*BFF = Best Friends Forever
With candidates like Donald Trump in the race for the Republican nomination for president, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker might seem almost moderate. But avoiding Trump's offensive gaffes hardly qualifies Walker as a moderate, especially when it comes to climate change and clean energy.
In fact, Walker's positions have been extreme -- and extremely aligned with the Koch brothers' Big Polluter Agenda. Before Walker became a presidential candidate (officially on July 13), the Koch brothers had already given him millions of dollars of support during his tenure as Governor through their organizations, Americans for Prosperity and Freedom Partners. These groups work to elect candidates who are climate deniers, and who want to protect the profits of Big Oil and Big Pollution at the expense of clean air, clean water, public health, and action against climate change.
Charles and David Koch plan to spend close to $900 million in the 2016 election, effectively acting as their own shadow political party. Although the brothers claim to remain neutral, David Koch reportedly told a room full of donors that they think he should be the Republican nominee.
Though Walker is a relatively new national political figure, he's made a splash on the national political scene since taking office in 2011 for his controversial actions regarding unions and abortion. What about his record on energy and environmental issues?
According to the Wisconsin League of Conservation Voters' Executive Director: "He really has gone after every single piece of environmental protection: land, air, water -- he's left no stone unturned. It's hard to imagine anyone has done worse."
On climate change, Walker has declared that Wisconsin will not comply with the EPA's Clean Power Plan, which aligns him directly with Senator Mitch McConnell's dirty tactics. He's pledged to "oppose any legislation relating to climate change that includes a net increase in government revenue." Under Walker's administration, the Wisconsin Board of Commissioners of Public Lands voted to ban its employees from working on global warming issues on state time.
On environmental protection more generally, Walker said in June that he wants to gut the EPA. He doubled down on this bad idea recently, saying that state environment departments should take charge and that EPA should be "limited to mediating interstate conflicts over, say, where a body of water or a piece of land goes through multiple states." That's not an encouraging proposition given his administration's record: the state Department of Natural Resources, run by a Walker appointee who opposes environmental protection, has laid off staff in the face of the governor's own budget cuts, delayed important rules and cut back on enforcing laws that protect state residents from pollution.
If you're concerned about the Koch brothers' using their Big Oil money to enact the Big Polluter Agenda, then the prospect of a Scott Walker presidency isn't pretty. With seventy-eight percent of voters saying they think the government should limit global warming pollution, we'll have to hope those voters' opinions count for more than the Koch brothers' millions.