokesperson for Nextgen Climate told the Times. The PAC is also spending on state legislature races in Oregon, California, and Iowa, though the biggest money is going to Washington state.

At the moment, Gov. Inslee is waiting on his legislature’s approval to launch a greenhouse gas reduction plan — including a cap-and-trade program — that will help the state meet future targets that the legislature itself set in 2008.

There’s also a bigger picture: In 2013, governors of Washington, Oregon, and California, and a proxy for the premier of British Columbia, signed the Pacific Coast Action Plan on Climate and Energy. Steyer is a big supporter of the plan — he even helped broker it — but for it to be realized, he told the conservative Washington Examiner, governors will “need stronger majorities in Oregon and Washington.” Cue the dump trucks full of cash.

Other groups are fighting it out at the state level as well. The League of Conservation Voters has a network of state-level affiliates, which are active in this year’s election cycle (though, as is often the case with electoral money trails, we won’t know quite how active until long after the results of the elections are in). LCV’s Colorado affiliate is behind a big push to elect two state-level democrats in Colorado, one to the state Senate and one to the House. The Environmental Defense Action Fund, earlier this year, backed four candidates in the Kansas GOP primary who had supported the state’s mandate requiring utilities to use more renewables. And state-level political action committees like California’s Leadership for a Clean Economy have sprung up to help direct money to worthy politicians.

It’s a smart strategy. Conservative groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council and the State Policy Network have long recognized that while Congress moves slowly — and, in recent years, has not really moved much at all — it’s very often at the state level that the policies that affect day-to-day life are debated and implemented. So fighting battles for the statehouse and city hall makes sense — and it’s much cheaper. Climate hawks appear to now have that page in their playbook too.

Find this article interesting?
Donate now to support our work.Share

Please

enable JavaScript

to view the comments.

Get stories like this in your inbox

AdvertisementAdvertisement

Visit site – 

The Tom Steyer campaigns you haven’t heard about yet

Posted in Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, global climate change, LG, ONA, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Tom Steyer campaigns you haven’t heard about yet

Why Are These Hedge Fund Kingpins Dumping Millions Into the Midterms?

by LudieHuynh Posted on October 14, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>
Hedge fund pioneer James Simons during a 2007 interview Mark Lennihan/AP

As Democrats and Republicans battle for control of the Senate, hedge funds are dumping millions of dollars into congressional campaigns. Most of these companies are lining up behind one party or the other. But the second-biggest spender, Long Island-based Renaissance Technologies, is playing both sides of the aisle. As of early September, the firm’s CEO, Robert Mercer, had given $3.1 million to Republican candidates and super-PACs. Its founder and chairman, James Simons—a brilliant former National Security Agency code breaker—had donated $3.2 million to their Democratic counterparts.

Neither man has spoken publicly about his motives, but the donations coincide with at least two federal investigations into Renaissance’s business dealings. In July, Renaissance executives were hauled before a Senate subcommittee and grilled about the company’s use of complex financial instruments to dodge billions of dollars in taxes and skirt federal leverage limits, which protect the financial markets from swings and crashes. As Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) put it during the hearing, “excessive leverage” can “bring down not just a reckless borrower, but the financial institution that lent it money, and that failure can ripple through the entire financial system.”

Continue Reading »

Visit source:  

Why Are These Hedge Fund Kingpins Dumping Millions Into the Midterms?

Posted in alo, Anchor, Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Ts Books, Ultima, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Why Are These Hedge Fund Kingpins Dumping Millions Into the Midterms?