So, for that matter, does Elizabeth Warren, who stood with Sanders to support him in this political stunt.
On Wednesday — the day after Democrats and progressive causes took another serious jamming at the ballot box — Sanders and Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR) introduced a bill they call the “Keep It in the Ground” Act, which has the unpopular purpose of preventing oil and gas exploration and production.
According to Daily Kos:
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
Sen. Jeff Merkley and Sen. Bernie Sanders introduced legislation Wednesday to stop issuing leases to extract fossil fuels from on- and off-shore federal lands. Titled the Keep It in the Ground Act, the bill would also terminate all existing federal leases that are not producing. Co-sponsors of the legislation are Democratic Sens. Barbara Boxer, Ben Cardin, Kirsten Gillibrand, Patrick Leahy, and Elizabeth Warren.
(H/t: Freedom Post)
Pew reporting early this year, based on long-term opinion tracking, indicated that a majority of the public continues to support more drilling (i.e., not just continuation of the drilling we already do). Although Democrats show the least support for increased drilling, 50% of those who call themselves moderate Democrats still favor it, as of the 2014 polling year. It’s only among those who describe themselves as “liberal Democrats” that support for increased drilling drops to 28% (which is still an interestingly healthy percentage). Self-described political “moderates” favor increased drilling by 57%; registered Independents were 46% in favor of it.
Likewise, a national poll in 2015 showed two-thirds of respondents supporting approval of the Keystone XL pipeline.
With significant percentages of Americans across the political spectrum agreeing with the call to “Drill, baby, drill,” Sanders’s plan to “keep it in the ground” puts him way out in the far-left fringe. That, of course, is also established nicely by the comments of his supporters at the press event announcing the new bill. See, for example, the lament of Bill McKibben, founder of the activist group 350.org:
McKibben said if the effort had started a long time ago, transitioning to a clean-green, climate-friendly world would have been easier. But, he lamented, starting decades ago was hindered because “there was a disinformation campaign” concocted by fossil-fuel interests to persuade people that global warming wasn’t really happening. This profit-motivated propaganda has led us, he said, to a world in which we have just now seen the highest wind speeds ever recorded in a storm in our hemisphere and a hurricane in Yemen that produced 10 years’ worth of rain in two days. Failure to take action on climate change, he said, has produced “instability and danger” which we now see in the “constant ongoing testimony of Mother Nature.”
Considering that our reliable weather records go back less than 200 years, on a planet that is some 4-5 billion years old, drawing seminal conclusions about Mother Nature’s testimony from two weather events in the last three weeks seems a bit hasty. But that’s what the far-left fringe specializes in.
It is meaningful testimony, in another sense, that Bernie Sanders makes any headway at all against mainstream Democratic political candidates. Maybe the testimony is, for example, that the mainstream candidates (Clinton, O’Malley) are weak, and too many Democratic voters are out on the radical fringe themselves, having very little in common now with the traditional Democrat of yesteryear.
If the day should come when Elizabeth Warren is put up as a candidate for the Oval Office, expect the mainstream media to impose a blackout on her participation in this radical fringe event. The media watch over the reputations of Democrats better than the politicians’ political handlers do.
