January 20, 2011 07:02 PM UTC

GOP Plots Their Anti-Environmental Agenda

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• by: ClubTwitty

(This should turn out well. – promoted by Colorado Pols)

Republicans and their K-Street constituents are meeting to plot their plans to thwart carbon and climate legislation, Politico is reporting:

Top staff members for key House and Senate Republicans met in a closed-door session Tuesday with energy industry interests to work on strategy to handcuff the Obama administration’s climate change agenda.

With the backing of GOP caucus leaders, aides for House Energy and Commerce Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.) and Senate Environment and Public Works Committee ranking member Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) are seeking unwavering support from a host of industries for an all-out push to block federal and state climate rules.

“The feedback we got was ‘hey, great, go for it guys,'” one Republican aide told POLITICO. “And we pretty strongly told them we do need your help to get this done. And when we walked away from the meeting the feeling was we got that.”

This is the first salvo in what will undoubtedly be a broad attack in attempts to tie the hands of the Democratic Senate and Obama administration on environmental, energy, and public lands issues.

The Congressional Western Caucus has issued it’s 2011 ‘War on the West’ document, a hasty rehash of a familiar extractive wish list–known variously in its history as the Sagebrush Rebellion and ‘Wise Use’ movement.  

There is nothing new in the GOP/corporate agenda to gut regulations, open more-and-more public lands and resources to private interests, bind the authority of land managers, and block public oversight of agencies.  But expect Colorado to be in the cross-hairs, both as a resource-rich target for plunder development, and as the purplest of states, as pols position for 2012.

 

All of Colorado’s Republican House members have been put on the Natural Resources Committee–now chaired by unreformed Sagebrush Rebel Doc Hastings from eastern Washington. Reps. Coffman and Lamborn are listed as members of the Western Caucus.  

And although some conservative columnist at the Denver paper thinks its a dodge, Obama has suggested he’s willing to deal on regulations–a sentiment that some fear is being echoed too readily out of the Governor’s office as well–at a time when we need forward-thinking leadership and 21st-century solutions, not a dusty cut-and-paste from decades in the past.  

In spite of robust profits for corporations of late (which are still failing to bring about as robust an increase in employment), expect enablers to sing the blues for the common man, weaving hard not to mention those who are actually reaping most of the gain, and to use the economic crisis as a golden opportunity–to hand over more public treasure to their benefactors.

Already GOP members are complaining about better enforcement, oversight, and regulation of offshore drilling; arguing that fracking should not be regulated under the federal Safe Drinking Water and Clean Water Acts; and pushing to open more wilderness-quality and other natural lands to extractive development.  The wish list is old, but the danger is clear, and always present.