For the current Speaker of the House, John Boehner (R-OH), American democracy is simpler than representing the people who vote for him. Instead of fighting for jobs and health in his district, Boehner will just spend money to polish his image in 2012. He has made a decision to collect vast sums of money from industry polluters outside his district who couldn’t care less about the 8th district of Ohio.

Boehner has always taken money from coal polluters, but very little compared to other politicians. In 2003 Boenher took only $25,000 from fossil fuel interests. That’s far less than Representative Ed Markey (D-MA) took in 2009 when he was pushing the failed Waxman-Markey climate legislation. In the last election cycle Boehner took over $300,000.

This year, Boehner has already collected over $1.5 million from the coal industry alone. He apparently takes money from any coal company that will pay, like Oxbow Corp., a mining operation owned by a William Koch in Florida.

In Boehner’s district as many people die from coal-fired power as people who work in it.

There are only two small, but very dirty, coal plants in his district. Hamilton Municipal Electric Plant in Hamilton, OH pollutes the economically-disadvantaged community of about 53 homes with heavy metals like mercury and cadmium. Hamilton employs as few as 50 people. Together with Piqua Municipal Power Plant, pollution from these two coal plants kills 27 of Boehner’s constituents per year, and costs his district $7.3 million just by causing bronchitis. Piqua employs 5-9 people.

Hutchings Station is a large coal plant surrounded by Boehner’s district. Hutching’s pollution kills 45 people per year. Hutchings causes 740 asthma attacks every year, sending 44 people to the emergency room. Hutchings Station is only 9 miles away from a John XXIIII elementary school filled with children of Boehner’s voters.

American Electric Power (AEP), on the other hand, is 60 miles from Boehner’s district. First Energy, another polluter in Ohio who has no political stake in Boehner’s district, defended Boehner receiving large contributions from American Electric Power because “AEP is based in Ohio.”

There are more jobs in wind and solar in Ohio than in coal-fired power – a ratio of 5:4. Renewable energy installers in Ohio abound, including companies in Boehner’s district like Extreme Solar in Hamilton, OH.

Speaker Boehner may argue that he has more responsibility now, as leader of the House of Representatives. But he can’t stay Speaker if the 8^th district of Ohio realizes he’s forgotten them.

And what goes for the 8^th district of Ohio goes for the country. Coal costs America far more than it gives, to the tune of half a trillion dollars per year. Hospital visits and lost economic opportunity are the outcome of Speaker Boehner’s quid pro quo with profiteer polluters like AEP and First Energy. Wind and solar also provide more jobs than coal, even when including mining for America as a whole.

But, for Boehner, coal pays.

This morning, CEOs, founders, and other leaders of 68 organizations sent a letter to President Obama, urging that he do what he can to stop the dangerous extraction of shale gas that is occurring across the country without any federal public safeguards. Often called ‘fracking,’ communities from Pennsylvania to Texas to Minnesota are already suffering from the numerous environmental problems connected with this process to force “natural” gas from shale several thousand feet below ground.

The letter states,

‘Fracking involves shooting millions of gallons of water laced with carcinogenic chemicals deep underground to break apart rock to release trapped gas. Despite its obvious hazards, regulation necessary to ensure that fracking does not endanger our nation’s water supply has not kept pace with its rapid and increasing use by the oil and gas industry.

To date, fracking has resulted in over 1,000 documented cases of groundwater contamination across the county, either through the leaking of fracking fluids and methane into groundwater, or by above ground spills of contaminated and often radioactive wastewater from fracking operations. Rivers and lakes are also being contaminated with the release of insufficiently treated waste water recovered from fracking operations. In addition, fracking typically results in the release of significant quantities of methane – a potent greenhouse gas – into the atmosphere despite the availability of cost-effective containment measures.’

Fracked gas may be no ‘bridge fuel,’ and it certainly is not ‘clean energy.’ Burning natural gas releases about half the greenhouse gas as burning coal, but fracked gas may produce so much more methane during extraction and processing that it could be as bad or worse than coal for the climate.

The oil and gas industry have good lobbyists, and have achieved years ago exemptions under virtually every federal environmental law, including the Safe Drinking Water Act and Clean Water Act. Companies like Conoco Phillips, Chesapeake Energy and Talisman Energy are not even required to disclose the more than 900 different chemicals used in the fracking process, which contaminate aquifers. Talisman has even targeted children in its lobbying, with ‘Terry the Fracosaurus’ who promotes an industry that is polluting drinking water with toxic chemicals.

Oil and gas companies have spent over three hundred million dollars in the last two years lobbying against federal protections from their pollution, so it is not too surprising that the federal government has decided to ‘shoot now, ask questions later.’ There are few efforts by Congress and the administration to mitigate the public health impacts of fracking.

In the next week or two we should see some results fom a panel of experts set up by the Department of Energy, which is supposed to reach conclusions on how to frack safely. However, the panel is stocked with only frack-friendly experts. EPA is studying impacts on water quality, but that study will take years to complete and is limited in its scope.

While further knowledge about impacts is a certainly a good thing, in this case ‘more research’ means political procrastination. EPA found 24 years ago that fracking contaminates water supplies. So far the only legislation to get much traction is the ‘FRAC Act,’ spearheaded by Democracts from Pennsylvania, New York, and Colorado. This bill is an important step to closing one legal loophole in the Safe Drinking Water Act, and would require that industry disclose which chemicals they’re using.

Today Greenpeace released a report, “Polluting Democracy,” featuring 15 members of the Dirty Money Team – Members of Congress who often work for polluters with money instead of their voters.

We live in a representative democracy. Every citizen should not need knowledge and influence with every important decision made by the government. Our representatives are supposed to learn how best to represent our interests, and it’s their job to try to make the case for a vote we don’t currently support. The fifteen members of Congress in “Polluting Democracy” consistently vote against cleaning up coal pollution so we can breathe clean air.

The Dirty Money Team

Representative Upton (R-MI) voted to restrict pollution from coal in 2009. Even if the majority of his voters were against the idea (they are not) representing their well-being means it’s his job to make the case again. Unfortunately, some members of Congress are like Upton today, and appear to represent polluters that pay for campaign ads or have money to retain mercenary lawyers to lobby Capitol Hill.

Sometimes paying polluters are not even from the recipient Representative’s district. As shown in “Polluting Democracy,” Mike Rogers (R-MI) has no large coal plants in his district, but takes coal company cash and votes against pollution controls on coal plants in neighboring districts that kill about 454 people every year, very likely including people in his district. Other Representatives guilty of this type of fatality-friendly politics include Fred Upton (R-MI), Patrick Tiberi (R-OH), and Doc Hastings (R-WA).

Politicians like to talk about creating jobs and slashing wasteful spending, but many of them forget their party’s talking points when they are introducing bills and voting. The wind and solar industries have created far more growth than the coal industry in the last several years, and this is expected to continue. The growth potential by 2020 of renewable energy jobs is twice that of fossil fuels.

In the states for most of the 15 districts covered in “Polluting Democracy” there are more jobs in wind and solar than in coal-fired power. Representatives Jason Altmire (D-PA) and Mark Critz (D-PA) might consider joining the House Sustainable Energy and Environment Caucus (SEEC) since in Pennsylvania there are twice as many people employed in wind and solar than in coal-fired electricity.

Like Altmire and Critz, Jerry Costello (D-IL) is a member of the Congressional Coal Caucus. Meanwhile, Illinois employs triple the number of people in wind and solar power compared with coal-fired power plants. In Missouri, there are about as many jobs in coal-fired power as in wind and solar. Rep. Russ Carnahan (D-MO) has just as many coal-fired power plants in his district as Rep. Jo Ann Emerson (R-MO). Carnahan is a member of SEEC, while Emerson is in the coal caucus.

Wind and solar energy don’t release toxic mercury like burning coal does, while mercury is among the many pollutants causing a variety of costs on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars per year. Coal costs just from mercury pollution, due to cardiovascular disease, mental retardation and lost productivity, are as high as $29,312,500,000 per year.

The coal industry in the United States has unjustified pull on the levers of democracy. It is nothing new that polluters choose to invest in stopping public health policy instead of investing in pollution controls. But every year a new group of at least 34,000 people die and hundreds of thousands of other people get sick from pollution caused by burning coal in America.

In exchange for passing the Clean Air Act three decades ago polluter-funded politicians negotiated rules to ignore the oldest, dirtiest coal plants. Some of these plants are so old you could effectively say the Clean Air Act ‘great-grandfathered’ them.

Yesterday, EPA issued a final standard that finally includes hundreds of coal plants across the country that were never required to install basic technologies to control for their pollution of sulfur dioxide (SO2) and nitrogen oxides (NOx). SO2 and NOx penetrate deep into the lungs, damaging them, and essentially suffocate people.

Pollution from each American coal plant on average kills up to 50 people per year, but coal plants with no controls for SO2 and Nox are far more lethal. Examples are the Fisk and Crawford plants in Chicago owned by Edison International, which has been lobbying against EPA health protections. Chicagoans are fighting to close these plants.

More people live within a three-mile radius of Chicago’s Fisk and Crawford plants than any others in the country. Neither plant has a current operating permit (expired 29 September 2010), and neither actually delivers power to utility customers in Illinois. Chicagoans get nothing but bad health from Fisk and Crawford. Across the state of Illinois, this new EPA protection will save between 720 and 1800 premature deaths, or 5% of the national total, by 2014. Only Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York stand to benefit more.

Coal industry utilities other than Edison International, such as American Electric Power and GenOn, spend vast sums of money fighting public health protections, instead of investing in pollution controls on sulfur dioxide and nitrous oxide that have been available for decades. Today, the stock these polluting utility companies put in their lobbyists must be plummeting now that new, commonsense safeguards will be put in place to protect the health of America’s communities.

No method of harnessing energy is more expensive and damaging to American’s health than burning coal, and yet coal polluters take every opportunity to outsource costs of up to 500 billion dollars per year to American communities in the form of healthcare and environmental costs. Hopefully, yesterday’s EPA announcement will set a precedent for future safeguards that will protect communities from coal pollution in the form of 130 million tons of toxic ash annually, as well as airborne arsenic, lead, cadmium, and mercury.

Most people who went to school in the United States know of Scholastic books. You might not have heard until last week that they were pushing coal industry propaganda on 4^th-graders. We teamed up with Center for Commercial-Free Childhood, Rethinking Schools, and Friends of the Earth in asking Scholastic to reconsider a contract with the American Coal Foundation (ACF).

Materials provided in the United States of Energy teach children the benefits of coal-fired power but conveniently fail to point out any of its foibles. A few include blowing tops of thousands of mountains, spreading 110 million tons of toxic ash around the country every year, and there’s that climate change thing.

I can’t really say it any better than the description of ACF on Kentucky’s educational network television website: “ACF’s objective is to educate the public about the advantages and potential of coal: It’s abundant; it’s affordable; it’s American; and with the commercialization of innovative new technologies, it can be used in an environmentally acceptable manner.” ACF manages to get its url onto the websites of departments of eduction, where teachers can pull down lesson plans such as one in which children mine chocolate chips out of cookies.

While we expect the coal industry to lie that coal can be affordable and environmentally acceptable, should we have really expected Scholastic to become the coal industry’s hired clown? It turns out this isn’t the first time that Scholastic has shown poor judgment. Last year, for instance, the US Chamber of Commerce borrowed Scholastic’s goodwill to cajole middle-schoolers into supporting polluters rather than federal pollution limits to protect children.

Scholastic has produced good materials. I myself recall being excited in 1^st grade about the Scholastic book fair. And the realm of influence of Scholastic expands far beyond the borders of elementary school playgrounds in the United States. Greenpeace has been engaged with Scholastic before, pushing the company to use recycled paper when printing chronicles of Harry Potter. They even published a book in which Greenpeace was a main character.

On Friday Scholastic admitted that they ‘were not vigilant enough as to the effect of sponsorship…’, and over the weekend pulled the ACF materials off its website. We’ve won this battle, but not before thousands of schools received the materials. Scholastic needs to do more than avoid contracts with polluter lobbyists in the future. Scholastic needs to recall United States of Energy and publicly explain how its internal review will result in a better, brighter company. As a for-profit company with direct access to children’s minds, mistakes like this ACF incident mean Scholastic has to work hard to regain credibility.

The Obama administration says they’re on the side of the coal industry. I’m talking about the administration’s support of polluters in American Electric Power v. Connecticut. The Supreme Court is finally hearing this case, filed in 2004, about carbon pollution caused by burning coal for electricity. Defendants are responsible for about 10% of carbon dioxide pollution in the United States. The plaintiffs include several states who are arguing that they should be allowed to sue polluters of greenhouse gases under public nuisance law. Global climate disruption is surely more than a nuisance, but this atmospheric emergency requires every tool we can muster.

Obama’s Justice Department has twice filed an amicus brief on AEP v. Connecticut, in which they argue that responsibility for climate change policy lies with the Executive Branch and Legislative Branch. This is also the coal industry’s argument, never mind that they simultaneously lobby against any and all limits to their pollution by EPA and Congress. I do not believe that the Obama administration is two-faced, but they also don’t appear rushed on global warming policy.

Despite his campaign promise, President Obama never campaigned for climate policy. He let Congress try to push a climate bill without any public campaign. Of course that didn’t go well. The heyday was Waxman-Markey, a valiant effort on the bill’s namesakes, but it was so riddled with polluter compromises by its passage that Greenpeace had to oppose it.

Although climate policy should have been a foregone conclusion in the 70s, the seven year life of AEP v. Connecticut isn’t that long in terms of federal policy movement. In 1987 Congress passed, and President Reagan signed, the Global Climate Protection Act, which stated that ‘[t]he President, through the Environmental Protection Agency, shall be responsible for developing and proposing to Congress a coordinated national policy on global climate change.’ This has never happened.

Actually Obama’s EPA has argued that developing regulations on GHG pollution from utilities are not intended to impose specific targets, caps, or numbers on pollution limits. In its third year, the Obama administration continues to drag its feet on carbon pollution from burning coal. Obama continues to publicly support the myth that coal plant smokestacks can be safely turned upside down, pumping billions of tons of pollution underground.

Every administrative agency and President Obama himself have seemingly made every effort to publicly assuage the concerns of polluters. Obama has been letting climate deniers boost public opinion. And the political trend in Congress is not improving on its own. That’s the whole point of this case – that citizens should be able to ask the courts to step in when Congress and the President have failed us.

Every country’s climate delegation is in Bangkok explaining their climate policies. Frustrating comments from the US delegation coupled with dynamics surrounding a possible government shutdown at home make it impossible to believe the US administration considers global warming an urgent problem.

Urgent means peak global emissions in 4 years, which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says is likely needed to avoid runaway global warming (lost cause scenario for climate policies).

There are a lot of ways and certainly a lot of reasons the administration continues to stall an international agreement on global warming pollution. I don’t envy people in the US administration who really understand that we should have had a policy decades ago to address this developing global catastrophe.

However, I struggle to have sympathy for the President whose job is to lead on important issues like the American climate debate, since he has instead been pushing policies to feed the false notion that fossil fuels are awesome.

Here in Bangkok the US is bragging without justification, while attacking the idea that the UN Parties should use agreed methods of measuring climate policy impacts. There must be some Aesop fable to tell the story. But since I can’t think of it, I’ll just have to make one up.

Keep in mind that the US carbon pollution reduction target for 2020 is 3% below 1990 levels. This is so lacking in ambition that we have already half-way succeeded without trying because of the recent recession and existing energy market trends. Also, the US is responsible for the largest percentage of carbon pollution in the atmosphere.

Here’s an allegorical account from yesterday’s UN climate meeting:

One day, Bear announced to all the animals in the forest that he has taken bold action to avert a forest fire.

Cougar asked, ‘That’s great! What did you do? When did you do it?’

Bear said, ‘Well, there are many ways to avert a forest fire. And it doesn’t matter when – obviously it was before now.’

Squirrel piped up, ‘This morning I put out a cigarette that some human must have thrown from his car.’

All the forest animals knew Bear was a rather inconsiderate smoker himself. He’d become addicted as a cub. Also, despite his large size and relatively huge impact on the forest community, he was rather insecure as a person. So the other animals cut him some slack for the smoking habit.

Salamander asked, ‘Bear, didn’t I see you pick up a half-smoked cigarette off the road, take few drags, and throw it on the forest floor yesterday?’

Deer chimed in, ‘Yeah, actually. You may have started the last forest fire. We are happy to hear about your bold action, but what did you do, Bear?’

Bear flew into a rage, announcing, ‘Look, we don’t all avert forest fires in the same way! It’s not important how I did it, and it’s not like I’m the only one who can put out fires! Get off my back!’

The US administration has done many things that are good for the climate. But these actions are starkly overshadowed by Obama’s support for exemptions for industrial agriculture polluters, investment favor for nukes and coal technology in lieu of renewables, expanded offshore drilling, drilling on public lands, and massive coal mining expansion and exports. Unlike EPA actions to reduce global warming pollution, some of these really bad policies the President has promoted in recent speeches.

Rather than using his office and fantastic media access as a platform to campaign for climate policy, the President is promoting the fossil fuel industry and therefore feeding the obstinate climate skepticism of American voters that frustrates the rest of the world.

I don’t blame the President for a Congress that cannot get it together to pass this year’s budget. It seems we are faced with an anarchical majority in the House that wants to take government out of the business of protecting Americans from things like toxic pollution, babies getting sick, and general ignorance. Riders to the budget bill include stripping the funding for EPA to reduce mercury pollution, for Planned Parenthood, and various programs for the arts, education, and scientific research.

While President Obama will not publicly defend his own administration’s authority to address climate change, we do have a White House statement from the Office of Management and Budget that should be clear enough. “If the President is presented with a bill that undermines critical priorities…. through funding levels or restrictions… the President will veto the bill.”

If Obama doesn’t veto a bill that cuts EPA funding, he must not consider dealing with global warming a ‘critical priority.’ It would be difficult to accept that the President believes sacrificing EPA authority is part of a strategy to achieve strong climate change legislation. Any chance this could have been part of the ‘spirit of compromise’ has by now faded into simply promoting policies on behalf of polluters.

Fortunately, Senate Majority Leader Reid announced on April 1^st that there will be no attacks on EPA allowed in the budget bill.

About 50,000 people just communicated to their Senators that they’ve had it with coal companies polluting policymaking, and polluting their communities.

With their names on the petition, we dropped off a copy of the latest Harvard study on true cost of coal to every Senator’s office.

We visited the offices of Senators from states devastated by coal mining, such as John Rockefeller and Mitch McConnell who represent West Virginia and Kentucky, where hundreds of Appalachian peaks have been leveled.

We visited the offices of Senators like Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Jim Inhofe (R-OK) who take their cues from the polluter companies that paid for their election campaigns. We also dropped off the petition and Harvard study to Senators like Sherrod Brown (D-OH) who have been on the fence about whether carbon pollution from coal is dangerous enough to restrict now.

No Senator can honestly say that s/he doesn’t know that coal may cost voters as much as $500,000,000,000 annually on top of the cost of electricity. Or that air pollution from burning coal kills up to 34,000 Americans every year.

For public health advocates this is going to be a busy two weeks of defense on Capitol Hill. We are faced with a government shut down on April 9th, when the 3-week budget extension expires. This affects anything the federal government funds, such as programs like Planned Parenthood, Food Stamps, and pretty much everything but national defense.

Leadership in both the House and Senate have vowed that the next budget bill will be good for several months at least. However, success means also defeating bills that may become riders being pushed by polluter-funded Senators and Representatives. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has promised votes this week on three such bills, all of which aim to keep EPA from doing its job to reduce pollution from coal.

Senator Inhofe wants to effectively abolish EPA as far as coal is concerned. If you know it was opposite day when he named it, Inhofe’s CARE Act speaks for itself. Senator Rockefeller wants a two-year delay of restrictions on global warming pollution. He’s pitching it as prudent, but the truth is that EPA is usually happy on its own to delay regulations.

EPA was told by the Supreme Court four years ago that the Clean Air Act obligates EPA to develop rules if greenhouse gas is deemed to endanger the public (as in causes catastrophic climate disruption). Rockefeller’s bill to stall longer is really a foot in the door for a fossilized Congress to take back their vote on the Clean Air Act.