The bill will channel millions of dollars a year into national parks and other outdoor recreation areas. It is on its way to President Trump after passing the House on Wednesday.
Both parties are aiming to use the bill’s passage to burnish their reputations and bolster their political fortunes.
Speaking in front of the Capitol on Thursday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) praised freshmen Democrats for leading the effort to pass the bill.
“The bill honors our responsibility to be good stewards of our natural heritage,” she said while surrounded by about a half-dozen Democratic lawmakers.
In particular she praised Rep. Joe Cunningham (D), a former ocean engineer who is in a tough reelection race in a coastal South Carolina district that President Trump won by 13 points. He was the lead House sponsor of the bill.
“He brought his scientific know-how, his devotion to preserving the planet, to the Congress and made this legislation possible,” Pelosi said.
On the other side of the country, Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter and senior adviser, toured Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado to trumpet the bill and visit some of the infrastructure in need of repair with Interior Secretary David Bernhardt, a Colorado native.
The trip had a political undercurrent. The bill’s chief Senate sponsor, Cory Gardner of Colorado, is one one of the most vulnerable Senate Republicans up for reelection in November. He is running against a former governor, John Hickenhooper, in a state Trump lost by 5 points.
“Working with Senator Gardner on the Great American Outdoors Act, we are securing funding for the next 100 years to preserve our national parks and public lands,” Ivanka Trump said in a statement before the trip.
The Gardner campaign is also out this week with a 30-second ad touting passage of the bill.
The bill amounts to a big infusion of spending in areas across the country near national parks and other public lands.
It would pump $900 million a year into the Land and Water Conservation Fund, used to expand and improve urban playgrounds and other public places.
For the next five years, it would also invest another $1.9 billion per year in fixing roads, trails, pipes and other infrastructure in national parks, forests and wildlife refuges.
Collectively, federal public lands face a $20 billion backlog in maintenance work.
Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), a supporter of the bill, suggested the legislation was “the biggest conservation bill passed since 1964” and could help members keep their seats.
“It’s the kind of thing that gets people reelected,” he said during a teleconference Thursday with activist hunters who advocated for the legislation.
Correction: The original version of this story said Donald Trump lost Colorado to Hillary Clinton by 3 points in 2016. The margin was 5 points.
Power plays
A group of Senate Republicans sent a letter to Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) pushing to boost clean energy in the next coronavirus relief bill.
The letter from Gardner and fellow Republican Sens. Thom Tillis (N.C.), Lindsey Graham (S.C.), Susan Collins (Maine), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Martha McSally (Ariz.) and Richard Burr (N.C.) cites the about 500,000 job lost in the sector during the pandemic.
“As we focus on getting the country back to work, we must include an industry that had already been putting Americans to work faster, and in more places, than the overall economy before the COVID pandemic hit,” the senators wrote. “…Unfortunately, COVID-driven layoffs and furloughs are already underway in the clean energy sector.”
Like Gardner, Collins, Graham, McSally and Tillis are up for reelection this year.
In a statement, Citizens for Responsible Energy Solutions praised the letter. “America deserves a jobs-forward COVID-19 relief package that helps our citizens get safely back to work and helps our economy get back on track,” the group’s executive director, Heather Reams, said.
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) says the state’s nuclear bailout energy law should be repealed following an alleged bribery scandal.
DeWine reversed course after saying this week the law shouldn’t be repealed. The debate over the bailout bill followed the arrests of Republican House Speaker Larry Householder and four others in a $60 million bribery case, the Associated Press reports.
“The Republican DeWine said he continues to support the policy in the bill, including preserving Ohio’s two nuclear power plants as part of power generation in the state,” per the AP. “But DeWine says the process that created the bill and the law tainted it irrevocably… He called on lawmakers to repeal and revisit the legislation ‘through an open process that the public can have confidence in.’”
A draft climate platform from the Democratic National Committee pushes for net-zero emissions by 2050.
“The draft platform, obtained by The Hill on Thursday, includes several updates [Joe Biden] made to his plan recently. The DNC objectives, however, do not go as far some of the more ambitious goals laid out by progressives,” the Hill reports. “Like Biden, the DNC wants to achieve carbon-free power by 2035, as well as invest in 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations and conserve 30 percent of America’s lands and waters by 2030.”
Some differences between the draft climate platform and Biden’s goals include a DNC target of net-zero emissions for new buildings by 2030, compared with Biden’s 2035 target. The Hill adds: “The DNC also wants to invest in 500 million solar panels and 60,000 wind turbines. Biden’s plan doesn’t set specific goals for turbines or solar panels.”
Coronavirus fallout
There are up to a million families in North Carolina falling behind on their utility bills.
They’ve been late on or missed a combined $218 million in payments on electric water and sewage bills between April 1 and the end of June, Tony Romm reports. The dearth of funds is not only threatening residents but its leaving cities in financial peril.
“The trouble stems from the widespread economic havoc wrought by the coronavirus, which has left millions of workers out of a job and struggling to cover their monthly costs,” The Post’s Tony Romm reports. “…In some cases, cities that own or operate their own utilities have been forced to absorb these losses, creating a dire situation in which the government’s attempt to save people from the financial brink instead has pushed municipal coffers to their own breaking point.”
It’s not clear whether more federal help is forthcoming.
A new report found that earthquake sensors detected the surface of the Earth became unusually calm as the pandemic led to economic shutdowns.
“The shutdown effect registered by seismometers is akin to that typically seen in the middle of the night and during holiday periods, only this one lasted from March to May and encompassed almost every corner of the planet — a stunning global quiescence never before seen in the history of earthquake science,” Joel Achenbach reports. “…Constrained by the coronavirus pandemic, human activity diminished when countries began shuttering their economies and urging people to engage in social distancing.”
Read the report from the journal Science here.
He adds: “This new database could help scientists better distinguish faint natural tremors from those caused by human activity, the researchers wrote. Beyond that, it could be a tool for monitoring activity during pandemics.”
Thermometer
A new study warns the amount of plastic waste in the ocean could triple in the next 20 years.
“The study ― commissioned by nonprofit The Pew Charitable Trusts and sustainability consultancy and incubator SYSTEMIQ ― finds that if plastic production and consumption continues at the current pace, by 2040 there could be 600 million metric tons (661 million tons) of plastic polluting precious marine ecosystems, clogging waterways and sinking to the depths of the sea,” HuffPost reports. “Over the next two decades, we could see over 2.5 times more plastic in the ocean each year, the report projects.”
The report points to solutions that could reduce plastic waste in oceans by 80 percent over the same period, including “reducing the amount of plastic produced in the first place by eliminating avoidable plastics and designing products for reuse; using alternative materials where appropriate; improving labelling to help people better understand what’s recyclable; and increasing waste collection.”
