Posted on 08/16/2022 2:06:27 PM PDT by Oldeconomybuyer
WASHINGTON, Aug 16 (Reuters) - With President Joe Biden expected to sign a long-negotiated climate spending bill later on Tuesday, environmental groups are turning their focus to their next fight - halting efforts to fast-track permitting for major infrastructure projects like pipelines and highways.
Green groups hailed last week's passage of the Inflation Reduction Act and its $369 billion for climate and energy spending. But amid the celebration, some frontline and indigenous groups said they felt betrayed.
For Senate Democrats to win backing from their final holdout - West Virginia's Joe Manchin - they offered compromises that would boost fossil-fuel production, including a pledge to work on legislation for speeding up the years-long process for infrastructure permits.
"The permit reform bill will be harmful and damaging to environmental justice communities and will eliminate the tools that we do have available to fight back against projects," said Dana Johnson, senior director at WE ACT for Environmental Justice.
Anthony Rogers-Wright, the environmental justice director at New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, resigned from the board of environmental policy group Evergreen Action, which had helped shape the bill. He said he no longer wanted to be part of an organization "taking a victory lap knowing full well the pain this behavior causes."
It was an abrupt moment after several years of unity, after national green groups vowed in 2020 to focus on addressing racial injustice in the wake of the George Floyd murder by police. Together, U.S. environmental campaigners and grassroots groups fought the deregulatory policies of former President Donald Trump.
"We will continue to work closely with leaders across the climate movement ... to stop the buildout of any new fossil-fuel infrastructure and to prevent the erosion of bedrock environmental laws and community participation in the environmental review process," Raad said.
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
“reform”
Such a perverse use of the word in this context.
They use it with guns too. They are the language Gestapo.
Joe will never get his pipeline and these people will make sure of it. He sold his soul for nothing.
The problem for them is that most infrastructure projects being held up by permit reviews etc are “green energy” projects.
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