I love that "Unintentionally Hilarious Resources Committee Web Pages" is now
an actual, multi-post category on this blog.
It's going to take a few posts to plow through all of the BS on the Resources Committee's "
Earth Day" website, which purports to expose environmental nonprofit fundraising and lobbying as "big business" by posting environmental groups' CEO salaries, lobbying expenses, and annual revenues. Apparently we're all living like princes drinking martinis in our high-rise offices. Clearly the Resources Committee Web Team has not been to
my phat group house recently. The martini part is pretty accurate though, if you want to call straight shots of Smirnoff a "martini."
More to the point--the
enviro lobbying expenditures page is what makes this website an UNINTENTIONALLY HILARIOUS RESOURCES COMMITTEE WEB PAGE. That's because the expenditures posted for enviro groups are so ridiculously small compared to the lobbying expenditures of the special interests we are commonly lobbying against. To wit:
The Resources Earth Day site looks at the past 5-7 years of expenses for a slate of major enviro groups, and comes up with a grand total of $31,599,114 in total lobbying expenditures. In contrast, the oil and gas industry
alone spent $220,732,499, or seven times that amount, lobbying Congress over just the last 5 years. Agribusiness
spent $353,316,615. The chemical industry
spent $112,066,610. (Source:
Opensecrets.org)
And these are
just three of the industries that commonly advocate for dangerous and harmful policies that environmental groups must fight against, from weak standards for securing chemical plants against terrorist attack, to opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas drilling, to weakening the Clean Air Act or the Endangered Species Act.
Labels: enviros, House Resources Committee, Pombo, Unintentionally hilarious Resources Comittee web pages
