environment

That's the question in the minds of many observers of environmental policy-making this week, as a wave of the greenest legislators in North Carolina decline to stand for re-election in the face of radically re-engineered district lines.

The latest worrisome retirement announcement came last week from former House Speaker Joe Hackney, long considered the leading environmental champion in the N.C. General Assembly. Redistricting had gerrymandered Hackney into a "double-bunking" of incumbents with fellow legislator Rep. Verla Insko (D-Orange).

After months of waiting for the Legislature to officially end the 2011 Long Session, the NC League of Conservation Voters released its annual Conservation Scorecard. NCLCV has been scoring NC Legislators on environmental issues since 1999 and this year’s scores are the lowest they have ever been. The Scorecard is a valuable tool voters can use to evaluate which legislators best represent their environmental values. The Conservation Scorecard gives each state legislator a score of 0 to 100 based on his or her votes on key environmental bills in the recent session of the General Assembly.

As the next Congressional fight over payroll tax extensions and unemployment benefits and pipelines gets set up in the next few weeks for either its final chapter or to be kicked down the road a bit farther, one or the other, you’re going to hear a lot from our Republican friends about how much they value work and workers; most especially, they’ll tell you, they value American jobs for American workers.

After all, they’ll say, creating American jobs is the most important thing of all.

But if we were to look back over just the last few months, some would tell us, we could quickly find examples of how Republicans promote ideas that don’t seem to value work or workers at all, much less American jobs.

Well as it turns out, “some” seem to be right; to illustrate one of those examples we’ll look back a month or two or three to a time some Republicans might wish was long, long, ago, in a galaxy far, far away.

Cross-posted from the Institute for Southern Studies Facing South blog.

As the grassroots movement opposing the controversial gas-drilling technique known as hydraulic fracturing or "fracking" racks up political victories, the industry embraces military tactics for dealing with its critics.

I can't resist sharing this. It's the Mayberry Solar Farm in Mt. Airy.

Pictured at the dedication are Sen. Richard Burr and Rep. Virginia Foxx. Nevermind that both vote in lockstep with the Republican anti-clean energy agenda.

Never mind that Richard Burr voted no on the tax incentives that encourage clean energy development, voted to bar EPA from regulating greenhouse gases, and introduced legislation to abolish the EPA (which employs more than one thousand North Carolinians).

Never mind that Virginia Foxx voted in lockstep with every House Republican effort in the last few months to kill off alternative energy and defang the EPA.

When it comes to a local solar farm, hey, let's cheerlead at the ribbon cutting!

I’m going to be really honest with you: after all the fights at the mall to get just the right present for everybody and the giant hassle of going to the Post Office so I can get the perfect stamps for my cards – and then worrying that I left someone off the list – I am just not in the mood to do a 9/11 story.

And it’s been getting worse every year. I mean, just like the “It’s Christmas Every Day Store”, I know there’s one of the “9/11 Every Day” stores open, in the all-too-human form of Rudy Giuliani, and I’ve learned to live with that, but it seems like they got started with the 9/11 earlier than ever this year – and by the time the TV memorials and analysis and retrospectives are all over, to paraphrase Lewis Black…I’m going to hate freedom.

In an effort to stave off this fate, we’ll be headed in a different direction today: I have three stories to pass along; each is important enough that you really should know about them, and yet they’re each very much bite-sized and easily digestible.

It’s all good stuff…so let’s get right to it.

The North Carolina League of Conservation Voters Foundation began running radio ads last week informing the public that the legislature is ignoring its mandate to create jobs while scrapping policies that protect water and air quality. The ad highlights that numerous pieces of legislation threaten jobs created by tourism which are dependent on clean water and air.  They also launched a web site, www.thataintrightnc.org, which offers details about the impact of legislation and lists bills that have little to do with jobs but everything to do with eliminating environmental protections.

This legislative session of the North Carolina General Assembly has mounted a frontal assault on our state’s environment and the ability of our regulatory agencies to preserve our clean air, water, and land. Now, state lawmakers have added Senate Bill 181 to the list of destructive, counterproductive proposals that our state’s precious natural resources have to face.

 
@ncgovoffice yfrog.com/h265tjij
 

In America, today, there are three kinds of drivers: those who look at the other gas pumps down at the ol’ gas station and think: “Oh my God, I can’t believe how much that guy’s spending on gas”, those who look at their own pump down at the ol’ gas station and think: “Oh my God, I can’t believe how much I’m spending on gas” – and those who are doing both at the same time.