The League of Conservation Voters released their annual National Environmental Scorecard Wednesday, ranking members of congress on their environmental voting record in the past year.
The report tallies 35 "key votes" on environmental issues in the House and 14 in the Senate, and averages the voting record of each member of Congress. Eighty-five members of the House, along with 37 Senators, had a 90 percent or higher pro-environmental record in 2012. Yet 17 senators and 175 of the lower chamber's 435 members received a score of less than 10 percent, according to LCV.
Votes tracked in the report related to topics such as offshore drilling, oil subsidies, public lands protections, ocean policy and other natural resource and environmental issues.
Gene Karpinski, President of the League of Conservation Voters, said in an emailed statement, “The best that can be said about this session of the 112th Congress is that it’s over." He added, "In the face of Hurricane Sandy and the hottest year on record in the U.S., the House of Representatives managed to cement its status as the most anti-environmental House ever."
"The good news is that while the U.S. House voted against the environment with alarming frequency, both the U.S. Senate and the Obama administration stood firm against the vast majority of these attacks," the group wrote in the report.
The report's findings echo the observations of Harvard University's Theda Skocpol, "who noted a sharp shift away from environmental causes by Republican members of Congress over the last five or six years," according to The Guardian.
The League of Conservation Voters' National Environmental Scorecard has been "the nationally accepted yardstick used to rate members of Congress on environmental, public health, and energy issues" since 1971, according to the organization.
A recent report to Congress from the Government Accountability Office affirmed the "very clear" science behind climate change and warned that the federal government is "terribly exposed" fiscally to the impacts of climate change, reported The Huffington Post's Michael McAuliff.
Below, find a list of the 17 senators who received a score of 10 percent or less on environmental issues and fell well below the Senate average of voting pro-environmentally 56 percent of the time in 2012. Read the full report here.
