After a fun afternoon of volunteering at the Earth Day event on the National Mall (which, fortunately, was neither blown away nor electrocuted in the stormy weather), LCV interns Michelle, Spencer and Courtenay leaped over puddles that would intimidate Moses, onto a train and towards Baltimore to catch flights to Kansas City (Spencer) and St Louis (Michelle and Courtenay). Their aim: to head to the midwest to help "Renew Missouri" with a signature-signing initiative to put clean energy on the ballot in November.

At the airport, after an enthusiastic "Go team!" the interns parted. Due to the storms Courtenay and Michelle's plane was delayed, so that we arrived at our hotel at 1:30AM, sleepy but excited for the day ahead.

The next day we drove via rental car to the Coalition for the Environment office in St Louis, where we met its friendly and energetic staff. After a warm welcome we started working- Michelle and Courtenay drove to Meremac Community College to collect signatures for the afternoon, then came back to the office to work the phones until 9pm.

People -particularly students- have been very obliging with their John Hancocks. We're optimistic about the week ahead!

Environmental Hero Handbook

“If politics interests you, pick candidates who’ll fight for the health of our planet…and work like hell for them,” writes John Javna, America’s bestselling environmental author, in the newly revised edition of his 1990 classic “50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth.” Javna, a member of the Oregon League of Conservation Voters, encourages readers to “work with LCV on their tough, effective campaigns to defeat anti-environment candidates, and support those leaders who stand up for a clean, healthy future for America.”

Javna’s book is full of tips on bettering our world, from taking action in your church of synagogue, to joining groups like LCV, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Rainforest Action Network. In fact, each group has chosen an important issue and provides “Steps for Success” to motivate readers and their peers to protect the planet.

Javna and his teenage children have also launched the website 50SimpleThings.com, a constantly-updated fountain of resources on environmental activism including facts, news, a blog, and a forum. So whether you prefer curling up with a good book or surfing the web, Javna will give you all the tips you need to be an environmental hero.

Bush’s Confession: Empty Words on Global Warming

LCV Press Secretary Josh McNeil has written another astute press release:

In response to President Bush’s Rose Garden address on global warming, Gene Karpinski, President of the League of Conservation Voters, issued the following statement:

"Earlier this year, the Vatican announced that polluting is a sin, and we had hoped that Pope Benedict could convince President Bush to take meaningful action to reduce global warming,” Karpinski said. "The President may have confessed that global warming is a problem, but his inadequate proposals show that he'd rather kiss the rings of oil executives than listen to the Holy Father and every reputable climate scientist in the world. This proposal is too little, too late to effectively reverse global warming and too little, too late to save this President's record of failure."

LCV Asks John McCain to Clarify Position

LCV Press Secretary Josh McNeil just wrote the following press release:

Washington, DC – In response to Senator John McCain’s call for a gas tax holiday, the League of Conservation Voters today asked the Presidential candidate to clarify his position. In a speech in Philadelphia today, Senator McCain said, “In my administration, there will be no corporate welfare.” Yet, when given the opportunity to vote to repeal more than $18 billion in subsidies to Big Oil, McCain failed the American people.

On December 17, 2007, the Senate voted to invoke cloture on a version of the energy bill that would have repealed those handouts to Big Oil. The measure failed by one vote – 59 to 40. McCain was the lone Senator to miss the vote, ensuring that billions of taxpayer dollars continued to flow into ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, BP and ConocoPhillips. These multinationals enjoyed another year of record profits, yet the corporate tax cuts McCain proposed today would reduce taxes for those five companies by an addition $3.8 billion.

Meanwhile, McCain’s proposal raises more questions than it provides solutions for our ailing economy. For example, federal gas taxes go to the highway trust fund — does this proposal mean that resources devoted to creating jobs and repairing our crumbling bridges and roads are slashed? His plan would cut $11 billion for highway funding, a sum that could be better made up by repealing the $18 billion in subsidies for Big Oil.

“If Senator McCain wants to save money for American taxpayers, he should get to the root of the problem: massive taxpayer-funded subsidies to huge oil companies that are already making tens of billions of dollars a year,” LCV President Gene Karpinski said. “The answer to the high cost of gas is not temporary tax maneuvering, it is a fundamental shift away from oil and towards clean, renewable energy.”

CNN reports that the average cost of a gallon of gasoline is $3.38 per gallon this week, but taxes make up less than 5.5% of that cost. A average family filling a 12 gallon tank today will pay $40.56. Only $2.21 of that total goes to federal taxes, while the cost of gas has grown exponentially in the last few years.

Oil Tycoon Feels Winds of Change

Legendary oilman T Boone Pickens founded a Texan oil company in 1956 and since has built it into a fortune worth $3bn.

However his latest investment has nothing to do with black gold. Over the next few years he plans to erect a string of 2,700 wind turbines across Texas, a plot that will be five times larger than the world’s current record-holding wind farm. His long term plans are even more impressive: he envisions an army of wind farms along America’s great plains, and a sea of solar panels running from Texas to southern California.

Anyone who thought that all billionaire oil executives were pro-Bush should hear Pickens fume over the president’s apathy towards the energy crisis: "George Bush has done nothing. Nothing. Every guy that ran for president clear back to Nixon said he would make us energy independent, but not one goddamned thing has been done. Zero. The biggest problem facing the United States in the next 50 years is energy and nobody has come up with a solution."

Now that’s a maverick. Read the Guardian article on Pickens here .

Friday Funny

High Temperatures

Today the Center for American Progress released a summary detailing global warming’s projected effects on human health. Cases of vector-born diseases, respiratory and cardiovascular illnesses, heat waves, food scarcity, wildfires and floods all threaten to increase in a hotter world.

Fortunately several major health organizations will draw attention to the upcoming challenges. The Center for American Progess says:

“The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions holds a hearing this morning on the public health challenges of climate change. The World Health Organization has declared the theme of this week’s annual World Health Day ‘protecting health from climate change.’ And this week’s National Public Health Week is themed ‘Climate Change: Our Health in the Balance.’”

While solving some health issues will be difficult, others can be controlled with wise investments. For example, numbers of malaria-carrying mosquitoes, already rampant in parts of Africa, are rising the with the temperature. However, distributions of insecticide-filled nets in countries like Ethiopia and Kenya have produced miraculous drops in malaria cases.

Last night on a special charity episode of American Idol, British Prime Minster Gordon Brown announced that his government would supply the funds for 20 million mosquito bed nets. “That's one in six of the 120m bed nets the world needs," Brown said. “And I'm challenging the rest of the world - governments, business and anyone else who wants to end this killer disease - to join us in this effort by donating money for nets.”

EPA Administrator Travels Halfway Around the World; Gets Nowhere

What do you do when Nancy Pelosi, environmental organizations, and 13 different states are angry with you? If you’re the head of the EPA, you hide out Down Under.

Over the Easter Break, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Stephen Johnson took 11 staffers plus security to Australia to tour farms and water treatment plants at a total cost of $280,000 (half the budget of EPA’s annual travel allowance.) The trip was supposed to promote environmental collaboration between the U.S. and Australia, but it turns out a simple flight to California would have been a lot more productive.

Barbara Boxer, chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee, has expressed grave frustration with Johnson for failing to testify about global warming before her committee. This would be an opportune time to explain why the EPA won’t allow California to set its own carbon cap targets. "If your goal is to learn about actions to address global warming, I suggest that you visit California, which has moved ahead aggressively with greenhouse gas controls," Boxer wrote to Johnson. Moreover, last week 18 disgruntled states and 11 environmental organizations sued the EPA for failing to limit greenhouse gas emissions from new cars and trucks a year after the Supreme Court ruled that they had the power to do so.

Meanwhile the Bush Administration proposes to slash the EPA’s budget by $300 million for 2009. This includes massive cuts to enforcement budgets (funds to penalize polluters), research and development of technologies that address global warming, and funding for EPA’s Superfund site cleanups (which is already half of what it was in the 1990’s.)

Yet instead of distancing himself from Bush’s policies, Johnson vacationed in Australia with U.S. Ambassador Robert McCallum, an old friend of Bush’s who represented Australia’s anti-Kyoto stance before the election of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. Needless to say, the trip probably didn’t enlighten Johnson’s global warming perspective much.

To improve America’s environmental policies, Stephen Johnson would have saved a lot of money, time and - last but not least - carbon dioxide emissions if he had simply showed up at Nancy Pelosi’s office.

Friday Funny

Don't you know that we're toxic?

Last night, LCV staffers Charlene, Elizabeth, Michelle and Spencer bravely attended a lecture given by Ken Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group (EWG), who spoke about toxins in Americans’ bodies.

EWG recently took blood samples from ten umbilical cords after they had been removed from babies in American hospitals. Tests revealed that the babies had an average of more than 200 industrial chemicals in their bodies. Like alcohol and drugs, toxins are passed to fetuses via the mother’s bloodstream and many of the chemicals discovered by the EWG are common in household products and food that has been treated with pesticides.

Of the 287 chemicals detected in the babies’ blood, studies showed that 180 are cancerous, 217 are toxic to the brain and nervous system, and 208 caused birth defects or abnormal development in tests on animals.

Chemicals that can have harmful effects on the development of infants and children often exist in seemingly innocuous products. For example, the chemical used in Teflon, Perfluorooctanoic Acid, was recently labeled as a likely human carcinogen by the EPA's Science Advisory Board. Yet the current legislation regulating what products chemical companies are allowed to put on the market, the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), has not been updated in thirty years.

Ken Cook discussed EWG’s study on umbilical cords to draw attention to the Kid Safe Chemical Act, a bill that has been introduced in both the Senate (S1391) and House of Representatives (HR 4308). The act would require chemical makers to disclose the safety of their products to the EPA before being allowed to release them into the market.

The complete Environmental Working Group report on contaminants found in umbilical cord blood is found at http://archive.ewg.org/reports/bodyburden2/.

Gore Launches Climate Campaign

Today Al Gore will launch "We," a three-year, $300 million campaign to turn Americans’ awareness of global warming into concrete solutions. The campaign will encourage citizens to demand that their elected officials require the capping and lowering of emissions.

LCV is proud to be sponsoring the “We” campaign and is optimistic about its success. President Gene Karpinski told the Washington Post, “It heightens both the urgency and the sense we can get the job done with the broad middle that will make the difference, while having the resources to communicate in a sophisticated way in a more expansive fashion than the community has done before.”

The new advertisements can be seen tonight during programs including “American Idol” and “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.”

April Fools

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Gene Karpinski, President of the League of Conservation Voters, today acknowledged his utter shock at the testimony of executives from the five largest oil companies before the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming.

Leaked copies of testimony broke early this morning and represent an unprecedented shift in the oil and gas industry’s political strategy.

“After decades of standing in the way of clean energy, energy efficiency, and global warming legislation, it looks like these oil execs finally got a visit from the Ghost of Christmas Future,” Karpinski said.

The leaked testimony gives an indication of the fundamental change in policy.

Peter Robertson, the Vice Chairman of Chevron, began his testimony with an apology to the people of the world on behalf of the Big Oil companies for standing in the way of vital global warming legislation. He promised that the $123 billion profits of these five companies in 2007 would be directly invested into research and implementation of clean, renewable sources of energy such as wind, solar, and geothermal. Tears streaming down his face, Robertson stated “I only hope my grandchildren can forgive me.”

J. Stephen Simon, ExxonMobil Senior Vice President publicly repudiated the 2006 statement by his boss, ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson that “At a minimum, there’s an enormous amount of uncertainty around this whole question [of global warming].” Simon admitted that global warming is a real and dangerous issue, and that ExxonMobil had spent more than $23 million to fund bogus scientific studies to mislead the public about global warming. He promised to return that money to consumers, who paid for it with record prices at the pump.

John Hofmeister, President of the Shell Oil Company, begged consumers’ forgiveness for the more than $295,000,000 donated to politicians and political action committees by Big Oil in the last decade. Promising to put that money into savings at the pump, Hofmeister said, “We have used our record profits in an attempt to buy off the United States government and to pilfer another $18 billion from taxpayers who are already paying close to $4 at the pump. We have no excuse.

Today, April 1, is the last time we play the American people for fools.”