Mike Pence - Not Just As Asshole! Not Just A Xtian Fascist! He's Also A Koch Industries Tool!

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Pence became chairman of the House Republican Conference, the GOP's third-ranking House position, as Obama entered the White House in January 2009. By June, the Democratic-controlled House passed the first climate change legislation ever to make it through a chamber of Congress. The bill was based on cap-and-trade, an approach for setting limits on carbon emissions and selling permits to polluting companies, who could in turn trade the chits among each other. Such a market-based system had been backed by both Obama and his opponent, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). But bipartisan support for climate action was about to crumble, and Pence would play an important part in its demise.

To serve as his Republican conference chief of staff, Pence tapped Marc Short, a political operative with contacts throughout the conservative donor world. Short had been executive director of the Young America's Foundation, one of a network of nonprofits funded by wealthy conservatives like the Koch brothers to promote conservative values and policies. Short arranged for Pence's first invitation to speak at one of the Koch brothers' secretive fund-raising seminars in June 2009, according to a 2017 profile by The New Yorker's Jane Mayer. In the run-up to that event, Pence was one of the first members of Congress to sign the No Carbon Tax pledge that the Koch-funded advocacy group, Americans for Prosperity, was circulating against the cap-and-trade legislation. Pence urged other members to sign.

"I think the science is very mixed" on climate change, Pence told MSNBC host Chris Matthews that spring. "Look, I'm all for clean air. I'm all for clean coal technology. I'm sure reducing CO2 emissions would be a positive thing." But, Pence said, "You're going to see Republicans... oppose this massive national energy tax."

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The previous Republican governor, Mitch Daniels, had established a voluntary renewable energy standard and launched a major energy efficiency program for Indiana. But with Pence as governor, the Republican legislature worked to dismantle those programs. In 2014, when Indiana lawmakers passed a repeal of the energy efficiency initiative , Pence took care not to cheer the demise of the popular program. He said he had mixed feelings, but he killed the program decisively when he neither signed nor vetoed the legislation, allowing the repeal to become law in 2015 without his signature. Years later, studies showed that Pence had reason to avoid taking credit for the first-ever state repeal of energy efficiency rules. Doing away with the requirements cost Indiana consumers $140 million more in utility bills from 2015 to 2019, and may have slashed job creation in the state by 37 percent, according to one analysis.

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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/31082020/candidate-profile-mike-pence-climate-change-election-2020