Ed Markey, Climate Champion: A Legislative History
By: Lilian McCarthy, Jonas Poggi, and Isabella Rocha
A High School Science Project
Decades before terms like “climate crisis,” “sustainability,” and “the Green New Deal” had entered political vocabulary, there was one thing on Ed Markey’s mind: Strontium-90. A radioactive byproduct of nuclear testing, Strontium-90 was a substance that was turning up in Malden’s milk.
Ed’s father, an employee of the Hood Milk Company, had shown him the technology the company was using to extract Strontium-90. Before campaigns and elections, before oversight and legislating, before organizing and advocacy, Ed had one challenge: the Malden Catholic High School science fair. As judges evaluated his project, Ed explained the process — although slightly bungling the details. “I saw it as a public health issue. I saw it as an issue for the children of the world,” said Ed in a recent campaign video.
This was the beginning of a long history of Ed Markey’s environmental activism. While today 80% of young voters say that climate change is a major threat, fighting for environmental justice wasn’t always popular. Despite that, Senator Ed Markey has dedicated his career to it. Before Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was born, before Al Gore had won his Nobel Prize, and before our climate crisis escalated to the dire situation we are in today, Ed Markey was standing up — often alone — for environmental issues that affect the lives of every American.
Cold War Denuclearization
Senator Markey began his crusade for clean energy when he was 15, speaking in front of parents, teachers, and peers at the Malden Catholic High School Science Fair. But now, as Joshua Miller wrote: “No elected official on the national scene has been banging the drum about the nuclear menace as loudly and for as long as the [73]-year-old Malden Democrat.”
As a young legislator during the Cold War, Ed was a vocal advocate against nuclearization. He fought state officials and U.S. Presidents for decades about the crisis of nuclear weapons; Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and now Donald Trump are just a few of the obstacles he has encountered in his push against nuclear power and arms. He even published a book, Nuclear Peril, about global anti-proliferation.
Appliance Efficiency Act
Before climate change was considered a serious issue, Senator Markey authored the Appliance Efficiency Act of 1987. The act aimed to set minimum energy efficiency standards for common appliances to make sure that producers were making products that were maximally efficient, both technologically and economically. Efficiency standards had already been set, but with the Appliance Efficiency Act of 1987, the Department of Energy was tasked with updating the standards.
The bill ended up passing through both chambers of Congress and was signed into law by President Ronald Reagan on March 17, 1987. As a result of the Appliance Efficiency Act of 1987, home appliances such as air conditioners, refrigerators, freezers, washers, and dryers were assigned minimum efficiency standards in order to reduce energy consumption. Refrigerators today use only about 25% of the energy they used back in 1975, and this difference is caused by the new efficiency regulations set by Markey’s Appliance Efficiency Act. At the same time, refrigerators are becoming larger, and have more features that improve use while still remaining energy efficient.
These improvements in energy efficiency have also allowed consumers to save money on energy, and saves the country billions of dollars in energy costs. Senator Markey’s bill not only helps the environment by having appliances use less energy to operate, but helps our wallets by saving us money.
Fuel Efficiency Standards
In 2007, global warming was far from a hot-button issue. Yet after Democrats’ historic victory in the 2006 midterms, Congress took substantial action on climate change for the first time in decades — this action was spearheaded by Ed Markey. As chair of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, then-Representative Markey was able to create progress on an issue he had been paying attention to since the turn of the century: reforming federal standards to ensure that cars emitted less carbon dioxide.
Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards are federal regulations that ensure new cars must meet a certain standard of fuel efficiency. Going up against the oil barons of modern day, Ed challenged Congress to increase the standards more than they already had, mandating that fuel economy standards increase by four miles per gallon each year. Ed knew that this would be an uphill battle, fighting against one of the most powerful groups in politics — but Ed also knew the dire impacts of our nation’s dependence on oil.
Transportation comprises a plurality of our nation’s greenhouse gas emissions, and is directly linked to global warming. “The urgent, looming crisis of global warming continues to rise as every day goes by,” Ed said then. “It is our duty — our responsibility — to break that addiction.” Congress eventually reached an agreement to not only increase CAFE standards, but to allow for more use of renewable energy. These standards would not have existed as they do today without Ed’s work in the past.
Waxman -Markey
In 2009, then-Representative Ed Markey along with Representative Henry Waxman introduced the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, also referred to as Waxman-Markey. The bill required electrical utilities to be 20% renewable and energy efficient by 2020 and would have invested billions of dollars into clean energy technology as well as energy efficiency, including carbon capture. If passed, the bill would have caused an 80% decrease in U.S. carbon emissions by 2050. Waxman-Markey would have drastically reduced carbon emissions compared to where we are today.
At the time, Waxman-Markey was the only comprehensive piece of legislation addressing climate change to pass either section of Congress. Although the bill passed the House with support from a few Republicans, it ultimately ended up failing in the Senate due to intense opposition to the bill from fossil fuel companies and the Tea Party.
Waxman-Markey was one of the strongest and most ambitious pieces of climate change legislation introduced, and it would have been a start to fighting climate change. Even though Waxman-Markey ultimately did not become law, Senator Markey has continued to fight for bold, comprehensive climate legislation, specifically through his work on the Green New Deal.
BP Oil Spill
On April 20th, 2011, one of the most catastrophic environmental disasters in modern history began. An explosion on the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig killed 11 people, and 205,800,000 million gallons of oil flooded the Gulf of Mexico. At the time, it was unknown to the public how severe the oil spill was: BP withheld information in an attempt to save face.
But Ed Markey knew that BP was up to something. Using his influence, Ed made sure that BP publicly broadcast footage from the cameras it was using to monitor the spill. Within 24 hours, one million people had seen the video, temporarily crashing Congress’ web system. After the footage was released to the committee, scientists calculated that the 1,000 barrels of oil per day number that BP had previously stated was false: instead, 60,000 barrels of oil were spilling into the gulf each day. In the days before Twitch, Facebook Live, and Twitter, Ed used the power of digital media to create change.
Ed’s work yielded tangible results: a year after the spill, BP paid a $4.5 billion settlement and pled guilty to 14 federal criminal charges, including obstruction of Congress for information that it withheld from Ed’s committee. BP was then suspended from receiving federal contracts due to its mismanagement of the spill: the details which we would never have known about were it not for Ed.
Green Public Transportation
Most recently, Senator Markey introduced the BRAIN TRAIN Act, or the Building Rail Across Intercity Networks To Ride Around Interior of the Nation Act. If you like that catchy name, just wait until you hear about the actual bill.
Within the Act is a call for the Department of Transportation to select high-performance rail projects based on exactly what public infrastructure should be based on — levels of estimated ridership, on-time performance, reduced trip time, and more. Moreover, the Act focuses on providing intercity passenger rail service in regions that are consistently under-connected to affordable public transportation. And finally, the rail projects will be chosen based on the anticipated “favorable impact on air or traffic congestion and safety.”
The BRAIN TRAIN comes at a time when the general public is finally beginning to pay attention to the intersection of climate and racial justice–and it is a perfect synthesis of how the government can bring actual change to underserved and oppressed communities. Such thoughtful federal legislation is hard to come by.
Ed’s never fought for these issues because they’re popular — Ed’s fought for these issues because they’re right, and because they’re just. It’s safe to say that when he’s re-elected, Ed’s going to keep fighting for them just as vigorously as he always has.
