>> Louisiana Congressman Cedric Richmond, who has taken vast contributions from the
fossil fuel industry, will serve in President-elect Joe Biden's administration.
So this is a problem especially considering what Richmond has been chosen for.
Richmond, a national co-chair to Biden's presidential campaign, will leave his House seat to serve
as a senior adviser with the title of Director of the Office of Public Engagement.
Richmond is also expected to serve as a liaison with the business community, and climate change
activists.
So as someone who's taken a considerable amount of money from the fossil fuel industry, it's
strange to put him in a position where he would be dealing with any type of climate
activism.
>> In good faith anyway.
>> In good faith, exactly, and I think it is important to look at his record and I wanna
give you some details on how much money he has taken from the fossil fuel industry.
So during his 10 years in Congress, Richmond has received roughly $341,000 from donors
in the oil and gas industry, the fifth highest total among House Democrats.
That includes corporate political action committee donations of $50,000 from Entergy, an electric
and natural gas utility, $40,000 from ExxonMobil and $10,000 apiece from oil companies Chevron,
Phillips 66, and Valero Energy.
It gets worse, Richmond has raked in that money while representing a Congressional District
that is home to seven of the 10 most air-polluted census tracks in the country.
And also during the climate crisis that has battered his home state of Louisiana, Richmond
has joined with Republicans to vote to increase fossil fuel exports and promote pipeline development.
He also voted against Democratic legislation to place pollution limits on fracking.
And he voted for GOP legislation to limit the Obama administration's authority to more
stringently regulate the practice.
So he not only takes money from fossil fuel companies, he also acts on that influence
by those campaign donations.
So John as someone who cares deeply about climate change and covers it extensively on
your show.
I love to hear your thoughts.
>> They're not good.
>> Bad.
>> Yeah no, it's yay, great.
And it would be one thing if it was, you could in theory he could have chosen this guy for
a number of different positions that have very little to do with climate change.
I mean, I would argue that the range of jobs that have to do with climate change are pretty
broad.
But you could have found something a little bit more removed from directly serving as
delays into these sorts of groups.
But they haven't either because of a conscious decision that they don't care about this,
a lack of commitment to proper, not vetting necessarily cuz it's public information, but
actually caring enough to prioritize choosing someone without these sorts of ties.
Or theoretically as a trial balloon just to let people know what direction they're going
in terms of their staffing.
And when I saw this sort of thing obviously initially had that paying of like, come on,
seriously?
And I think that that's sort of a residual thing where leading into Biden choosing his
cabinet.
If you'd asked me, is Biden gonna keep all of his promises?
I would have said no, but you can still have that latent hope that, hey, maybe he'll do
the right thing in a way no politician does, which doesn't turn out to be true.
And what I then retreat to is the position of how did we present Joe Biden when we were
supporting him for the election.
Very consciously as our preferred opponent out of the two.
And this is the sort of thing an opponent does, and then you have to respond accordingly.
And thankfully, people who care about climate change are responding to this putting pressure
on them to not actually keep in mind that position, we'll have to see how successful
it is.
This is a very low level minor fight over climate change.
There are far more important ones we need to win this to really have any hope of winning
the bigger ones.
>> Right, yeah, I think you make a great point there.
And I think that this is just the latest example, because I think there have been many, that
demonstrate how Biden is going to just really follow through on this moderate centrist messaging
that we got from him during the election.
He didn't hide it, I mean Biden was really the only candidate who from the jump, just
said that, no, I think we need to work with Republicans.
I think that leading from the middle is the way to go.
As I've mentioned a billion times on the show, he told his Wall Street donors that nothing
will fundamentally change under his leadership.
The only difference between Biden and Trump is that the bleeding needs to stop and Biden
will stop the bleeding.
And what do I mean by that?
Things devolved so quickly under the Trump administration.
And I'm talking about just basic rights, basic protections and our Democratic process has
been in jeopardy under the Trump administration.
But when it comes to policy proposals that I desperately want as someone on the left,
I'm not gonna be naive and think that Biden's going to deliver.
But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't at least try, that we shouldn't fight and hold
him accountable as much as we can.