Green group targets GOP Rep. Lungren on climate

The League of Conservation Voters (LCV) hopes to tip the balance in a close California House race by casting incumbent Rep. Dan Lungren (R) as an enemy of efforts to battle dangerous climate change.

LCV is sending out a pair of mailers in Lungren’s central California district this week as part of a broader $380,000 mail program against the incumbent announced earlier in October.

One mailer shows a picture of Earth and then shows the planet flatted out in a frying pan under the words “This is Your Earth Under Dan Lungren’s Leadership” — a play on the famous “This is your brain on drugs” ads from the 1980s.

“Some of Dan Lungren’s views are so extreme, it is hard to believe they’re real,” the mailer states, adding that Lungren “thinks he knows better than America’s scientists.”

A second piece of mail shows a drawing of Lungren balancing on a small piece of sea ice and states the incumbent is “on an island of his own” in refuting widely held scientific views.

Lungren’s contest against Democratic challenger Ami Bera in the redrawn district is listed as a “toss-up” in The Hill’s race ratings.

Lungren, in a debate last month, said that “there is no doubt that there is ... climate change,” but added that “the question is who causes it and is it caused predominantly by human activity?

“It seems to me we ought to take reasonable steps but not steps that so put us in a disadvantageous situation economically that we will have less jobs,” he said.

Lungren voted against a cap-and-trade bill that narrowly passed the House in 2009, and more recently has voted for legislation to scuttle Environmental Protection Agency climate rules.

Neither bill advanced in the Senate.

The attack mailer is part of LCV’s broader, $2 million “Flat Earth Five” campaign to unseat five House members the group says have staked out “extreme” and “anti-science” positions on climate change.