Republican leaders have begun gathering evidence for sweeping investigations of US President Barack Obama’s environmental agenda, from climate science to the BP oil spill if, as expected, they take control of the US House of Representatives in today’s midterm elections.
The new US Congress will not be installed until January, but Democrats and environmental organizations say they are braced for multiple, aggressive investigations from the incoming Republican majority.
Republican leaders have also raised the possibility of disbanding the Global Warming Committee in Congress, established by the Democratic Speaker, Nancy Pelosi.
“We are already getting posturing from some of the potential committee chairs that they will turn their committees into investigating committees,” said Kate Gordon, who oversees energy policy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund. “I think there is a potential for the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] and the entire administration to be called into hearing after hearing after hearing.”
Staff working for Darrell Issa, the Republican poised to head the powerful House Oversight and Investigation Committee, have already contacted a watchdog group that is suing the Obama administration for e-mails and memos related to the BP spill.
Issa and other Republican leaders have also said they are looking for ways to revisit last year’s climate science controversy, sparked by hacked e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, England.
Jeff Ruch, the director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, said his organization had been contacted by Issa’s staff looking into charges that the Obama administration knowingly played down estimates of the oil spill.
He expected a far more aggressive investigation than any of those seen so far.
“They won’t pull punches and will put people under oath and will pursue it until they get something,” Ruch said. “They will be looking for heads, not just the facts.”
The zeal is fueled by the rise of “Tea Party” candidates for whom climate change denial verges on an article of faith.
“I think a clear majority does not accept human causality in climate change. It’s definitely not within the orthodoxy of conservatism as presented by Sarah Palin and folks like her,” Bob Inglis, a Republican member of the House Science and Technology Committee who lost to a Tea Party candidate, told National Public Radio.
A Pew Research Center poll last week showed 16 percent of Republicans say the Earth is warming because of human activity, compared with 53 percent of Democrats.
Tea Party candidates also tend to be fiercely opposed to government regulation. That combination — libertarian and anti-climate science — puts the EPA at the top of a Republican hitlist that seeks to limit the authority of the agency. Already, Republican leaders have demanded the EPA chief, Lisa Jackson, justify the potential cost to industry or employment of dozens of pollution controls.
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