By Cliff Montgomery – Feb. 13th, 2014
House Republicans have the worst voting record on environmental matters in over 40 years, according to a group which tracks such legislative activity.
The League of Conservation Voters (LCV) has released its most recent National Environmental Scorecard, and the result was especially bad for GOP representatives. In fact, the lawmakers were given the worst average score “since 1970, the year [the Scorecard] was founded by leaders of the environmental movement following the first Earth Day,” according to the study.
The LCV has stated that in recent years, its average score for House Republicans has decreased and decreased again. In 2008, the House GOP’s pro-environment voting average was an already dismal 17 percent – in 2012, that average dropped to 10 percent – and fell to a record low of 5 percent in 2013.
“This scorecard is a disturbing reflection of the extent to which the Republican leadership of the U.S. House of Representatives continues to be controlled by tea-party climate-change deniers with an insatiable appetite for attacks on the environment and public health,” stated the authors of the report.
A recently released Pew Poll appears to support the LCV’s findings. A nation-wide survey which Pew conducted in October discovered that 61 percent of ordinary (i.e., non-tea-party) Republicans acknowledge that global warming is supported a strong scientific body of facts, compared with a mere 25 percent of tea-party-affiliated Republicans.
“There is a jarring disconnect between the frightening climate change developments of 2013 and the results of the 2013 National Environmental Scorecard,” stated the LCV study.
“As the scientific consensus around climate change and its impacts only solidified, climate change deniers ramped up their rhetoric, pushed harmful legislation that would exacerbate the climate crisis, and blocked all efforts to address it,” added the Scorecard.
“Indeed, the first session of the 113th Congress is widely acknowledged to be one of the least productive and most dysfunctional in our nation’s history and will likely be best remembered for shutting down the government,” the study declared.
To be fair, both Congressional chambers received poor marks from the LCV. The full House averaged only 43 percent on the Scorecard, and the Senate was given an average score of 57 percent – by grade-school standards, those are failing marks.
