Major environmental group makes first ever endorsement of Hillary Clinton

[PufPuf23]

22. Based on history, I would expect Hillary Clinton to be a weak environmental POTUS.

Last edited Tue May 31, 2016, 11:57 AM - Edit history (1)

Why? Fracking, big oil, Keystone, supporter of MIC, supporter of carbon offset credits, supporter of free trade deals

POTUS Obama has been weak on the environment regards to priority of the issue.

Stopping war is a most forward environmental initiative as there is nothing more damaging to the environment and wasteful of natural resources than war.

The major environmental groups that rose to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s have become corporatized and weak sauce but good careers for a few since peaking in effectiveness in the 1980s, this includes the Natural Resource Defense Council and its affiliate NRDC Action Fund. NRDC can no longer be described as a grass roots organization. NRDC focuses on politics and fund raising and is part of the status quo. I am not claiming that NRDC is a "bad" organization but that it is a mature organization subject to corporate capture and is not the same grass roots organization as when came to prominence. NRDC maintains access to politicians and corporations now by a willingness to be part of the system and stay within that box.

The wiki for NRDC mentions five court cases; three were progressive environmental initiatives in the 1970s and 1980s, the last two are from the 113th Congress and one could argue the nuance is more to protect specific corporate from grass roots interests.
Legislation[edit]

From wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_Resources_Defense_Council

NRDC opposed the Water Rights Protection Act (H.R. 3189; 113th Congress), a bill that would prevent federal agencies from requiring certain entities to relinquish their water rights to the United States in order to use public lands.[18][19] According to opponents, the bill is too broad.[19][20] They believe the bill "could also block federal fisheries agencies like the United States Fish and Wildlife Service from requiring flows that help salmon find fish ladders and safely pass over dams."[19]

Proponents of the bill disagree with NRDC's stance on the bill, arguing that the current Federal policy defended by NRDC seeks to make users of public lands turn over water rights which in many cases they have paid state or local governments for. Operators of ski areas, ranchers, and farmers, and other users of public land say that the Federal policy defended by NRDC denies them rights to use water for which they have already paid, effectively denying them use of the land. The Water Rights Protection Act is supported by national ski area groups, the American Farm Bureau Federation, the National Association of Conservation Districts, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, the Family Farm Alliance, the National Water Resources Association, the Colorado River Conservation District, the Colorado Association of Conservation Districts, and other interests threatened by existing Federal water policy in the West which the NRDC is defending.[21]

NRDC supported the EPS Service Parts Act of 2014 (H.R. 5057; 113th Congress), a bill that would exempt certain external power supplies from complying with standards set forth in a final rule published by the United States Department of Energy in February 2014.[22][23] The United States House Committee on Energy and Commerce describes the bill as a bill that "provides regulatory relief by making a simple technical correction to the 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act to exempt certain power supply (EPS) service and spare parts from federal efficiency standards."[24]

Effect on administrative law

The NRDC has been involved in the following Supreme Court cases interpreting United States administrative law.
Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Corp. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., 435 U.S. 519 (1978), which held that courts could not impose additional procedural requirements on administrative agencies beyond that required by the agency's organic statute or the Administrative Procedure Act.
Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., 467 U.S. 837 (1984), which gave administrative agencies broad discretion to interpret statute to make policy changes if Congressional intent was unclear. Chevron is now the most-cited case in American case law, even more so than all the citations to famous decisions such as Marbury v. Madison, Brown v. Board of Education, and Roe v. Wade combined.[25]
Baltimore Gas & Elec. Co. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., 462 U.S. 78 (1983)[26] is a United States Supreme Court decision which held to be valid a Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) rule that the permanent storage of nuclear waste should be assumed to have no environmental impact during the licensing of nuclear power plants.


Regards the NRDC Action Fund:

http://www.nrdcactionfund.org/about/ and,

http://www.nrdcactionfund.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Action-Fund-FY14-PD-990.pdf

One should note that about 85% of NRDC Action Fund contributions go to pay W-2 salaries of between $175,000 and $422,000 and these same individuals each had between $35,000 to $63,000 of income from actions related to the NRDC but not NRDC Action Fund W-2 income.