A gas-mask wearing demonstrator during the first Earth Day celebration in 1970. (Associated Press)

 

Happy Earth Day!
To start, a quick quiz:

1. Who said the following quote:

“Restoring nature to its natural state is a cause beyond party and beyond factions. It has become a common cause of all the people of this country. It is a cause of particular concern to young Americans, because they, more than we, will wreak the grim consequences of our failure to act on programs which are needed now if we are to prevent disaster later.”

2. Which organization contributed the most money and support to the first Earth Day?

(Yup, you guessed it: you gotta read the post to find the answers.)

A planetary shout-out

From its scrappy beginnings 43 years ago as an effort to teach the public about America’s environmental crisis, Earth Day has evolved into a major international event. It’s now the largest secular celebration in the world, with millions of activists simultaneously participating in countries around the globe.

Right now the earth needs all the love it can get. But even in the face of today’s catastrophic environmental crises, like climate change and the vast destruction of natural habitats, environmentalism has become a staunchly partisan issue in Washington, where lawmakers repeatedly shy away from legislative action to address very urgent problems. This is evident not only in Congress’ failure to enact any comprehensive legislation on climate change, but also in the alarming number of elected officials who consider the mere suggestion of stricter environmental regulation anathema, a plot to kill jobs and weaken our economy. In fact, many lawmakers now consider the Environmental Protection Agency among the most reviled and distrusted agencies in the federal government. This was evident last year, when several Republican presidential candidates repeatedly called for the agency’s termination.

Have Americans always been so apprehensive about environmental laws and regulations? And has it always been so controversial and partisan?

The first Earth Day

Back in 1970, the environmental outlook was not so shiny either.
After decades of unfettered industrial and economic growth in the absence of strong federal environmental laws, America had managed to majorly muck up its air and water resources. Toxic effluent from factories spilling into streams and rivers was not an uncommon site in industrial areas. Countless open spaces and waterways throughout the country had become dumping grounds, and air pollution was so bad, it frequently left urban areas shrouded in thick blankets of smog.

Consider this timeline of events:

• November 1966: In New York City, 168 people die of respiratory-related illnesses over a 3-day period due largely to horrendous air quality.

• March 1967: Secretary of the Interior Stewart L. Udall, announces the first official list of endangered wildlife species in the U.S. 78 animals are named, including the symbol of American itself: the Bald Eagle.

• January 1969: A blowout at an offshore oil rig near Santa Barbara spills upwards of 10,000 gallons of crude oil for 10 days into the Santa Barbara Channel and onto nearby beaches. At the time, it’s considered largest oil spill in American history (sadly, it now ranks third, overtaken by the 1989 Exxon Valdez and 2010 Deepwater Horizon).

• June 1969: A particularly fetid industrial stretch of the Cuyahoga River running through Cleveland bursts into flames (seriously) when oil-soaked debris in the water is ignited by sparks from a passing train.

“If the people really understood that in the lifetime of their children, they’re going to have destroyed the quality of the air and the water all over the world and perhaps made the globe unlivable in a half century, they’d do something about it. But this is not well understood.”

That’s a quote from Senator Gaylord Nelson, a Democrat from Wisconsin, who spearheaded the first Earth Day organizing effort.

Nelson formed a congressional steering committee, invited California Republican Congressman Pete McCloskey to co-chair it and hired 25-year-old Harvard Law School dropout Denis Hayes to direct the undertaking. Borrowing from the Vietnam War protest model, the mission was to organize environmental teach-ins throughout the nation, all during the course of a single day.

With a very limited budget and no email or internet access (didn’t exist yet), Hayes and his small group of young organizers mailed out thousands of letters to high school and college student body presidents across the nation requesting their participation. The group successfully brought together volunteers in dozens of cities and college campuses to organize local events.

Denis Hayes in the Earth Day campaign office (Associated Press)

The Earth Day organizing effort caught on like “gangbusters,” said Nelson.
On November 30, 1969, the New York Times reported: “Rising concern about the ‘environmental crisis’ is sweeping the nations campuses with an intensity that may be on its way to eclipsing student discontent over the war in Vietnam.”

Hayes, who was interviewed in the recent PBS documentary Earth Days, recalls the sentiment:

“Lord knows what we thought we were doing. It was wild and exciting and out of control and the sort of thing that lets you know you’ve really got something big happening … What we were trying to do was create a brand new public consciousness that would cause the rules of the game to change.”

 

In all, 20 million Americans participated in the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970, marking the single largest demonstration in U.S. history.

Recalls Hayes: “It was a huge high adrenaline effort that in the end genuinely changed things. Before (that), there were people that opposed freeways, people that opposed clear-cutting, or people worried about pesticides, (but) they didn’t think of themselves as having anything in common. After Earth Day they were all part of an environmental movement.”

A rally in Philadelphia as part of the first Earth Day celebration (AP)

And that brings us to the second question of the quiz: The group that was most supportive – financially and otherwise – of the first Earth Day organizing effort was the United Auto Workers.

An organization not generally known for championing environmental causes, the UAW donated money, provided volunteers across the country, and paid the printing costs of promotional materials.

UAW President Walter Reuther pledged his organization’s full support for Earth Day and for subsequent environmental legislation.

In one speech, he said:

“The labor movement is about that problem we face tomorrow morning. Damn right! But to make that the sole purpose of the labor movement is to miss the main target. I mean, what good is a dollar an hour more in wages if your neighborhood is burning down? What good is another week’s vacation if the lake you used to go to is polluted and you can’t swim in it and the kids can’t play in it? What good is another $100 in pension if the world goes up in atomic smoke?”

UAW-sponsored flier

Soon thereafter, General Motors’ president Edward Cole promised “pollution free” cars by 1980 (that didn’t quite pan out).

The era of environmental regulation

Before we get to that, here’s the answer to the first question of our little quiz. The quote was by none other than (drum roll, please):
President Richard Nixon … during his State of the Union address in 1970.

Yes, that Nixon, best remembered as the conservative Republican who appealed to the “silent majority,” prolonged America’s involvement in Vietnam, and resigned in disgrace over the Watergate scandal.

Nixon, however, also oversaw and approved the most sweeping environmental regulations in the history of our nation – the very ones responsible, in part, for the fresh air and clean water we enjoy today.

Even before the first Earth Day, Congress and the president began taking action. On January 1, 1970, Nixon signed the National Environmental Policy Act, which among other things, required environmental impact statements for major new projects and developments.

Environmentalism had never been one of Nixon’s big political priorities, but his administration recognized the growing media attention and public pressure around the issue. In other words, he realized that pushing forward strong environmental regulation was, at that point, a prudent political move.

Three months later, President Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

By the end of 1970, he had signed an extension of the Clean Air Act. Now considered the single most important piece of air pollution legislation in American history, it required the newly formed EPA to create and enforce regulations on airborne pollution known to be hazardous to human health, and, among other things, led to the universal installation of catalytic converters in cars.

By the end of 1972, the Clean Water Act, the Pesticide Control Act (which banned DDT), and the Marine Mammal Protection Act had all been signed into law by Nixon. A year later, he signed the Endangered Species Act and soon thereafter the Safe Water Drinking Act.

Most of these bills were approved with bipartisan support in Congress, some almost unanimously.

In a televised speech in 1972 Nixon said:

“I have sent to Congress today a sweeping set of proposals to clean up our nation’s air and water. This is the most far reaching and comprehensive message on conservation and restoration of our natural resources ever submitted to the Congress by the President of the United States. We are taking these actions not in some distant future, but now, because we know that it is now or never.”

By and large, the regulations worked. Environmental conditions vastly improved. America had been on the brink of ecological disaster, and we did something about it while we still had the chance.

The next decade — through the presidencies of Republican Gerald Ford and Democrat Jimmy Carter — was somewhat of a heyday for environmentalism in America. Which is not to say that there weren’t strong voices of opposition and major lingering environmental problems. Nonetheless, during this era legislators on both sides of the aisle agreed that protecting the environment simply made the most sense.

In 1979, just before the price of a barrel of oil hit $30, President Carter had solar panels installed on the White House roof in support of his Federal Solar Research Institute. He said: “We must balance our demand for energy with our rapidly shrinking resources.”

 The end of the green honeymoon

And then, with the election of President Ronald Reagan in 1980, the environmental honeymoon came to a swift conclusion. By the end of the first year of his presidency, Reagan had issued an executive order giving the Office of Management and Budget (OMB ) the power to regulate environmental proposals before they became public. He also cut the EPA’s budget by almost half. In his second term as president, Reagan even took the symbolic action of dismantling the solar panels on the White House roof.

And since then, a unified political drive to protect the environment has never quite been revived.

The benefit of tangible problems

Organizers of the first Earth Day had a key advantage: the problems they were trying to tackle were clearly visible and impacted everyday life. Kids couldn’t swim in public lakes and rivers because they were too polluted; parks and open spaces were strewn with trash; people were getting poisoned by pollution in the air. And because of those very tangible problems, there was a clear and urgent connection made between environmental policies and quality of life.

Today, many of the issues at play are perhaps even more threatening – on a global scale – but also more abstract. The idea, for instance, that human action can be the cause of a couple of degrees increase in the global temperature, and that in turn can cause massive disasters is a much harder idea to convey to people who haven’t yet felt the impact.

Interestingly, though, in the wake of the many natural disasters that swept through the U.S. in 2012, the percentage of Americans who said they believed in the concept of climate change has risen slightly. And in his 2013 State of the Union address, President Obama broke his long-held silence on the issue and urged Congress to begin to address the problem.

This minor shift in public opinion has clearly not been enough yet to inspire any substantive legislative action in Washington. But it does suggest that when faced with the threat of environmental disaster, Americans grow more willing to accept the idea of regulation. That’s at least, what led to major changes in the 1970s.

What degree of environmental degradation will be powerful enough to inspire real change today?

Watch Map Center: What If the Battleground States Go Red? on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

Because nearly every state in the nation has a winner-take-all presidential electoral system (except Nebraska and Maine), the outcome on election day in most states is fairly predictable. No Republican presidential candidate, for instance, has won California since 1988, and there’s no sign of that trend changing anytime soon. So it wouldn’t be the smartest move to put your money on Mitt Romney here.

Likewise, Texas hasn’t voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1976. So Barack Obama’s chances of winning over the Longhorn State this election? Pretty slim.

Of course, on the rare occasion there have been some monumental upsets. Take Indiana, which hadn’t voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1964, but in 2008 picked Obama (albeit narrowly and ephemerally: the state is back to it’s solid red roots this year).

The majority of the presidential race is downright predictable.

So where’s the suspense? Where’s the action?

A candidate needs 270 electoral votes to win the election, so in most elections, the race comes down to the battleground states: those toss-ups that are divided pretty evenly between Republicans and Democrats and have lots of unpredictable independent voters.  It’s these states that typically have been the wildcards in recent elections, the one’s with the power to literally “swing” the outcome of a presidential race, and the places you’ll very likely find the candidates in the weeks and months leading up to the election.

As in 2008, the biggest swing states this year (the one’s with the most electoral votes, that is, and a history of vacillating) are Florida, Ohio, Virginia, Colorado and North Carolina. All of them chose Obama in 2008, and current polls show him retaining a slim lead in most. The individual outcomes, though, still remain very much up in the air.

There are a ton of good interactive electoral maps out there (so I’ll restrain myself from creating another one). I particularly like the Los Angeles Times interactive, which provides an electoral calculator, a clear breakdown of past election results, and an interface users to play with different swing state scenarios.

latimes.com

270ToWin, which I’ve referenced in past posts, also has a great set of maps and resources, including state-by-state historical voting patterns. The site includes an interesting electoral college prediction calculator based on current polling numbers.

Additionally, the BBC has a great interactive to learn more about battleground states, their populations, and the most compelling issues that might sway voters there.

So, then, what are the main factors that determine how a swing state might lean in a given election? There are many, of course, but among the most influential is the economy equation, A lot of voters evaluate the sitting president’s performance on current economic conditions (even if those trends had already taken shape prior to a president assuming power). Because the U.S. economy continues to be sluggish, and unemployment rates are particularly high in key swing states like Ohio, many of the on-the-fence voters who chose Obama in 2008 will likely be quite a bit harder to win over this time around.

Here’s a little factoid that never fails to mightily confuse most voters. As Americans, we actually DO NOT directly elect our presidents and vice presidents. I repeat, the U.S. president is not chosen through a one-person, one-vote system!

Simply put: this is not direct democracy!

When we head to the polls on election day to choose a presidential candidate, we’re not actually really voting for that person. Instead, we’re throwing our support behind a group of “electors” who belong to a strange institution called the electoral college. And it’s that group that actually casts the direct votes to decide who the next president and vice president will be.

Don’t believe me? Check out Article II of the U.S. Constitution. Says it right there. Honest.

Weird, right?

Here’s how it works:

First off, what is the Electoral College (and do they have a good football team)?

It’s more of an institution than a place. No dorms.  No frat boys. No teams. No crazy parties. Basically, none of the fun stuff.

Here’s what it is: During the presidential election every four years, the various political parties in each state (for instance: California’s Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, Greens, etc.) choose a group of “electors,” generally party activists who have pledged their electoral votes to the presidential candidate of that party should he/she win the popular vote in that state. Pretty much anyone who’s registered to vote is eligible to be an elector, with the exception of members of Congress and federal government employees).

Who better to explain our confusing electoral system than … the British!

When do the electors cast their official votes for president?

Oddly, it’s actually not until after election day. On the Monday following the second Wednesday of December (stay with me here!), each state’s electors meet in their respective state capitals and cast their votes — one for president and one for vice president. This event never really gets a whole lot of attention because everyone already knows that those electors are almost certainly going to vote for the candidate in their own party. The results are announced on January 6 and the president is sworn in two weeks later.

Technically, electors can change their minds, but that’s  only happened about five times in U.S. history (these electors are labeled “faithless”). Interestingly, most instances have been within the last 30 years, according to Time Magazine.

How many electors does each state get?

It’s based on the number of U.S. congressional representatives that each state has, plus its two senators. So, every state (and the District of Columbia) is guaranteed at least 3 electoral votes. A sparsely populated state like North Dakota – which has two senators but only one congressional representative – gets just three electoral votes. So, in North Dakota, each political party comes up with their own list of three electors to represent the state in the Electoral College (should the candidate from that party win the popular vote).

California, in comparison, is the most populous state, and gets 55 electoral votes (53 congressional reps plus two senators).

How does a candidate win electors?

The presidential election is decided state-by-state. And for almost every state, it’s a winner-take-all scenario. Which means that the candidate who receives the most popular (aka direct) votes in each state, gets all of that state’s electors. And the other candidates in the race – even if they lose the popular vote by just a couple of actual votes = get no electors from that state at all. Nada. Squat.

So, looking at California again, If Barack Obama were to win the state, he’d get all 55 Democratic electors and Mitt Romney wouldn’t get a single one of his 55 Republican electors.

And that’s why very populous states like California, New York, Texas, and Florida are political jackpots; they just have so many delicious electors for the taking.

The two exceptions to this rule are Maine and Nebraska. They use a proportional system, in which two electors are chosen by popular vote and the remainder of the electors are decided by the popular vote within each congressional district.

Why is 270 the magic number?

There are 538 electors nationwide, and to win the the presidency, a candidate needs 270 of them. So, if you win a state like California (even if you win it by a single measly popular vote), you’ve just gotten about 20 percent of the votes you need to be sitting pretty in the White House come January.

Conversely, presidential candidates generally don’t spend too much time on the campaign trail in  places like the Dakotas (no offense guys – we still love you). Although, you probably won’t find them spending that much time in California either – because it’s pretty safely in the Democratic category. It’s the big swing states (or battleground states) – places like Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Virginia – that you’ll see the candidates spending most of their time as the election nears. Because it’s these states that are still up for grabs and chock full of  electors – they’re the one’s that will usually decide the election.

PBS NewsHour’s election map center and the site 270 To Win both provide good interactive maps that allow users to play around with the variables and simulate various outcome. They also show the state-by-state breakdowns in past elections.

This is all really confusing! Give a real example already.

OK. Let’s look back at the 2008 election. First off, in terms of electoral votes, Obama pretty much killed it – he ended up with more than twice as many as John McCain: 365 compared to 173. But the weird thing is, Obama actually won the election by less than 10 million popular votes. The reason being that he was able to just squeak by in the big critical swing states (namely Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida), which collectively got him a huge number of electoral votes.

What happened in Florida is a actually a great example of just how peculiar our electoral system can be:

The Sunshine State is the quintessential mother-lode swing state; always unpredictable and worth a big chunk of electoral votes. In 2008, Obama won it by a margin of less than three percent (he got about 51 percent to McCain’s 48 percent). We’re talking about a victory of less than 300,000 votes. But because of the winner-take-all rule, Obama still got all 27 of the state’s electoral votes (and McCain got none). So depending on how you look at it, you could technically argue that the votes cast by the more than 4 million Floridians who chose McCain didn’t really end up counting for much at all.

Can a candidate win the presidency without winning the popular vote?

Indeed! It’s actually happened four different times in America’s history: In 1876 and 1888, Rutherford B. Hayes and Benjamin Harrison, respectively, won the White House even though they lost the popular vote (but won the electoral vote). And then there was the strange 1824 election, in which Andrew Jackson won more popular votes and electoral votes, but still ended up losing the election to John Quincy Adams. Turns out that Jackson’s 15 electoral vote advantage wasn’t enough to secure a required majority, and the presidency was ultimately decided by a vote in the House of Representatives. Pretty wacky.

And finally, who could forgot the 2000 election, in which Al Gore won more popular votes than George W. Bush, but lost the election (guess who’s now a big proponent of getting rid of the Electoral College?).

Why did the Founding Fathers come up with such a zany system? 

Two main reasons:

a) They wanted to steer clear of the British parliamentary model, in which the chief executive (prime minister) is chosen by elected representatives of the majority party. The founders thought that it was more democratic to appoint electors from each state than to have a system in which the president was elected by Congress.

b) It came down to an issue of old-school logistics: Back in the day (like way, way back: I’m talking before phones, and trains and wheels – OK, fine, they had wheels), long distance communication and travel was a challenge. Voting for delegates at a local level was easier and less susceptible to tampering and corruption than was counting every last person’s vote throughout the whole country.

What are arguments for keeping the Electoral College?

• It forces candidates to pay at least some attention to less-populated states. It also guarantees some political recognition to rural areas, as opposed to politicians being entirely focused on on voter-rich urban centers.
• It gives a greater degree of power to minority groups by allowing the opportunity for a relatively small number of voters in each state to determine the outcome.
• It’s consistent with America’s representative system of government, and it’s just the way we’ve always done it; it’s in our Constitution dagnabbit, so leave it be!

And how about against?

• Under our current electoral system, not all votes are equal; voters in swing states and less populous states have disproportionate power. And that disenfranchises millions of voters whose votes are not as important. In a direct election, everyone’s vote would have the same weight regardless of geography.
• It gives candidates the negative incentive to focus their campaigns mostly in swing states while largely ignoring the millions of voters in populous states that tend to consistently favor one party (like California and Texas).
• It’s a super outdated system that creates the potential for a candidate to win the popular vote but still lose the election.

In the week since the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling upholding key parts of President Obama’s health care law (“Obamacare”) – namely, the individual mandate that everyone buy insurance -  Americans have been inundated by an endless deluge of analysis and commentary. Making sense of it all is challenging, so here are 10 good resources that help connect the dots.

1. SCOTUS Blog’s straightforward, objective analysis of the decision (including this one paragraph explanation):

“The Affordable Care Act, including its individual mandate that virtually all Americans buy health insurance, is constitutional. There were not five votes to uphold it on the ground that Congress could use its power to regulate commerce between the states to require everyone to buy health insurance. However, five Justices agreed that the penalty that someone must pay if he refuses to buy insurance is a kind of tax that Congress can impose using its taxing power. That is all that matters. Because the mandate survives, the Court did not need to decide what other parts of the statute were constitutional, except for a provision that required states to comply with new eligibility requirements for Medicaid or risk losing their funding. On that question, the Court held that the provision is constitutional as long as states would only lose new funds if they didn’t comply with the new requirements, rather than all of their funding.”

2. Kaiser Family Foundation’s interactive timeline of the law’s implementation (what goes into effect when)

3. The NY Times’ interactive on how the health care law could affect you

4. Huffington Post’s slideshow of major impacts the law will have on young adults and college students

5. The NY Times’ series of multimedia resources on the law and the ruling, including an interactive timeline of health care reform efforts

6. Kaiser Family Foundation’s animated explainer on the health care law (narrated by Cokie Roberts)

7. ABC News’ good, brief report on the decision

8. PBS Newshour’s slightly lengthier analysis

9. Epipheo’s great short animated explainer on the decision

10. NPR’s answers to common questions about the law