Anti-environment Rep. McMorris Rodgers to chair House energy committee

House Republicans have chosen Washington Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers to chair the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which oversees environmental, energy, and climate change policy. Environmental advocates have long considered the Republican, in her 10th term, a strong opponent of the environment and a reliable vote for the interests of the oil industry.

McMorris Rodgers told supporters last year that if she became chair, she intended to promote American “energy dominance” and legislation like her unsuccessful 2022 bill to “unleash America’s oil and natural gas production” through more drilling and fewer environmental and safety regulations, E&E News reported in December.

A McMorris Rodgers spokesperson did not respond to an American Independent Foundation inquiry for this story.

In her 20 years in the House, she has compiled a strong anti-environmental record. According to the League of Conservation Voters, she has cast pro-environment votes just 5% of the time during her career.

In 2012, McMorris Rodgers parroted climate denialist talking points to the Spokane Spokesman-Review, falsely stating, “Scientific reports are inconclusive at best on human culpability for global warming.” The overwhelming consensus among scientists is that humans are the major driver of climate change.

She told the same newspaper in 2018 that humans are “partially” to blame for climate change, but still opposed government efforts to curb the problem.

McMorris Rodgers cheered President Donald Trump’s 2017 withdrawal from the international Paris Agreement on climate action and panned President Joe Biden’s decision to rejoin it as a “BIG MISTAKE.”

In November 2021, she tweeted, “The Biden administration’s energy agenda is an agenda that is divorced from reality. They’re putting their radical climate agenda ahead of both national and energy security.”

Instead, the Washington Republican has urged more domestic fossil fuel drilling, increased use of hydropower, an “all-of-the-above energy strategy,” and more “free-market solutions” to protect the climate.

She also pushed for construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, an ecologically dangerous and ultimately aborted project to import tar sands oil from Canada. Pipelines carrying tar sands oil are especially susceptible to leaks.

Though Keystone XL would have brought more oil from a foreign country, McMorris Rodgers repeatedly made false claims that it would have made the United States energy independent.

In October 2018, she lied to a debate audience, claiming, “The Trump administration is not doing anything to roll back the regulations that are going to hurt the environment.”She opposed Biden’s historic climate investments, writing in an April 2021 press release: “While I agree that we must address climate change, Democrats’ pie-in-the-sky, top-down government approach will only cripple America with debt, destroy jobs, and empower China to beat us in the global economy. Instead, we must do it the American way – with freedom to create, not socialism to control.”

In December 2016, news outlets erroneously reported that then President-elect Trump had chosen McMorris Rodgers to be interior secretary, though she later said she was never actually offered the job.

At the time, an array of environmental groups noted her poor record on the climate and environment.

“McMorris Rodgers has an absolutely extreme anti-environmental voting record,” said Gary Wockner, director of Save the Colorado, a nonprofit group that works to protect the Colorado River.

The environmental law nonprofit Earthjustice’s then-vice president of litigation for lands, Drew Caputo, warned in a press statement:

Congresswoman McMorris Rodgers’s environmental record is frankly terrible. She has repeatedly voted against the environment and in favor of special interests who want to use public lands and resources for private gain. She has supported rollbacks to critical environmental protections for our nation’s forests, voted to undercut the president’s authority to protect public lands as national monuments in Western states, and voted against restricting taxpayer hand-outs to companies that profit from oil and gas extracted from federal public lands.

“If McMorris Rodgers brings her ideology to management of America’s public lands, it will be open season for polluters who want to frack, drill and mine our public lands and waters,” predicted the Center for Biological Diversity’s Randi Spivak. “She just doesn’t understand that the nation’s public lands are a legacy for this and future generations rather than up for grabs to industry.”

The oil and gas industry has rewarded McMorris Rodgers for her votes, showering her with campaign contributions. According to OpenSecrets, she has taken more than $933,000 from the sector over the course of her career.

In October 2018, the Sierra Club included her on a list of “Fossil Fools,” citing her voting record and many oil and gas contributions as proof of “her allegiance to corporate polluters.”

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.