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This story originally appeared on Grist and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Journalists love a counterintuitive story, like when a Democrat criticizes unions or a Republican endorses gay marriage. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), with his idiosyncratic libertarianism, provides them with a lot of good stories, like his opposition to mass incarceration. In that vein, a couple of recent media reports assert, on the thinnest reeds of evidence, that Paul has accepted climate science or endorsed regulating carbon pollution. He hasn’t. Sorry, reporters: There is no counterintuitive story about Paul and climate change.
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Paul, who is announcing a presidential run on Tuesday, is an anti-government extremist and a climate change denier. Just last April, he said he is “not sure anybody exactly knows why” the climate is changing. He went on to call the science “not conclusive” and complain about “alarmist stuff.” If you’re wondering what he means by “alarmist stuff,” in 2011, while arguing for a bill that would prevent the EPA from regulating carbon emissions, Paul said, “If you listen to the hysterics,…you would think that the Statue of Liberty will shortly be under water and the polar bears are all drowning, and that we’re dying from pollution. It’s absolutely and utterly untrue.” Paul went on to assert that children are being misled into believing that “pollution” has gotten “a lot worse,” when “It’s actually much better now.” Paul, of course, was conflating conventional air pollution—like sulfur dioxide, which has declined in the US—and climate pollution, which is cumulative and global, and therefore gets worse every year, even if America’s annual emissions drop.
Indeed, Paul is prone to making ignorant, conspiracist statements about science in general. In October, he suggested to Breitbart News that Ebola may be more easily spread than scientists say and that the White House had been misleading the country on the issue. And in February, Paul told CNBC, “I’ve heard of many tragic cases of walking, talking normal children who wound up with profound mental disorders after vaccines.” This despite the fact that the supposed connection between autism and vaccination has been thoroughly debunked.
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In 2014, the 300 million visitors to US national parks may have noticed the potholes in the roads, the magnificent vistas obscured by dense brush, dirty visitors’ centers in need of basic repairs, trails that were not maintained, and overgrown campgrounds. Why? Blame Congress, which has routinely purchased new federal lands over the last 20 years while neglecting to fund the maintenance of existing national parks. National parks and historic sites need almost $12 billion in upkeep—or about four times the National Parks Service’s annual budget. Meanwhile, congressional Republicans proposed a budget that would slash spending by $5.5 trillion in 10 years.
So why the backlog? The NPS claims that stingy funding from Congress has forced park employees to make tough decisions about which repairs to perform and which to put off. But Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and many conservationists place most of the blame on the government, which has bought up new land instead of spending money maintaining the sites it already administers. “We spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year to acquire additional federal lands, but none of that funding is applied to the maintenance backlog,” she wrote in a 2013 op-ed in the Hill.
With an annual budget of $3 billion, the NPS is responsible for managing and maintaining 75,780 sites across the country—including such tourist destinations as the Grand Canyon, San Francisco’s Golden Gate National Recreation Area, Ellis Island, Mt. Rushmore, Yellowstone—and many of the nation’s most iconic NPS-administered landmarks are fast falling into disrepair. When the agency released its annual maintenance report on Monday, the NPS noted a staggering $11.49 billion in deferred maintenance costs.
The NPS is urging Congress to fund its 2016 budget requests of $248.2 million for high-priority repairs and $300 million over three years for longer-term projects. And that’s just the start. For roads and transportation projects, NPS is hoping for $150 million in Obama’s proposed transportation bill.
Last year’s defense authorization bill, for instance, created seven new national parks and increased the size of nine others, though it provided no additional funding for the expansion or for maintenance costs. Former National Park Service director James Ridenour has referred to Congress’ penchant for creating new parks without authorizing new funding to care for the old ones as “thinning the blood” of national parks. Even 20 years ago, older national parks were neglected in favor of new projects.
Things have only gotten worse. Congressional funding tends to be directed to new projects that politicians can tout to their districts rather than upkeep of old ones, note Kansas City Star reporters Jeff Taylor and Jake Thompson in an article that delved into the national park funding debacle. Kurt Repanshek of the National Parks Traveler magazine made a similar point in a recent op-ed: “Members of Congress certainly like to point to a unit in their home districts, but if we can’t afford the park system we have today, how can we possibly justify new units?”
Another symptom of the funding problem is that there are too few seasonal employees to get all the work done, says Leesa Brandon, a press officer for the Blue Ridge Parkway in Asheville, North Carolina. “We don’t have the seasonal staff we want to have. Our visitors enjoy driving along the Blue Ridge Parkway, the 495-mile-long linear park…they see ditches, potholes, vistas with overgrown plants, and tell our workers,” she tells me. Blue Ridge Parkway, the scenic road that stretches from North Carolina to Virginia and is one of the most-visited national parks, needs nearly half a million dollars to make necessary repairs on roads. According to the Federal Highway Administration, 45 percent of the road is in need of repair.
According to NPS, San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, visited by 13 million people every year, needs $232 million in upkeep. The White House itself needs more than $12 million in necessary and preventative repairs, such as the often postponed renovation of the West Wing, fixing the Harry Truman bowling alley, and buying the required 570 gallons of paint to cover the outside of the president’s home.
Nonprofit groups such as the Mesa Verde Foundation of Colorado and the National Park Trust are attempting to raise money to fill NPS’s funding gap and preserve parks all over the country, including the ancient cliff dwellings in Mesa Verde and the Santa Monica Mountains, the world’s largest urban national park, in Southern California. Many lawmakers and conservationists, including Murkowski, suggest that privatizing parks and outsourcing funding may shift the burden of maintaining the parks away from taxpayers.
Next year, the NPS celebrates its 100th anniversary, and the maintenance backlog is only expected to grow, unless Congress increases its budget or finds another way to fund the parks. The billions in unfunded repairs “show the result of Congress’ chronic underfunding of our national parks,” Craig Obey, a senior vice president for government affairs at the National Parks Conservation Association, tells Mother Jones in an email. “Failing to provide for the system’s basic maintenance needs has eroded our most treasured natural landscapes and historical sites.”
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Parks and Wreck: The Feds Need $11.5 Billion to Fix Our Public Lands
By John Lighton 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.
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Fossil fuel interests donated millions to Clinton charities. Is this a problem?
Why throw out perfectly pure water? Might as well do something useful with it. Original post: This craft beer’s secret ingredient is … sewage water ; ; ;
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The Future is Now: Shipping Containers Transform Into Eco-Friendly Apartments
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