Why is the Environmental Defense Fund spending $1 million to elect Republicans?
As even a casual political observer knows, the era of the moderate Republican is over, especially in the House of Representatives. The Republican House has made a fetish of attacking the environment. It has passed innumerable bills to strip the EPA of its authority and funding and to handicap the regulatory process. Not a single House Republican has a greater-than-50-percent lifetime rating on the League of Conservation Voters’ scorecard.
And so it was bewildering on Thursday when the Environmental Defense Action Fund (EDF Action), the Environmental Defense Fund’s campaign arm, began dropping $250,000 on ads supporting Rep. Chris Gibson, a Republican from upstate New York who is facing a self-financing Democratic challenger, Sean Eldridge. (Eldridge is the husband of Facebook cofounder and New Republic publisher Chris Hughes.)
This is just the beginning of EDF Action’s efforts to help elect Republicans. As Politico notes, “The Environmental Defense Action Fund is rolling out a seven-figure ad campaign to aid green-minded Republicans in the midterm elections, part of a longer-term effort to find GOP partners on priorities like climate change. … The group hasn’t publicly identified other Republicans it plans to support in its 2014 effort, which it says is worth around $1 million so far.”
Veteran environmental activists might roll their eyes, thinking, “There goes EDF again.” EDF is widely viewed among greens as the sellout organization that helps corporations and politicians greenwash their records. This is the group, for example, that takes money from oil and gas companies and pro-drilling foundations to produce research that shows lower methane leakage from fracking than other credible studies.
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http://grist.org/politics/why-is-environmental-defense-fund-spending-1-million-to-elect-republicans/