This is a follow-up to the Keystone XL amendment diary I posted yesterday. I wanted a separate diary to highlight the climate change amendments from yesterdsay and have been waiting for the roll call for one amendment to be formally posted.
Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI)'s amendment to say that the Senate believes that climate change is "real and not a hoax" passed 98 to 1 because it is such weak tea that it is actually water. The amendment says nothing about who is causing climate change, making it meaningless. Jim Inhofe trolled Democrats by coming out in favor of it, noting that "the climate is always changing." The only NO vote was Roger Wicker (R-MS).
John Hoeven (R-ND)'s amendment saying that Keystone XL would not have a significant impact on the environment was apparently altered to include language that "Climate change is real; and human activity contributes to climate change." As such, Hoeven voted against his own amendment.
15 Republicans did, however, vote for it:
Lamar Alexander (R-TN)
Kelly Ayotte (R-NH)
Susan Collins (R-ME)
Bob Corker (R-TN)
Jeff Flake (R-AZ)
Lindsey Graham (R-SC)
Orrin Hatch (R-UT)
Dean Heller (R-NV)
Mark Kirk (R-IL)
John McCain (R-AZ)
Lisa Murkowski (R-AK)
Rand Paul (R-KY)
Rob Portman (R-OH)
Mike Rounds (R-SD)
Pat Toomey (R-PA)
Too bad their other votes don't reflect that same acknowledgement. Although RL Miller from Climate Hawks Vote can provide a more climate-specific take on each senator's record, I'm going to look at their lifetime LCV scores as of 2013. (The 2014 LCV report card has not been released yet.)
Lamar Alexander: 19%
Kelly Ayotte: 26%
Susan Collins: 67%
Bob Corker: 16%
Jeff Flake: 10%
Lindsey Graham: 12%
Orrin Hatch: 10%
Dean Heller: 13%
Mark Kirk: 61% (inflated by his career in the House)
John McCain: 22%
Lisa Murkowski: 21%
Rand Paul: 11%
Rob Portman: 22%
Pat Toomey: 9%
All with the exception of Collins voted back in 2013 to ban the EPA from regulating greenhouse gas emissions.
And last year, when the Senate voted to extend a number of energy efficiency and clean energy tax incentives, all of them present but Mark Kirk voted no. (Kelly Ayotte wasn't there but would have likely voted NO as well.)
The 15 Republicans who acknowledge that human activity impacts climate change was whittled down to only 5 when the wording changed to "climate change is real; and human activity significantly contributes to climate change." This was Brian Schatz (D-HI)'s amendment. I've included its full text below:
SEC. __. SENSE OF CONGRESS.
(a) Findings.--The environmental analysis contained in the Final Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement referred to in section 2(a) and deemed to satisfy the requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (42 U.S.C. 4321 et seq.) as described in section 2(a), states that--
(1) ``[W]arming of the climate system is unequivocal and each of the last [3] decades has been successively warmer at the Earth's surface than any preceding decade since 1850.'';
(2) ``The [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change], in addition to other institutions, such as the National Research Council and the United States (U.S.) Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), have concluded that it is extremely likely that global increases in atmospheric [greenhouse gas] concentrations and global temperatures are caused by human activities.''; and
(3) ``A warmer planet causes large-scale changes that reverberate throughout the climate system of the Earth, including higher sea levels, changes in precipitation, and altered weather patterns (e.g. an increase in more extreme weather events).''.
(b) Sense of Congress.--Consistent with the findings under subsection (a), it is the sense of Congress that--
(1) climate change is real; and
(2) human activity significantly contributes to climate change.
That amendment also died, receiving only
50 votes when 60 were needed.
The five Republicans who voted to the amendment were the following:
Lamar Alexander (R-TN)
Kelly Ayotte (R-NH)
Susan Collins (R-ME)
Lindsey Graham (R-SC)
Mark Kirk (R-IL)
Again, too bad that they don't follow the implications of the science into policy. Like, you know, not supporting the Keystone XL pipeline. (The same could be said about the Democratic supporters of Keystone as well.)