Fix the Senate Now

On December 6, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell proposed a piece of legislation in the Senate that would allow the debt ceiling to be raised. Just a few short hours later, McConnell stood up on the Senate floor and actually filibustered his own legislation, effectively killing the bill that he himself authored.

You couldn't make this stuff up.

When Americans hear the word "filibuster," they might picture impassioned, hours-long speeches like Jimmy Stewart's in that classic scene from Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. But when McConnell killed his own bill last week, he only had to threaten to filibuster rather than actually take the floor. As Senator Jeff Merkley said, "It used to be that people wanted to take responsibility for their obstruction."

Not anymore. Under current Senate rules, it's staggeringly easy for important legislation to be derailed. Just the threat of a filibuster by a minority of senators can stop a bill in its tracks -- and we've seen it happen over and over. In 2009, the American Clean Energy and Security Act -- which would have represented substantial progress in addressing the climate crisis -- died in the Senate under the threat of a filibuster. Over the past six years, almost 400 Senate bills have stalled this way.

Enough is enough. That's why the Sierra Club has joined a coalition that's calling for rule changes to help end this obstructionism. Organizations ranging from the Communications Workers of America to the NAACP to Common Cause are all onboard, because we know that if we want to see legislative progress on our nation's problems -- from the fiscal showdown to the climate crisis -- we have to fix the Senate.

Mr. Smith fans don't need to worry. The changes we're asking for won't end filibusters but will make sure they’re used as our founders intended. Senators will have just one chance to filibuster -- not multiple opportunities to obstruct. Currently, many filibusters happen on motions to bring legislation up for debate -- not in the context of actual deliberation on bills. The U.S. Senate is often described as "the world's greatest deliberative body" -- so let's give the senators a chance to deliberate.

Oh, and senators should no longer be able to kill a bill just by threatening a filibuster. We should actually make them stand up and do it.

Americans get it. A new poll shows that more than 70 percent of us are in favor of changes to the Senate rules, with only 20 percent opposed.

Leaving the rules as they are is not an option. A "handshake" deal between senators won't work, either. That's all been tried before, and the problem has only gotten worse. Our nation faces too many challenges and opportunities -- spurring clean-energy growth, helping middle-class families, addressing the climate crisis -- to settle for a "do-nothing" Senate.

You can help. Call your senator's office and tell them it's time to fix the filibuster.

Smarter Choices for Climate Solutions

Each year, $200 billion of our federal, state,and local tax dollars are spent on our transportation system. That money goes for everything from highways and bridges to public transit and bike lanes, and spending it wisely is one of our most powerful tools for fighting climate disruption.

Currently, our transportation system is heavily dependent on oil, which is our largest source of climate pollution -- roughly one-third of all U.S. carbon emissions. If we want to cut carbon pollution fast, moving beyond oil for transportation is an obvious strategy.

What's more, it's something Americans already support. More than 80 percent of us are in favor of improving bus and rail service, as well as more funding to make biking and walking safer. Actually, that's not so surprising when you consider that one in three Americans doesn't drive at all.  

Yet even though the number of vehicle miles traveled in America has gone down every year since 2004, the automobile still receives the lion's share of transportation funding. Bike commuting, meanwhile, grew 40 percent nationally between 2000 and 2010. In fact, biking and walking now account for 12 percent of all trips in the U.S., but they get only about 1.6 percent of federal transportation spending.

Transit ridership is up nationwide, too, but cash-strapped transit agencies are being forced to reduce service and raise fares. Meanwhile, low-income families without access to public transit can end up spending more than half of their budget on transportation.

By disproportionately spending our transportation dollars on roads and highways, we're creating hardship for people who can't or don't drive, while also subjecting those who do drive to unpredictable gas-price spikes and horrendous highway commutes. The simple solution is allocate our transportation dollars more sensibly. That means more funding for projects that improve and expand access to transit and alternative transportation -- and less for projects that will prolong our reliance on oil.

This week the Sierra Club released a report called "Smart Choices, Less Traffic: 50 Best and Worst Transportation Projects in the United States." It calls out both good and bad ways of spending our tax dollars. We've also put all 50 transportation projects on a Google map -- so you can see for yourself what's happening in your part of the country.

Examples of "smart" choices include:

• Expanding and electrifying light-rail systems across the county.
• Funding bicycle and pedestrian pathways.
• Repairing the tracks and improving the route of Amtrak in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Vermont.

Some "not so smart" choices:

• A 100-mile gravel road in pristine Northern Alaska that's being built to allow year-round access for oil and gas exploration.
• A highway in Virginia (the "Coalfields Expressway") that is essentially an excuse for a strip mine.
• A  two-mile long tunnel under downtown Seattle.

Bottom line: We already know how to build the kind of transportation infrastructure that will help America meet the challenges of the 21st century. Many communities -- highlighted in the "best" examples in this report -- are already doing exactly that.

But old habits die hard, and plenty of oil-intensive projects are still sucking up dollars that could be put to better use. Luckily, states now have more control over how federal transportation funds are spent. Write to your state's governor to demand a better transportation future that helps move us beyond oil.

Time to Stand Up for Families and the Environment

You've probably heard about the "fiscal showdown" in Washington, D.C., but you might not realize how it could affect the environment. The reality is that the entire environmental community has an enormous stake in the negotiations between Congress and President Obama.

If an agreement isn't reached in early 2013, then the so-called "sequester" or automatic budget cuts that would kick in would be a major setback for clean air and clean water. There would be an across-the-board 8.2 percent cut in virtually every national environmental program. Many of these programs and protections have already suffered deep cuts, but a sequester would mean even more budget woes for the agencies that keep our air, water, and land safe.

But even if a sequester doesn't happen, there is sure to be a lot of horse-trading on environmental issues that we hold near and dear. So we'll need to be on guard to defend against mostly Republican demands to cut environmental programs and domestic discretionary spending to serve their own agendas.

Another potential danger is that the massive bills that will be negotiated during the fiscal showdown could include anti-environmental amendments or "riders" -- pieces of legislation that have nothing to do with the task at hand. For example, one of our opponents in Congress could attach a rider to roll back mercury protections or to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from enforcing the Clean Air Act.

To make sure the environment has a voice at the table, the Sierra Club has joined with a broad coalition of more than 30 national progressive organizations, ranging from SEIU to the Center for Community Change and MoveOn.org to call on Congress and President Obama to put the interests of working American families ahead of those of fossil fuel corporations and the super-rich.

The core priorities of this coalition include many of the things we care most about: clean energy investment and job creation, investment in green transportation, and renewal of the Production Tax Credit for wind energy.

Both a healthy economy and a robust clean-energy economy begin with a strong middle class. But for the past three decades, the chips have been stacked against working families, while the super-rich got much, much richer. Everyone wants to see a prosperous economy, but working families and the middle class are the real engines of our economy. The economy moves forward when those folks have good jobs, can educate their kids, shop on Main Street, afford their health care, and retire in security.

We can make that vision a reality by building a clean-energy economy that works for everyone, but we have to get our nation's leaders to make the right decisions and resolve the fiscal showdown by investing in America. Instead of cutting critical environmental protections, public health services, and social safety net programs, we should be rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure and developing a 21st-century electrical grid that will create jobs and save energy and money without polluting our air and water.

Rebuilding a strong middle class and creating a clean-energy economy won't happen by accident. It depends on making the right decisions as a nation. The problem, of course, is that those aren't the decisions that we've been making. Our leaders have kicked the big decisions further and further down the road while doling out more tax cuts to the super-rich and more tax loopholes for Big Oil and other corporate polluters. That's got to stop.

You can help. Let Congress know that now is the time to cut polluter subsidies -- not environmental programs.

Bicoastal Clean-Energy Leadership

Back in the dog days of 2010, when it became clear that Congress wouldn't be passing a climate bill, many people were frustrated and disappointed, including me. But as I wrote in Sierra magazine at the time, Congress's failure to act didn't mean we couldn't keep making progress on climate disruption. Lots of good things have been happening -- nationally, at the state level, and in our cities.

Last week, the mayors of our two largest cities showed exactly what I'm talking about.

I was honored to be invited to speak briefly at an event with Mayor Michael Bloomberg, sponsored by the League of Conservation Voters and the Regional Plan Association in New York City to discuss the city's future after superstorm Sandy. Very few individuals are in Mayor Bloomberg's league when it comes to taking real, substantial action on climate disruption. Recall that during the last election it wasn't either of the candidates who brought climate to the forefront as an issue -- it was Mayor Bloomberg.

During last week's event, the mayor announced far-reaching plans for making New York City both better prepared for and more resilient to extreme weather events like Sandy. At the same time, he reiterated his strong support for moving beyond coal and promoting both clean energy and energy efficiency. It's been five years since the mayor announced PlaNYC -- a green-building initiative that is one of the most ambitious and successful climate action plans in the country. But New York is not the only city taking action. Mayor Bloomberg also currently serves as the chair for the C40, a group of more than 60 large cities across the globe that are working to reduce their carbon emissions. One out of every twelve people on the planet lives in a C40 city.

America's second largest city is also a member of the C40. Its mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, has set a goal of eliminating its use of coal power by 2020, while simultaneously increasing renewable energy to 40 percent . In keeping with that objective, yesterday the mayor announced that L.A. would commit to buying all of the energy produced by a major solar plant on the reservation of the Moapa Band of Paiutes in southern Nevada. The contracts are for enough energy to power 105,000 homes.

This is not only a big step forward for Los Angeles, which has been getting nearly 40 percent of its power from aging, out-of-state coal plants, but also good news for the Moapas, who have suffered far more than their share of the ill effects of coal power. Nevada's Reid-Gardner coal plant is practically in their backyard.

As Mary Anne Hitt, the directory of the Sierra Club's Beyond Coal Campaign, wrote:

This Moapa Solar project is one of two long-term solar purchasing agreements that, along with the CLEAN LA feed-in-tariff solar program, are designed to replace power from Arizona's Navajo Generating Station coal plant and put Los Angeles on a firm path to replace its use of coal with clean energy alternatives – energy efficiency, solar, wind, and geothermal.

In the long run -- and we're all in it for the long run -- no single "silver bullet" will solve the climate crisis. The good news, though, is that we have a clear objective to keep in our sights. All we need to do is keep moving away from dirty fuels and toward clean energy and sustainable transportation. How we do that is limited only by our imagination, our passion, and our resolve. All of those were on display in New York and Los Angeles last week.

You can see what's happening across the country on our Climate Comes Home "This Is What Change Looks Like" map. Check it out -- you can even add what's happening in your own city, neighborhood, school, business, or home.

The Un-Conservation Congress

If you've seen Lincoln, then you know that a) Daniel Day-Lewis is an Oscar frontrunner and b) Republicans are capable of doing great things. In the film, of course (spoiler alert), they pass the 13th Amendment and end slavery. And just a few years later, the character played by David Strathairn (Secretary of State William Seward), saved the entire state of Alaska (from Russia) by picking it up for 2 cents an acre. Another famous Republican in the film, Ulysses S. Grant, later signed the act that created our first U.S. national park (Yellowstone).

In the 20th century, of course, Republican overachiever Theodore Roosevelt designated 5 national parks, 8 national monuments, and 150 national forests (when he wasn't camping-out with the founder of the Sierra Club). Even just 48 years ago, enough conservation-minded Republicans were left in the House to pass the Wilderness Act almost unanimously (in the Senate, it squeaked by 73-12).

How times have changed. The current Congress has demonstrated unrivaled proficiency at accomplishing nothing -- and it has "un-succeeded" most spectacularly when it comes to protecting public lands. If things don't change, this could be the first time since 1966 that Congress has adjourned without protecting a single acre of wilderness.

The problem isn't that none of today's Republicans care about wilderness. Many do. Unfortunately, the radical fringe leadership of their party flat-out refuses to support wilderness legislation -- even bills sponsored by fellow Republicans -- unless their purpose is to open up wilderness to mining and drilling.

Here are five examples of Republican-sponsored wilderness bills that are getting more love from the Sierra Club than from fellow congressional Republicans:

• HR 608 Alpine Lakes Wilderness Additions and Pratt and Middle Fork Snoqualmie Rivers Protection Act. With its proximity to the Seattle metropolitan region, the Alpine Lakes Wilderness Area is one of the most popular wilderness areas in the country. This legislation would add over 22,000 acres to the existing area and protect areas beloved by many and vital habitat for trout.
• HR 977 Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore Conservation and Recreation Act. Nestled on the shores of Lake Michigan, this is a popular spot for hunters, anglers, and boaters. This legislation would protect over 32,000 acres, or nearly half of the entire unit.
• HR 41 Beauty Mountain and Agua Tibia Wilderness Act. Would protect over 21,000 acres as wilderness north of San Diego County. The area is full of deep canyons, rugged rock formations and popular with hunters, hikers, and backpackers.
• HR 163 Central Idaho Economic Development and Recreation Act. Would protect as wilderness part of the largest unprotected roadless areas in the lower 48 -- 330,000 acres.
• S 1090 Tennessee Wilderness Act. Would protect nearly 20,000 acres of the Cherokee National Forest in Tennessee and would be the first wilderness designated in the state in 25 years.

That's just a sampling of the dozens of bipartisan wilderness bills authored by both Republicans and Democrats that are pending before this Congress. Most of them have strong local support because people know that protecting these lands will help build local economies, protect valuable open space, and preserve wonderful recreation opportunities for future generations.

Republican obstructionism isn't good for the planet and, after the last election, it’s clear it isn't even good for the Republican party. Here's a chance to reclaim what once was a popular core value of the Republican Party (conservation) and, at the same time, actually accomplish something.