When you want to get to the bottom of something, it’s always a useful hint: follow the money. Whether you’re a hard-hitting journalist or you drive around in a van solving mysteries, it’s usually the fastest and most reliable way to ascertain anyone’s motivations. For me, the cynical assumption that everyone is after their own bottom line is a lifeline that helps keep my world in focus. So when someone with a resume like Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski’s introduces legislation to remove the EPA’s mandate to regulate greenhouse gases as part of the clean air act, it doesn’t surprise me that she’s attacking the EPA’s ability to inhibit the increase of global climate change as well as her own ability to live in a world where New York City is not submerged in frigid Atlantic waters, because she’s doing it to repay the interests that got her elected.
I was more concerned when I was invited to a meeting with the staff of Senator Kay Hagan organized by our friends at CREDO Action and the Center for Biological Diversity to make sure she wasn’t going to join Senator Murkowski’s coalition to gut the Clean Air Act. Although Senator Hagan’s environmental policy specialist allayed our fears about that particular fiasco (Hagan won’t be supporting the bill), our conversation with him raised other concerns about what kind of people have Senator Hagan’s ear when it comes to sustainability reforms. When pressed about a shift from coal and nuclear power to true sustainables and energy saving retrofits, the man in Washington made it clear that one of their primary concerns was an increased cost of electricity moving manufacturing overseas. As some of you may remember, the monumental cost of an energy overhaul and the subsequent increase in the price of energy causing outsourcing and massive job losses is a fire-and-brimstone speech that has been emanating from the pulpit of big coal for some years now. After all, it is much cheaper to tell politicians scary stories than to clean up their act. So it may still be a while before we can move towards sustainable energy sources here in North Carolina, and although it means we’ll be lagging behind the rest of the world in just a few short years and that our current system of lobbying is in dire need of repair, it is still some small comfort to know that you can always follow the money.
-Nathan Aspenson