Money Where Their Mouths Are?
Congress refuses to support the Green New Deal. Does House spending tell a similar story of environmental apathy?
In 2019, House Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Senator Edward Markley released House Resolution 109, more commonly known as the Green New Deal. The resolution includes such goals as “to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions through a fair and just transition for all communities and workers… eliminating pollution and greenhouse gas emissions as much as technologically feasible…[and] identifying other emission and pollution sources and creating solutions to remove them”, aimed at slowing the progression and mitigating the present impacts of climate change. So far, Congress has been less than receptive to the resolution; on March 26th, 2019 the resolution was voted on by the Senate. The result: 57 votes against, 0 votes in favor. 43 Democratic senators voted “present”. In 2021 the disapproval of the resolution was once again confirmed when the U.S. Senate adopted an amendment to “prohibit legislation or regulations that implement the Green New Deal” by a vote of 99–0. A vote for passage of the Green New Deal has not yet occurred in the House of Representatives, but it would come as no surprise to see similar pushback to the legislation in the lower chamber of Congress. From the floors of Congress, it seems that most legislators just aren’t willing to stake their careers on supporting the proposals that would make a real environmental difference. But is this same apathy towards the environment reflected in the professional activities of house members, or does there seem to be an effort to be congressperson in a sustainable fashion? And just how much are our elected representatives contributing to waste, emissions, etc?
To find out I dove into the House of Representatives disbursement data from Quarter 3 (July-September) of 2021. This dataset is “a quarterly public report of all receipts and expenditures for U.S. House of Representatives Members, Committees, Leadership, Officers and Offices.” Excluding personnel compensation, a significant number of the purposes that reps spent the most on can be tied to carbon emissions. These potentially carbon-intensive purposes include franked mail, commercial transportation, printing and reproduction, private auto mileage, and gasoline. The top 9 expense purposes (excluding personnel compensation) are summed and visualized below, by party, for the quarter.
To get an idea of the carbon footprint of one of these activities, I looked into franked mail — the third costliest expenditure for reps (once again excluding personnel compensation). One of the privileges of being a congress member is the ability to send mail without paying for postage. In the Senate, this is limited to $50,000 per senator per year, but in the House, reps are unrestricted in the amount they can spend on mass mailings, so long as it is within their Member Representational Allowance which is allotted for all office expenses. It would seem that House reps are definitely taking advantage of this privilege; in Q3 of 2021 alone, the House spent a grand total of $2,691,896.21 on franked mail. That’s a lot of letters. Of course, it is impossible to know the exact types of mail being sent, but if we assume that this mail consists of standard-size, rectangular envelopes sent at the first-class rate of $0.63, we get that approximately 4,272,851 individual pieces of mail were distributed by the House in the span of just 3 months. A 2011 study estimated that a single sheet of A4 paper accounts for around 4.5g of CO2 equivalent, so if every piece of franked mail consisted of only one sheet of paper (a generous assumption), the House’s franked mail for one quarter would amount to 37,680 lbs of CO2 equivalent emissions. Interestingly, Democrats seem to have spent considerably less on franked mail in the quarter than their Republican colleagues. Between the 235 Democrats in the 116th Congress, $840,527 was spent on franked mail. The 199 House Republicans spent more than double that: $1,779,992. Now perhaps this isn’t the most abhorrent offense to be going after our elected officials for, but in an age where a huge majority of the country can be reached digitally, it’s an expense (fiscally and environmentally) worth questioning the necessity of.
Looking at other types of top expenditures, the trend of Republicans spending more on carbon-intensive activities seems to hold true. They spent about $1.18 million on commercial transportation, $1.17 million on printing and reproduction, and around $725K on private auto mileage. Democrats comparatively spent $920K on commercial transportation, $939K on printing and reproduction, and around $196K on private auto mileage. House Democrats might not be willing to step up in support of the Green New Deal just yet, but the data seems to show that they at least try to perform their duties as congresspeople in a relatively sustainable manner.
Still, the presence of wasteful and carbon-intensive activities in the list of what House representatives from both parties are spending the most on is cause for concern, and compounds on their failure to push for legislation that will be needed to slow and prevent climate change. So I suppose the data seems to support what Congress has already made clear: our representatives don’t care all that much about the environment, not in their legislative work nor in conducting their professional activities.
