Bernie Sanders Says US Should Curb Fossil Fuels to Clean Up Russia, China

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., wants to pledge American resources to clean up the Chinese, Indian, and Russian environments.

Flanked by environmental activists Wednesday on the Capitol’s East Lawn and joined by Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., the Vermont senator touted the pair’s legislation to prohibit all new fossil fuel developments on federal land, a measure aimed at fighting climate change.

Although there is little chance the legislation would receive a vote in the Republican-controlled chamber, Sanders said the bill signals renewed American commitment to “a clearly international crisis.”

“We are going to be leading by making the transformations that we need in this country and using our technology to help China, to help Russia,” he told reporters:

China has enormous environmental problems, thousands—millions of their people are dying from pollution. We’ve got to work with China. We’ve got to work with India. We’ve got to lead the world. And by the way, we can create a huge amount of good-paying jobs in this country.

Sanders, who calls himself a democratic socialist, didn’t provide specifics on the international clean-up effort, and his office did not respond to several requests by The Daily Signal.

His proposed Keep It in the Ground Act would prohibit all new leases for the production of coal, gas, and oil on federal lands. The legislation also would ban offshore drilling in both the Arctic and Atlantic oceans.

To avoid a global warming catastrophe, according to Merkley’s office, 80 percent of the world’s fossil fuels must not be tapped. Although the United States accounts for only 10 percent of the world’s reserves, his office said, the nation should take the first step by transitioning from “a fossil fuel economy to a clean energy economy.”

Bill McKibben, leader of the environmental group 350.Org, told reporters any “powerful legislation” on the issue is likely impossible in the current political environment.

A senior aide to Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, chairwoman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, told The Daily Signal the Sanders-Merkley legislation is dead on arrival.

The staffer, Robert Dillon, criticized the measure as “shortsighted,” noting that the U.S. has the “toughest environmental standards in the world” and warning that the legislation in effect would export pollution to countries with lower standards.

“Why would we want people with less stringent environmental standards producing our energy for us,” Dillon asked, “when they’re going to do more ecological damage than we would?”

But Merkley’s strategy seems to be to go around Congress and rely instead on leaders of other nations. This also has been President Obama’s approach on the issue, critics charge.

At the press conference, Merkley confirmed that the bill’s timing was “designed to help fuel the conversation in Paris,” referring to the upcoming treaty-making climate conference known as the Paris Protocol.

Global leaders will gather in Paris late this month for the United Nations Climate Change Conference to hammer out a new universal agreement on environmental pollution and regulation.

Nick Loris, an economist and Morgan fellow at The Heritage Foundation, warned that the conference could have the unintended consequence of keeping the lights off for a billion of the world’s poor.

“There are huge costs to restricting global energy production through decarbonizing the world’s energy economy,” Loris told The Daily Signal. “It will prevent the poorest citizens of the world from accessing reliable, baseload energy.”