80% of Democrats that Voted for the House Climate Bill Re-elected

November 4th, 2010 by Susan Kraemer

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Of the 211 Democrats who voted for the Waxman-Markey cap and trade climate bill, 170 have been re-elected so far – as of close counts through today.

Climate hawks got 80% approval.

Climate zombies? Just 37% approval.

Climate hawks beat climate zombies: more than 2 to 1.

Only 37% of the 43 Democratic no-votes held their seats. Of the 43 swing district Democrats who voted against it, 67% lost with only 16 holding their seats. (In fairness, the Democratic no votes were mostly in Republican swing districts, swept in on the youth vote with Obama, but young people tend to forget to vote in midterms.)

That’s just a 37% approval rate for climate zombies. But the corporate fossil-funded media is trying to tell another story, one not based on the actual numbers.

Just as after the attempt by Al Gore and Bill Clinton to reign in carbon dioxide emissions in 1993 with a btu tax (which excluded renewable energy) marked the concerted beginning of the organized corporate attacks on Al Gore ever since, the post-Fairness Act media is playing this as one more terrible and unpopular thing the Democrats did.

And they didn’t wait for the election results, either.

The New York Times posed a typical kind of story, the day before, predicated on the assumption that Americans repudiate a clean energy future that hurts (fossil energy CEOs) “jobs”.

NYT: Will the Ghost of Cap and Trade Haunt Democrats Tomorrow — and Beyond?

Today we see:

Cap and Trade voters Take a Beating

Greens Desperate to Avoid Blame

“It’s very dangerous branding for them,” Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the fossil-funded “think tank” Competitive Enterprise Institute and a paid skeptic on climate science is quoted as saying. “There will never be another vote on a Btu tax in my lifetime for the reason of 1993. I suggest if cap and trade is similarly thought of, there will also never be a vote on cap and trade.” “Indeed, directly after the cap-and-trade vote — which itself was delayed for an hour while Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) held the floor to decry the bill — House Republicans taunted Democrats with chants of “Btu, Btu.””

Today, Politico’s Morning Energy further scoffs at the climate hawks such as the NRDC for trying to set the record straight – as if the citing of mere statistics is an uninformative waste of the readers time.

Greens scramble to distance themselves from Dem losses

And perhaps that’s useful for the fossil industry, to make statistics and percentages – just like any other inconvenient branch of science – suspect. We “scramble” to “distance” ourselves.

But numbers don’t lie. Eighty percent of the House Democrats who voted for cap and trade got another term. That’s just the truth.



[Update, as numbers are going back and forth with recounts, my numbers come from the Politico story itself. The Wonk Room number is 81%]

Related stories:

Waxman-Markey Will Pay For Itself, CBO Finds

Susan Kraemer@Twitter









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