09.13.18

Natural Resources Committee Democrats Kick Off “Wasted Resources” Series Highlighting GOP Oversight Failures, Misplaced Priorities

Washington, D.C. – Ranking Member Raúl M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.) and the House Natural Resources Committee Democrats today launched Wasted Resources, a new multimedia series highlighting the major natural resources policy issues the Republican majority ignored over the course of the 115th Congress and the misguided hearings they chose to hold instead.

The series kicks off today by highlighting a Committee hearing on July 13, 2017, featuring Republican witness testimony accusing multiple Native American tribes of being legal creations with no cultural or historic basis. The hearing came the same week as news that a 2,200-square-mile iceberg had broken off the Antarctic ice shelf; the Trump administration had removed the phrase “human activity” from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration press releases on global warming; and that the planet’s sixth mass extinction of species is already underway. In what will be a recurring theme throughout the series, the Committee’s Republican majority ignored those issues.

The Wasted Resources series, set to continue for the next five weeks, will cover multiple platforms – including the Democrats’ Medium, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts – to revisit the issues Republicans ignored throughout the 115th Congress, look at how Democrats tried to address those issues, and examine what Republicans chose to focus on instead. Rather than conduct oversight of climate change, sexual harassment at the Interior Department, the environmental risks of coal deregulation, or the potential sale of formerly protected public lands to private interests, among other pressing issues, Republicans have focused largely on across-the-board demands for environmental deregulation and continue to insist that climate change is a hoax.

For more information and to follow Wasted Resources, visit https://medium.com/@HNRDems/wasted-resources-b72484dd71c8 each Tuesday and Thursday and follow @NRDems and #WastedResources on social media.

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