The Sierra Club Responds to Paul Krugman

From a link in the comments to Paul Krugman's column, here's the Sierra Club's response:

A Response to Paul Krugman, by Carl Pope, Sierra Club: The Sierra Club, unlike Paul Krugman does not believe that it is naïve to reward leadership. Nor do we think that all politics comes down to whether you have a D or an R after your name on the ballot. Senator Lincoln Chafee earned our endorsement for his courage in standing up to the bullies in the Republican leadership, for transcending the polarizing sound-and-light show that passes for politics these days, and for hewing true to his core beliefs. Championing the protection of the legacy we leave our children cannot remain a partisan issue -- we are all sweltering under the same sun this summer.

The value of the Sierra Club's endorsement -- to environmentally concerned independents, Republicans, and Democrats alike -- is that it tells voters where a candidate stands on values they cherish. If a voter wants to know who the Democrat is in a race, they don't need the Sierra Club to tell them. Our job is to reward conviction, applaud leadership, and promote progress made in cleaning up the air and water and in preserving our wild lands and wildlife -- no matter which side of the aisle we find it on.

Indeed, in political races all over the country where the Sierra Club happens to be endorsing Democrats who share Lincoln Chafee's values on the environment, right-wing campaign managers have tried to blunt the power of our message by saying that we are simply "a knee-jerk arm of the Democratic party." Paul Krugman, ironically, would like us to make the jobs of these people easier.

And to set the record straight -- because of the committee seats he holds and the influence that he wields as a member of the Republican majority -- Senator Chafee has been extremely effective in stopping President Bush's polluting "Clear Skies" plan and in blocking efforts to weaken the Clean Air Act and the Endangered Species Act.

At the Sierra Club, we value performance above party affiliation. We stand up for the people who have stood up for us and for the environment. And we are proud to stand with, and behind, Senator Chafee.

Krugman's argument is:

Now compare this with the behavior of advocacy groups like the Sierra Club, the environmental organization, and Naral, the abortion-rights group, both of which have endorsed Senator Lincoln Chafee, Republican of Rhode Island, for re-election. The Sierra Club’s executive director defended the Chafee endorsement by saying, “We choose people, not parties.” And it’s true that Mr. Chafee has usually voted with environmental groups.

But while this principle might once have made sense, it’s just naïve today. Given both the radicalism of the majority party’s leadership and the ruthlessness with which it exercises its control of the Senate, Mr. Chafee’s personal environmentalism is nearly irrelevant when it comes to actual policy outcomes; the only thing that really matters for the issues the Sierra Club cares about is the “R” after his name.

Put it this way: If the Democrats gain only five rather than six Senate seats this November, Senator James Inhofe, who says that global warming is “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people,” will remain in his current position as chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. And if that happens, the Sierra Club may well bear some of the responsibility.

And, in a follow-up to today's column in Money Talks, Krugman adds:

Centrism, Schmentrism, Money Talks: ...Paul Krugman: My point wasn't that Chafee is a bad guy (and I'm not allowed to make election endorsements, anyway — officially, you have no idea whom either David Brooks or yours truly wants to win the midterms.)

The point, instead, is about the nature of the political environment. Take the six most liberal Republican senators, and replace them with Democrats who, as individuals, are considerably more conservative; the result would still be a dramatic shift of the political scene to the left. Take the 16 most liberal Republican members of the House and replace them with conservative Dems, and we'd be living in a transformed political universe. Conservative organizations seem to understand this; many liberal groups apparently don't.

Update: The House Energy and Commerce subcommittee:

More Denial, Editorial, Washington Post: Over the past two weeks, a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee has held a pair of truly senseless hearings on global climate change. The purpose was not to figure out how to cut carbon emissions. It wasn't even to discuss the science of global climate change in general. Instead, the purpose was to pick at a single study of global temperature patterns, the so-called "hockey stick" graph -- a trend line that purports to show a sudden and dramatic increase in global temperatures in the 1990s and therefore looks like a hockey stick. The graph is hardly central to the modern debate over climate change. Yet the subcommittee has investigated the scientists who dared produce it and hounded them for information. Now that a study of the graph by the National Academy of Sciences has largely backed up the hockey stick findings, the committee has been holding hearings to attack it some more. ...

The reality is that nobody knows how bad global warming will be... So the prudent move is to take action now as a kind of insurance policy. Yes, reducing carbon emissions substantially is a daunting prospect given American and world dependence on fossil fuels -- so daunting that it induces a kind of denial in many people. But it is a particularly ugly kind of denial that leads a congressional committee to spend this kind of energy attacking scientists, instead of confronting the problems their data suggest.