Politicians love to go for the easy applause line and lately, in Washington, that has meant decrying “job-killing regulations.”

Republican candidates for president have all gone for this crowd-pleaser.

• Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney has promised to “tear down the vast edifice of regulations the Obama administration has imposed on the economy.”
• Texas Governor Rick Perry claims he would halt all regulations and impose a sunset so that they would automatically expire.
• Herman Cain claims that eliminating regulations would provide “an immediate boost for our weakened economy.”

Even President Obama has at times appeared to buy-in to this notion, ordering every agency to review its existing regulations to eliminate burdens on business, even though such analysis would have been completed when the regulation was first written.

It may be a crowd-pleaser, but it turns out that it simply isn’t true that regulations kill jobs. The Washington Post talked with some of the country’s top economists and experts on the relationship between job creation and regulations. The conclusion?

“Overall impact on employment is minimal.”

The truth is that regulations can impact jobs but don’t have much effect when it comes to employment. That means that a particular regulation might reduce jobs in one industry but create them in another. For example, a clean air regulation might reduce jobs at a dirty coal-fired power plant and create new jobs at a clean-burning natural gas plant. But, looking at the big picture, employers report that only 0.3% of layoffs are due to “government regulations/intervention.” That’s small potatoes compared with the 25% of jobs lost due to reduced demand for products and services in our weak economy.

While they may not have a big impact on jobs, regulations do have a big impact in a lot of other areas, namely in protecting workers, the public and the environment. So, let’s put “job-killing regulations” to rest. If our politicians are looking for new descriptions, how about “life-saving, people-protecting, society-benefiting regulations”? It’s not so catchy, but it has the benefit of being true.

President Obama spent most of the week in California, the state known as the electoral ATM. It was a smart way to close out the third quarter of the fund raising cycle. But even as the checks roll in, campaign watchers are assessing which candidates have energized which segments of the electoral map.

Judging from current numbers, Obama is developing a bit of a Latino problem.

A recent Gallup poll found that his approval ratings have fallen to 48 percent among Latino voters—the lowest since he became president. In 2008, Obama carried 57 percent of the Latino vote. Today, 48 percent say they would give him a second term. In New Mexico, his numbers 69 percent in 2008 to 58 percent right now.

There are several likely reasons for this drop. With the economy still faltering, unemployment rates among Latinos hover above 11 percent, two points higher than the rest of the nation. Meanwhile, Obama has yet to advance the comprehensive immigration reform he spoke about in the 2008 campaign.

This is not a voting block any candidate wants to trifle with. Roughly 22 million Hispanics are projected to be eligible to vote in 2012. Seventy-five percent of the Latino population is concentrated in eight states, where their numbers reach or exceed 1 million: California, Texas, Florida, New York, Illinois, Arizona, New Jersey, and Colorado.

Latino voters could decide several Congressional races in 2012, and maybe even the president if it gets close enough.

That’s why it is so critical for Obama to mobilize this base of support. Despite the dip in Obama’s approval ratings among Latinos, many will probably vote for Obama anyway. The question is: will they come out in big enough numbers to make a difference in battleground states.

If Obama really wants to reenergize these voters and get them to the polls, he needs to stand strong on something Latinos care deeply about: public health and the environment.

These are issues that cut close to home for many. Sixty-five percent of Latinos in the United States live in areas where the air is too polluted to meet federal public health standards. Fifteen percent live within 10 miles of a coal-fired power plant, one of the biggest sources of air pollution in the nation. Breathing air in these regions can lead to increased asthma attacks, bronchitis, cardiac disease, and cancer.

Most Latino voters view strong environmental safeguards and cleaner, more sustainable solutions as ways to protect their families. They will vote for leaders who fight for policies that bring safer air and cleaner water.

A poll of Latino voters across five western states found that 83 percent reject the false choice between protecting land, air, and water and having a good economy. The National Latino Coalition on Climate Change found that a majority of Latino respondents equated switching to clean energy with building a good economy.

Obama can win impassioned Latino support if he makes environment and public health a more central part of his platform. Many Latino leaders were deeply distressed when Obama abandoned stronger smog standards earlier this month. If he sides with polluters one too many times, he will fail to mobilize these critical voters.

But if he allows the EPA to continue releasing strong public health standards and if he keeps threatening to veto the dirty bills coming out of Congress, he can find common cause with the fastest growing population in the country.

I’ll admit it. I was originally a Hillary Clinton supporter in 2008. I liked then-Senator Obama’s passion but I was comforted by Clinton’s experience in what I felt was a tumultuous time. After Obama became the victor from the primaries, I enthusiastically got on board.

Now, I feel like sucker.

Last Friday, President Obama forced the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to set aside a measure to reduce smog. If you breathe, this should be a big deal for you. The new smog rule would have prevented up to 12,000 premature deaths, 5,300 heart attacks and tens of thousands of cases of asthma attacks and other serious respiratory illnesses each year.

This is a decision that was solely in the President’s court. He ignored the EPA and the recommendation of the agency’s outside science advisors to side with polluting industries.

Why is the President now siding with polluters? He has taken strong environmental stands in the past. We saw the President push what was effectively the largest clean energy legislation ever passed as part of the initial stimulus bill. We stood with him as he pushed the climate bill in that first year. More recently, we saw the White House put us a road to reducing carbon pollution by making our cars cleaner.

But a number of recent moves are going in the opposite direction. The White House gave tentative approval to offshore drilling in the Arctic Ocean. The Administration continues to move forward on steps to approve the Keystone pipeline. And now it is backing away from smog rules.

Why? The White House claims clean air protections would be too expensive. But this is a farce. Letting the polluters off the hook won’t save lives, won’t create jobs and won’t fuel innovation. It will, however, endanger the health and lives of children and seniors.

In fact, as NRDC’s Frances Beinecke said late last week, “clean air investments yield enormous returns. The smog standards would generate $37 billion in value for a cost of about $20 billion by 2020. Taken together, Clean Air Act standards generated approximately $1.3 trillion in public health and environmental benefits in 2010 alone for a cost of $50 billion. That’s a value worth more than 9 percent of GDP for a cost of only .4 percent of GDP. The ratio of benefits to costs is more than 26 to 1.”

Why the White House is running away from this story is beyond me. This shouldn’t be about the economy because these safeguards will create jobs. And this retreat certainly isn’t going to get him any votes. In a June poll of likely voters commissioned by the American Lung Association found that 75 percent supported the EPA’s effort to set stronger smog standards and 66 percent believed that EPA scientists– not Congress — should establish clean air standards. Is he is hoping to attract a few votes from right? Unlikely if you consider that only 24 percent of moderate Republicans and 7 percent of conservative Republicans think he is doing a good job according to the the most recent Gallup polling.

Color me confused. The only thing that makes sense is that the White House made a political calculation that it couldn’t win the message war against the Tea Party. The Tea Party has made “regulation” a dirty word when in fact regulations help keep us safe.

Environmental and public health regulations are what keep that industrial mill from dumping its toxic chemicals in the lake you fish in each summer. Regulations have been cleaning our air for decades.Regulations on buildings ensure that your home and office be built to withstand foreseeable natural disasters. Long gone are the days when machinery regularly maimed employees thanks to labor regulations. And a lack of regulations can lead to disaster – just look at the Wall Street crash and the part that lax regulations played in that disaster. The word “regulation” is really a synonym for “public safeguard.” When did that become a bad thing?

President Obama should reconsider this misguided move and redouble his efforts to protect clean air. He is going to have many opportunities in the coming days to right this wrong. The House will be voting as early this month to try to overturn the clean air standards the White House has moved forward with. But if we don’t weigh in, the Tea Party will set the agenda of this White House.

Where is the hope and change that we were promised in 2008? I suspect that a lot of people who walked precincts and stood in long lines to cast a vote for the President Obama in the last Presidential election are asking themselves the same question.

Even though clean energy and climate issues are rarely at the heart of the anti-incumbency rhetoric, the frustration with all things Beltway could block comprehensive energy legislation this year.

President Obama’s leadership is the only force that can change that.

You see, when the electorate turns anti-Washington, Congressmen freeze up. They get scared of taking bold steps and they start saying "no" to everything.

Even on a good day, the odds of passing any bill in Congress–no matter the issue–starts at about 5 percent. Smart gamblers always bet the no vote in Congress.

But being a naysayer becomes even more attractive to politicians when they think their job is at risk. Voting "no" on a big, transformative bill allows them to give the illusion that they are "playing it safe" and to keep the bull’s-eye off their back for potential mid-term popularity contests.

"No" may be an easy decision for politicians, but it is the wrong choice for the American people.

We need to say yes to a clean energy and climate bill that will generate nearly 2 million jobs, put our nation at the forefront of one of the biggest markets of the 21st century, end our reliance on oil, and reduce dangerous pollution. Yet so many lawmakers are in a panic over elections that they can’t see these benefits.

They need to snap out of it. In a movie, this is the moment when someone would come along and slap the panicking person in the face. In politics, that slap is leadership.

President Obama must take charge of clean energy and climate legislation. The only major bills that pass through Congress are the ones with White House support. We are fortunate that President Obama backs climate action, but given this anti-incumbent mood, we need him not just to support it; we need him to lead it.

What would that look like? We saw it in the heath care debate. President Obama went into campaign mode and stumped on that bill every single day. He called in political chits. He got people in the same room to negotiate. He dragged it over the finish line because he went farther than asking for change. He demanded it.

That is what we need him to do for a clean energy and climate bill. Because let’s be frank: either we see some leadership or we call it a day.

If we don’t pass the bill this year, we won’t get another chance for years. Dave Robert’s painted the grim prospects for national climate action given the likely outcomes of future election cycles in his Grist blog this week. It doesn’t look good for another eight years – at least.

We need to get America moving right now toward a clean energy future, and we need President Obama to lead the way.

This week, Robert Redford appeared in a television ad for the NRDC that has already been written about in the Washington Post and New York Times. Interestingly, he didn’t call on Congress to take clean energy and climate action. He called on President Obama.

The president is the one with the bully pulpit. Tell him to use it on behalf of clean energy and climate solutions. Securing our future depends on it.

One of my first real memories of tragedy was when the space shuttle Challenger exploded. My entire school was cheering on teacher Christa McAuliffe, and when the shuttle blew up in midair, I remember standing with my sobbing classmates, trying to make sense of what we had witnessed.

As an adult, I felt a similar connection the day after September 11. In the midst of a national crisis, Congressmen from both parties and both chambers stood on the Capitol stairs and sang "God Bless America." I will never forget that moment and the sense of common cause it inspired in all who heard it.

Shared national experiences are pretty powerful things. Although one can’t really compare a terrorist attack on our nation to a mechanical failure that causes catastrophic loss, the experience of communal mourning is still similar…denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. But what this list does not mention is "resolve". No one can deny that regardless the nature of the event, when this nation marches to the same drummer, it creates a powerful beat that can move mountains.

Yet I didn’t feel that sense of common cause last month when the Deepwater Horizon exploded and killed 11 people. I didn’t feel it when the oil erupted like a volcano, gushing endlessly into the Gulf of Mexico. And I still don’t feel it even as the local tourism industry shuts down, fisheries are closed, water is endangered and the ecosystem is in peril.

Plenty of people are concerned about the Gulf, but it hasn’t permeated the national mood yet. In fact, instead of honoring the loss of life and examining the ongoing risk, some lawmakers seem to want us to forget all about this tragedy.

House Republicans have responded to the situation in the Gulf by talking about gas prices and calling for expanded offshore oil drilling. The Energy Rapid Response team they have assembled doesn’t even include a member from the Gulf Coast–only landlocked lawmakers who aren’t affected by the pain of oil spills.

It must be easy to whine about paying more at the pump when your constituents aren’t dealing with cleaning up an oil slick that is spreading by the day.

In all fairness to the droning, disconnected Energy Rapid Response team, we do have some elected officials actually from the area who are choosing to side with the oil companies instead of their constituents.

Senator Mary Landrieu, also known as the oil industry’s PR director, is begging people not to rush to judgment even as her state’s wildlife refuges are coated with oil and Louisiana’s economy is threatened. She claims to be on the side of the mom and pop drillers. Wow. If a big oil company like BP is having a tough time cleaning up their massive, historical mess, can you image what would happen if this kind of explosion happened to a small driller?

If there is one Member of Congress that gives me some hope it is West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd, who has met tragedy with the courage to stand up to negligent, dirty energy companies. West Virginia was the site of the April 5, 2010 collapse at the Upper Big Branch coal mine that killed 29 people and injured 2 others.

Senator Byrd took time to reflect on the tragedy. Instead of being an apologist for Massey Coal Company, he is representing the best interests of his constituents by demanding that dirty energy is made to pay for their mess and that West Virginians reexamine the role of the coal industry in their state.

Dirty energy has consequences. We see that very clearing in the Gulf and in West Virginia. We see how we pay the price for dirty oil and coal in losses: the loss of life, the loss of fishing and tourism jobs, the loss of economic growth and the loss of ecosystems that sustain us.

Loss is what happens when you make a pact with dirty energy. And even though we may not necessarily have a national drum beat quite yet, Americans are beginning to recognize that we can break this dangerous pact. Seven in ten say that it’s time to break our dangerous addiction to oil by fast-tracking clean energy legislation and by increasing our use of sustainable and renewable power and fuels. We can shift to cleaner technologies–things like fuel-efficient cars and renewable power–that will slash our reliance on oil and coal.

I would much rather see Americans rally around the promise of clean energy than yet another fossil fuel disaster. Wouldn’t you?

Heather Taylor-Miesle is the director of the NRDC Action Fund. Become a fan on Facebook or Twitter.

As we all drink our morning coffee and digest what this latest change-up means for the Senate, let me be the first to say – I continue to be hopeful that the Senate will take action on climate change.

The signs of momentum for a clean energy and climate bill outweigh any signs that come from the Massachusetts special election.

Take, for example, that this week, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid reiterated that he wants to pass the bill this spring, and that the bill has the tri-partisan support of Senators Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman.

In a little more than 6 weeks, 1221 businesses have called for strong action on climate via American Businesses for Clean Energy.

Not to mention the fact that President Obama spent 15 hours at the negotiating table in Copenhagen drafting an international climate accord with his own pen because he believes so deeply in the need to confront climate change. Top it off with the fact that Americans are frustrated with the continuing high jobless rate. The clean energy and climate bill, meanwhile, will create nearly 2 million additional jobs.

That’s the national picture. Now let’s look at what Brown himself might do on climate. In fact, like his constituents, Brown has said he believes we need to address climate change.

While it’s true that Martha Coakley was a more reliable vote in favor of a bill and it’s true that Brown has ties to the conservative tea party movement, I am not counting Brown out.

Most of Brown’s tea party supporters are out-of-staters, eager to push their agenda in whatever campaign they can. But now that the election is over, those folks will return home, and Brown will be left with the people who elected him — Massachusetts citizens who have said in poll after poll that they want clean energy and climate legislation to pass.

Brown has a choice to make. He can choose to serve the interests of those tea baggers who live elsewhere or he can choose to represent the people of Massachusetts. I hope he decides to follow the example of fellow Northeastern Senators Snowe and Collins, leaders who walk the tightrope between the conservative Republican leadership and their environmentally-minded constituents.

He opposes, however, most of the mechanisms currently on the table for accomplishing that goal. This seems to be the new GOP equivalent of having your cake and eating it too. (Senator Murkowski is especially good at playing both sides of this game). But it’s significant that these Republicans want to position themselves as proponents of fighting climate change – it means they and all their well-heeled advisors have concluded that time is on our side. They don’t think they can just deny that the problem exists or claim that nothing needs to be done about it. We have to capitalize on their sense that the future lies with a greener economy, even if they seem to be doing their best to stave off that future for the time being.

I hope Brown doesn’t use his fence-sitting to justify further delay. For if there was one thing the Massachusetts election showed is that voters want change, and they want it now.

People have grown impatient with their leaders. They don’t give them much time to realize their campaign promises anymore. President Obama took office just one year ago, but people have already moved on to the next person screaming for change. Brown knows this: he adopted Obama’s rhetoric from 2008 and ran as the change candidate.

It’s true that democracy can be painfully slow. The average bill takes Congress several sessions to pass and the major bills can take decades.

But several issues are ripe for action. They have had more than enough time to mature, and voters are begging for resolution. Americans want lawmakers to ensure the fat cats on Wall Street become better neighbors, to bring health care to those less fortunate, and to create jobs and economic opportunity by tapping into the global clean energy marketplace.

This is the kind of change voters want to see, and Brown has a chance to be part of the action. If, on his first day in office, he decides not to repeat the Mantra of No but instead to actually get some work done, he could be a game-changer on climate.

Our door is open, Senator-elect Brown, if that is the path you choose. Help us draft a bill that will protect the environment and get the economy back on track.

Tell POTUS That This Is Our Moment

In case you are tired of making your own New Year’s resolutions, President Obama would like you to help him set his. He is inviting Americans to tell him what we think the administration’s priorities should be for 2010.

I love that the president of the United States is asking us for our opinions. How refreshing is that? You can share your ideas by clicking here.

I instinctively knew what I wanted to tell him, right away. In fact, it took much less time to figure out his resolution than it did to decide on no new spandex for myself.

I want the White House to focus on getting clean energy and climate legislation passed in the Senate as soon as possible.

We need to get moving on climate solutions NOW. I believe this as a mother–I don’t want to my children to deal with acute water shortages or flooded homes. I need this as a taxpayer–clean energy investments and domestic manufacturing jobs are just the kind of jumpstart our economy desperately needs. I understand this as a Christian – we should be good stewards of the planet that God gave us.

And as a political junkie my gut also tells me that we will never have a better political environment for passing a clean energy and climate bill than the moment we have right now. This is our moment.

What could be gained by putting off climate change legislation? Are the issues going to change? Is climate going to become an easier problem to solve? Are big polluters going to stop opposing action? Are Democrats going to control more than 60 seats in the Senate?

This is a wake up call, one that I hope the handful of senators (featured in a recent Politico story) hears. These folks would like to delay the bill to some indefinite time in the future. Can someone please explain to me exactly how it is going to get easier in the future? .

A few senators have said they think we should delay the climate vote in favor of a jobs bill, but the effervescent truth is the climate bill is a jobs bill. According to a recent study from the University of California, we will generate nearly 2 million additional jobs by investing in clean and sustainable energy.

These smart opportunities will be spread across all 50 states. Let’s take Ohio. UMass has estimated that Ohio alone could produce almost 70,000 net new jobs–opportunities for steelworks who build wind turbines, construction workers who retrofit buildings to make them more energy efficient, and software engineers who do energy audits.

We need these jobs now, not in 2011.

Americans want progress. That’s what we voted for in the last election, but we need to see some signs of movement and success. Saving the planet and creating jobs at the same time sounds pretty darn successful to me. We might just be inspired to reward the senators who deliver that success with our votes come November.

In the meantime, tell the White House what you want it to achieve this year.
I am resolved.

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