Raising Kaine: Clinton VP Pick Good News for the Environment

As Hillary Clinton considered the selection of Senator Tim Kaine as her running mate some progressives responded, “Meh.” But based on his history environmentalists should be saying, “Yeh!”

Indeed, the NRDC Action Fund rightly called him impressive and the League of Conservation Voters said awesome.

So let’s look in more detail at the record.

The first card off the deck should be his LCV environmental rating card — a lifetime score of 91% as a U.S. senator. This has included many votes on clean energy that could have spelled trouble for a politician in a purple coal state like Virginia. It provides a shockingly clear contrast to his GOP counterpart, Governor Mike Pence of Indiana, who has denied the existence of climate change while eking out a meager 4% rating from LCV for his time in Congress.

But it’s worth going back a decade to measure the span of Kaine’s commitment. He had already been a city councilman and mayor in Richmond and Virginia’s lieutenant governor when he was elected to be governor in 2005. In 2007 he broke new ground by creating the Commission on Climate Change to help the state cope with the effects of climate change and to make recommendations for going beyond his existing Virginia Energy Plan’s goal of reducing by 30% the pollution contributing to it. He also advanced measures to protect 400,000 acres of land and open space from development.

These steps in the right direction were not obvious in a state that had gone Republican in 10 straight presidential elections. Indeed in 2004 Virginia had just helped reelect George W. Bush, who as president had pushed for a serious weakening of air pollution laws, euphemistically called “Clear Skies,” and a dirty energy bill co-written by major polluters and Dick Cheney. Since then Obama has won this swing state twice, and Kaine’s success in Virginia should help deliver it again in November.

When Kaine decided to run for a U.S. Senate seat in 2012 he put the issue of climate change directly before the voters of Virginia by calling out Republican opponent George Allen for denying the need to act on the issue. Kaine later credited his position on the issue and the work of environmentalists in support of him as instrumental to his victory. Once in the Senate he further stepped up his work on climate issues.

Some environmentalists have voiced honest concerns about Kaine on natural gas and coastal drilling issues. These issues should be considered carefully. But let’s face it a 91% record may not be perfect, but it’s pretty darn good.

Over his career Kaine has gotten increasingly active on clean energy and climate issues, amassing a solid record of accomplishments. Here are some highlights from Tim Kaine’s work on the environment:

· Senator Kaine supported Obama’s bold plan to clean up dirty, old coal-fired power plants. Meanwhile Donald Trump, Mike Pence and the Republican Party platform all call for repealing the administration’s Clean Power Plan.

· Senator Kaine called on Obama not to approve the Keystone XL pipeline for filthy tars sands from Canada. In explaining the failure of the project to measure up in an op-ed in the Washington Post, Kaine concluded simply we needed “to make energy tomorrow cleaner than it is today.”

· Senator Kaine helped convene a bipartisan congressional and intergovernmental conference in 2014 reviewing results from Old Dominion University’s pilot project on the threat of sea level rise to the coastline and naval facilities in the Hampton Roads region. (While it’s too much to say Kaine got participating Republicans to admit that climate change was real, the event opened a dialogue that seemed to persuade them the sea was in fact rising and something needed to be done about it.)

· As governor Kaine endorsed the Obama administration’s increased restrictions on the controversial and destructive practice of mountaintop removal for coal mining.

· Governor Kaine also created the Commission on Climate Change through Executive Order 59. Among other recommendations to help the state reduce climate change pollution, the commission gave particular emphasis to renewable energy and energy efficiency measures. Kaine’s successor, Republican Bob McDonnell, ended the commission but it was renamed and reinstated by current Democratic governor Terry McAuliffe.

Now the choice is between the ambitious policy agenda of the Clinton-Kaine ticket or the dreadful prospect of a Trump-Pence White House. Kaine has modestly described himself as boring, but I find his addition to the ticket exciting. In fact on the environment he’s not boring, he’s bearing down.