Ryan's Hopeless

Tim Ryan has a new job.

Alas, it's not as Assistant Secretary of Labor for Labor-Management Relations.

Ryan is now a member of the leadership council of Natural Allies for a Clean Energy, which is about clean energy like North Korea is really a democratic people's republic. Natural Allies for a Clean Energy does not promote clean-energy sources like hydropower, wind energy, or solar energy.  It promotes natural gas as a "clean energy solution."

Natural gas.

Natural gas!

Let me say that again - natural gas!

This group promotes natural gas as a "clean alternative to oil and as a "bridge" to genuinely clean sources of power for electricity, cooking and home heating, and they aim their pitch at younger and liberal populations, as well as racial minorities. The Energy and Policy Institute notes that this campaign is "happening despite mounting evidence regarding the risks of gas stoves to public health and that methane – the primary component of fossil gas – has a climate warming potential that is 84 to 87 times greater than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period."

Cutting gas and methane emissions, the Energy and Policy Institute notes, is "critical to having a chance to limit global temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius [2.7 degrees Fahrenheit]," according to the United Nation' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

No wonder the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee wouldn't help Ryan.

The fact that Ryan is joining a lobbying firm at all is revealing. Even if he had joined a group lobbying for more public transit and regulations forcing Detroit to phase out sport utility vehicles, joining any lobby in Washington would still have been significant for Ryan.  Joining a lobby after leaving elective office the political equivalent of hasbeen TV actors appearing at fan conventions in suburban New Jersey - it's a place you go when you know your career is over.  As fate would have it, members of the leadership council of Natural Allies for a Clean Energy include and have included former Senators Mary Landrieu of Louisiana (a fossil fuel state) and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota (ditto).   Both are Democrats from states that are as likely to elect Democrats to the Senate again in this century as the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences is to give the Album of the Year Grammy to a white guy who plays guitar and doesn't rely on synthesizers and autotuners for the rest of this millenium.  (Oh yeah, the Grammys are on CBS this Sunday, so now you know what night to see a movie.) 

At lease Landrieu and Heitkamp were in fact senators.  Tim Ryan is defeated Senate candidate who, had he played his cards right, could have been House Democratic leader instead of Hakeem Jeffries and been in line to become the next House Speaker from the Midwest named Ryan.  Now he's just a hasbeen loser.  And a hasbeen loser whose support for fossil fuels to heat and power homes reveals him to be . . . a phony.

Timothy John Ryan, . . . you're a fraud! 😠