CPAC – Memphis Flyer

Have you heard about that crazy Green New Deal? Yeah, the socialists are gonna ban hamburgers and air travel, and we’ll all be forced to use wind power for our homes! How nuts is that? When the wind stops blowing, you won’t even be able to watch television. Har har. How dumb do these liberal idiots think we are? Global warming? Har. We could use some of that right about now. It’s colder’n hell out there.

Just wanted to get that out of the way. Sorry. The lunacy passing for policy debate these days has reached depths of stupidity unimaginable just a few years ago. And President Trump’s unhinged two-hour dark-comedy routine at CPAC last Saturday just amplified it to the next level. It’s difficult to have an intelligent discussion about the environment — or anything, really — when one side of the “debate” has decided the best way forward is uninformed, knuckle-dragging ridicule.

Coal ash ponds near TVA’s Allen Fossil power plant

But the environment isn’t a laughing matter. The Green New Deal probably over-reaches, but it’s a starting point for policy discussion, not an edict to be enforced by socialist overlords. It doesn’t ban hamburgers or air travel, no matter what the president says. And wind turbines are used all over the country, generating electricity that will last throughout even the longest Netflix binge. Oh, and solar power works, too, even when it’s cloudy, or dark, like at night.

The environment and this country’s energy policy deserve serious attention and a real back-and-forth over the best ways to move — however gradually — from a mostly fossil fuel-based economy to one that will sustain the nation and the planet in the coming decades. But, as with almost every issue these days, foreign or domestic, political maneuvering and ignorant posturing seems to have subsumed the possibility of any substantive interchange of ideas.

If you need evidence that the environment needs attention, you have only to look to the TVA Allen Fossil power plant just south of Downtown, where we’ve got our own “green” issues to deal with. Thanks to some good reporting by Micaela Watts in The Commercial Appeal this week, we learned that the Memphis Sand Aquifer — the source of Memphis’ lauded drinking water — is in some peril. It is sitting beneath a coal ash landfill that contains ponds contaminated with 350 times the level of arsenic considered safe.

Though TVA closed its coal plant in 2018, replacing it with a more environmentally friendly gas-fired plant, tons of poisonous residue from decades of coal-burning remain at the site, separated from our aquifer by a thin layer of clay. But here’s the bad news: TVA reported this week that there is no clay barrier near the coal ash pond.

This would be a good time to point out the debt of gratitude all the residents of Memphis owe to a group of citizen activists who formed the group Protect Our Aquifer in 2016. They, along with the local chapter of the Sierra Club, have been relentless in their battle to keep TVA from doing what big corporations like to do: Find the cheapest way to do things, no matter the environmental consequences.

All those blue yard signs around town showed that people cared and were involved. The payoff was a big one. First, TVA was persuaded to back off its plans to drill new wells into the aquifer — near the site of the coal ash dump — in order to tap our water to cool its new gas-fired plant. The group was then influential in getting the county commission to re-examine and strengthen its permitting process for digging wells in the county.

That’s often what happens when a real debate is enjoined, when citizens stand up and make noise, and when issues get addressed and discussed in an adult, rational way by governmental bodies. Washington could learn something from what occurred here in Memphis.

Meanwhile, the somewhat good news is that TVA is assuring the public that it is quickly moving to address the problem and bring the coal ash site into alignment with federal guidelines — presuming the Trump administration won’t further weaken those guidelines in coming months in order to appease one of its corporate overlords.

We can only hope they’ll be distracted by trying to save our hamburgers.

When is a statewide political campaign also a natio nal campaign? Or perhaps that question is best turned around: How much do and should national JB

U.S. Rep. Diane Black and American Conservative Union chairman Matt Schlapp, who endorsed her gubernatorial candidacy, engaged in some mutual admiration on Monday.

issues influence, or even become, the substance of statwewide campaigns?

The question is undeniably relevant to the current campaign for Governor of U.S. Representative Diane Black, a Republican who seems at times to be running a national campaign and who, perhaps not coincidentally, made Memphis appearances Monday in the company of Matt Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union, and Ben Carson, secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

Schlapp, a familiar presence on national TV political talk shows, was at a Monday morning press conference with Black on Monday, where he endorsed her gubernatorial candidacy on behalf of the ACU, the nation’s oldest conservative lobbying organization, and Carson was a scheduled speaker, along with Black, at a Monday nighty panel discussion of the ACU’s Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) at FedEx Forum.

Schlapp said ACU had “been in the trenches” with Black for years, praised her work with the House budget committee, and avowed that there was “no better champion in the congress for our conservative values.”

Black reciprocated her pride in her high annual scores with ACU evaluations on issues and made the case that ACU values accorded well with Tennessee “core principles.” People from states like New york and California who come here and insist on less conservative concepts should be told, “that’s not how we do it here” and advised to “go back” to those states, said Black, who warned against Tennessee’s becoming a “purple” state like North Carolina next door.

During a brief meeting with local reporters, Black defended her solidarity with President Trump and her emphasis on such matters as immigration control at the nation’s southern border.

Issues like “sanctuary cities” and “in-state tuition” for illegals,” both of which she opposes, are important locally, Black said. “As Governor, I’d be responsible for making sure Tennessee is safe.” She added that her recent endorsements by the National Rifle Association and National Right to Life reflected the reality of these organizations’ issues as “concerns right here in our state.”

Asked about her showing in a recent Vanderbilt University poll, which gave her high name recognition statewide but included figures showing her unfavorable ratings higher than her favorable ones, Black answered, “What does the poll really mean? If you break those polls down, you see that they include liberals and moderates in there, and I’m obviously a conservative.”

She said it was “essential that I define who I am and what I’ve stood for over the last 20 years. I’m conservative, and I get things done.” She rejected opponents’ charges that she was a “career politician” and said, “What I really am is a career nurse,” as well as “a businesswoman, an educator,” and someone vitally interested in public policy. “I’m a very well-rounded person,” she said.

More than any of her GOP primary opponents, including former state Economic Development Commissioner Randy Boyd, who has called her “D.C. Diane” Black identifies with President Trump, who has returned the favor by praising her, especially for her work as House budget chair.

“Tax reform and GDP growth. I’m very proud of that,” Black said. “The President has vision and is a strong negotiator.” She was somewhat more conditional on the subject of the President’s recent announcement of tariffs against American trading partners. “That’s something you don’t do when there’s no problem,” she said, mentioning the state’s agricultural producers as being potentially vulnerable to retaliation.

“It could be difficult if it’s not done in a fair way,” she said of the new Trump hardline on tariffs. “But he is one who bargains and bargains well.”

Black would appear twice later on at the CPAC meeting, held in the lobby of FedEx Forum, first with both Schlapp and Carson in a panel in which she and the HUD secretary made much of their Horatio Alger-like rise from youthful poverty (both, as they told it, having been raised in public housing) and later, in a concluding panel with Schlapp, in which Black underscored her pro-life credentials and the two of them led what was by then a much-diminished crowd in a valedictory pledge-of-allegiance to the flag.