[at-l] OFF TOPIC: Article: Illiinois Candidate Obama's Environmental Record

[Bluetrail at aol.com (Bluetrail@aol.com)]

A good friend of mine worked for the Harvard Law Review for 12 years.  She worked with Obama when he was the first African-American Editor of the Harvard Law Review and says he's as genuine as he appears.  If he reaches the Illinois Senate seat, as is likely, he might be a person who could help be a bridge into the future--where those of us of the Caucasian, non-Hispanic variety will be in the minority. No mention of trails, but the rest sure looks good.
Joan   
bluetrail@aol.com

from Salon.com
Muckraker
Is Barack Obama too good to be true? Not judging by his stellar
environmental record.
By Amanda Griscom
from Grist Magazine

Aug. 6, 2004  |  As if America needs one more reason to fall in love
with Barack Obama. 

Beyond the unabashed idealism, stirring oratory skills, touching life
story, and knee-buckling smile that have made this candidate for
Illinois' open Senate seat the new beau ideal of progressive politics,
it so happens that this guy is a bona fide, card-carrying,
bleeding-heart greenie. 

And it's not as though Muckraker didn't rifle through his environmental
record going back more than a decade to try to find something off-kilter
-- some skeleton in the closet, some flaw to make him a mere mortal. But
all we found were accolades and evidence of true conviction. 

Obama's comments at the League of Conservation Voters' pro-Kerry rally
last week -- made only hours before he delivered the convention speech
that catapulted him onto the national stage and elicited comparisons to
Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy -- brought enviros to their
feet. 

"Environmentalism is not an upper-income issue, it's not a white issue,
it's not a black issue, it's not a South or a North or an East or a West
issue. It's an issue that all of us have a stake in," Obama shouted.
"And if I can do anything to make sure that not just my daughter but
every child in America has green pastures to run in and clean air to
breathe and clean water to swim in, then that is something I'm going to
work my hardest to make happen." 

The crowd went bananas at this call for unity across ethnic and
socioeconomic lines, as though they'd been waiting for exactly this kind
of dynamic leader to deliver environmentalism from the perception that
it's predominately a white upper-middle-class issue. 

Obama's environmental activism stretches back to his undergrad days at
Columbia University, during which he did a three-month stint with a
Ralph Nader offshoot organization trying to convince minority students
at City College in Harlem to recycle. Later, when he worked as a
community organizer on the South Side of Chicago, he fought for lead
abatement in the Altgeld Gardens neighborhood. 

After getting a law degree from Harvard, Obama became a civil-rights
lawyer and then in 1996 was elected to the Illinois state Senate,
representing the 13th district on Chicago's South Side, where he
distinguished himself as a leader on environmental and public-health
issues. In 2003, Obama was one of six state senators to receive a 100
percent environmental voting record award from the Illinois
Environmental Council. 

His efforts on behalf of the environment have been so consistent and
comprehensive, in fact, that LCV and the Sierra Club endorsed Obama in
his bid for Congress this year over half a dozen other Democrats
competing in the primary. Last month, the LCV named him a 2004
Environmental Champion, one of 18 sitting and prospective members of
Congress to receive the award. 

Obama is "by far one of the most compelling and knowledgeable
politicians on the environment I've ever sat in a room with," Mark
Longabaugh, senior vice president for political affairs at LCV, told
Muckraker. "I've been playing national politics for more than 20 years
and I quite literally can't remember one person I've met -- even on a
national level -- who was more in command of facts, more eloquent, and
more passionate on these issues than Sen. Obama." 

Obama's commitment to environmental protection has a personal
component: His 6-year-old daughter, Malia, has chronic asthma, a fact he
often cites when defending the long list of initiatives he has pushed to
clean up smog and air pollution in his state. And many of his
constituents suffer from the same condition. "More people die from
asthma attacks in Chicago than anywhere else in the country," said Brian
Urbaszewski, director of environmental health programs for the American
Lung Association of Metropolitan Chicago. "And Illinois has the highest
African-American death rate from asthma in the country -- four times the
national average." 

This year, Obama made an aggressive move to stem the tide of pollution
from Illinois' coal plants -- which produce nearly 50 percent of the
state's electricity -- by introducing a bill that would in effect block
the Bush administration's rollback of the Clean Air Act's new-source
review rules from being carried out in his state. "This is a very
complex issue, but Obama took it by storm," Urbaszewski said. "He dove
headfirst into all the complexities and wouldn't quit until he had a
solution." 

According to Jack Darin, who, as director of the Sierra Club's Illinois
chapter, has worked with Obama closely on these issues, "He's an
incredibly quick study. He's not a scientist, but remarkably adept at
analyzing the details of complex environmental issues, asking the right
questions, and ultimately making the right policy decision for public
interest." 

To build support for cleaner air, Obama opened a dialogue with the
coal-mining industry about how better pollution controls on power plants
could help create new markets for Illinois coal. Most of the coal now
being burned in Illinois comes from Wyoming and other Western states,
which has hurt the Illinois coal industry. But Illinois coal is cleaner
in terms of pollutants such as mercury. Obama argued that cracking down
on mercury pollution from coal-fired plants would give Illinois coal a
competitive advantage over Western coal. 

"Most politicians have forever played the interests of the coal
industry and the environment against each other," said Darin, "but Obama
found a way to argue soundly that we can put mine workers back to work
while making the air cleaner." 

Obama has taken on energy matters in Illinois as aggressively as
air-quality protection. As state senator, he is cosponsoring a pending
measure that would require 10 percent of the electricity generated in
the state to come from renewable sources by 2012, and he supports
another pending bill that would tighten energy-efficiency codes in
residential and commercial buildings. 

And Obama is making energy independence one of the top three priorities
in his campaign for a seat in the U.S. Senate, according to his
spokesperson, Robert Gibbs. He has pledged to endorse legislation that
would require 20 percent of America's power supply to be generated by
renewable sources by 2020, as well as regulations that would boost
corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standards to 40 miles per gallon
for cars. 

The list doesn't stop there. Obama has fought for tougher standards on
diesel engines, waged battles against urban sprawl and the destruction
of Illinois' wetlands, and mobilized residents in Chicago's
lowest-income neighborhoods to block toxic dumping in their communities.


It's particularly notable that Obama has gone out on a political limb
to advance environmental protections. "Illinois is a heavily industrial
state, and a tough place for environmentalists and other progressives,"
said Darin. "Illinois is a state that has no limits on campaign
financing, meaning the special interests are well entrenched." But Obama
has never capitulated, said Darin, and for most of his time in the state
Senate, he has been in the minority, going against the political grain
with surprising success. 

Nothing could better prepare him for the current scene in Washington.