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 Yesterday, the Wonk Room profiled
several candidates for the Democrat joining Sen. Lisa Murkowski
(R-AK) in her campaign to prevent Clean Air Act regulation of greenhouse
gas pollution. Today, Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) has announced that she is
the Murky Dem supporting the lobbyist-directed effort to prevent action
by President Obama to slow global warming. Because she “believes the
Clean Air Act is not meant to be applied to carbon dioxide emissions,”
Landrieu is collaborating
to craft what environmentalists are calling the Dirty Air Act:
“I
am considering that right now,” Landrieu said when asked whether she
backed Murkowski’s plan. “I have been working with her on it.”
Landrieu, like Louisiana’s Republican governor Bobby Jindal and
Senator David Vitter, has pledged allegiance to the pollution interests
who have given her over
$1.5 million instead of her own people. Last month, Jindal “filed
objections with EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson” over the proposed
climate rules, claiming the standards would have “profound negative
economic impacts on the state of Louisiana.” In September, Vitter
submitted an amendment to block
funding for centers that study and prepare for the impacts of climate
change.
Landrieu’s actions are quite simply morally indefensible. The
Mississippi Delta is under extraordinary
threat from global warming, as seas rise and storms intensify.
According to a recent analysis published in Nature, “an additional 2 degrees of
global warming” — to which our business as usual commits the planet — would
cause “6 to 9 meters (20 to 30 feet) of long-term sea level rise,” which
would “permanently
submerge New Orleans and other parts of southern Louisiana.”
This is not just a future threat. Climate change significantly
intensified Hurricane Katrina, which cost this nation $80 billion,
killed thousands, and displaced a million people. As hurricane scientist
Kerry Emanuel has explained, “Probably if Hurricane Katrina had happened
in 1980, the levees
would have held.”
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