page_title: League of Conservation Voters
section_title: National Environmental Scorecard
hierarchical_section_title: League of Conservation Voters / Activities / National Environmental Scorecard
caption_attribution_description: English: These are challenging times to be sure, but I left my meeting with @LCVoters yesterday heartened.
context_page_description: The League of Conservation Voters is an American environmental advocacy group. LCV says that it "advocates for sound environmental laws and policies, holds elected officials accountable for their votes and actions, and elects pro-environment candidates." The organization pursues its goals through voter education, voter mobilization, and direct contributions to political candidates. LCV includes 29 state affiliates. LCV was founded in 1970 by environmentalist Marion Edey, with support from David Brower. The group's current president is Gene Karpinski. It is headquartered in Washington, D.C. and has over two million members.
context_section_description: LCV tracks the voting records of members of Congress on environmental issues in its National Environmental Scorecard, a legislative scorecard.
  The average scores for members of the Democratic Party are historically higher than the scores for members of the Republican Party. According to ThinkProgress, a very low score on the Scorecard means a member of Congress has not "used their time in Congress to vote with the environment in mind." In 2002, Kimberley Strassel of The Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote that "Democratic politics...is what really drives the league's scorecard."
  In a 2012 report, the non-profit Rachel's Network examined the Scorecard scores for male and female members of Congress in the 107th through the 111th Congresses (2001 to 2010). The group found that "women in Congress vote for legislation supporting clean air, clean water, renewable energy, climate action, and public health much more often than their male counterparts." The report found that some of the difference was attributable to the fact that there were "more women Democrats in both houses of Congress than there are women Republicans," and Democrats favor more pro-environmental policies, but also found that "the difference in voting patterns still persists when gender is isolated within each political party." The report also found that "the gap between Republican men and women narrowed after the 2004 election cycle, which could be attributable to increased partisan pressures."
  The Scorecard has been cited by The New York Times,The Washington Post, Bloomberg News, U.S. News & World Report,HuffPost,
  and Scientific American magazine.
  In 1998, scholar Anne Y. Ilinitch and collaborators used the Scorecard "to identify Senators and Representatives with unsupportive environmental voting records" in evaluated corporate political contributions as a measure of corporate environmental performance. In 2004, researchers at the School of Forestry and Wildlife Sciences at Auburn University averaged Scorecard scores across a state's congressional delegation as a proxy variable for the "green-ness" of constituents, and found no significant relationship with the number of Endangered Species Act listings in a state. In 2012, Robert Brulle and his collaborators investigated factors affecting U.S. public concern about the threat of climate change and found that "the message sent to the public by the Republican voting record on environmental bills is very influential...This result provides strong confirmation of the role of elite cues and their influence on public concern about climate change. In an extremely partisan environment, Republican votes against environmental bills legitimate public opinion opposed to action on climate change."
caption: Senator Kamala Harris meeting with the LCV in 2017. As of 2019, Harris has a 100% rating - the highest - from the LCV.
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