“This bill is a thinly veiled attempt to shut out community input and roll back bedrock environmental protections like the Clean Water Act and the National Environmental Policy Act — effectively green-lighting scores of bad fossil fuel projects and stymying the just and clean energy transition President Biden says he supports,” said CLF President Bradley Campbell.
As we celebrate the sixth anniversary of the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument, we are calling for more of our ocean to be permanently protected
“This decision rejects the lobster industry’s attempts to distract from the overwhelming scientific evidence that entanglements have killed far too many right whales for far too long,” said Erica Fuller, a senior attorney at Conservation Law Foundation. “It took the Fisheries Service five years to finalize a rule that only reduced lethal entanglement risk by 50% when the science shows 90% is needed. This species doesn’t have another five years to wait for the agency to comply with the law.”
President Biden recently signed this first-of-its-kind climate bill into law – but what does it mean for climate action here at home?
“The U.S. is long overdue for real action on climate,” said CLF President Bradley Campbell. “This bill will help slash emissions at a time when the impacts of the climate crisis are being felt around the country. We still have work to do at the state and local level to respond to this crisis and bring emissions down to zero by 2050.”
“It’s no coincidence that this bill is moving forward at a time when large swaths of the country are baking in yet another heatwave,” said CLF President Bradley Campbell. “The IRA will help us slash emissions and bolster the country’s clean energy efforts to respond to the climate crisis at our doorsteps. However, this bill still doesn’t get us to where we need to be, so state action to reduce emissions is going to be critical in the years ahead.”
“Given the glacial pace of new right whale protections over the last decade, immediately curtailing the second biggest threat to their existence would be a game-changer,” said Erica Fuller, senior attorney at Conservation Law Foundation. “This proposed rule is a major step forward, but there’s a five-month gap in protection south of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket that should be addressed. Federal officials must now get these protections in place on the water as quickly as possible and effectively enforce them.”
The Supreme Court’s decision in West Virginia is a setback, to be sure. But it is also a reminder of the importance of action at the regional, state, and local levels – action that we have been leading here in New England for more than a decade as we waited – and waited – for federal climate rules to come into play.
So-called “advanced recycling” is a ruse. The term is part of a larger disinformation – or greenwashing – campaign. That campaign’s goal: to distract lawmakers and the public from real solutions to the world’s plastic crisis.
“The Supreme Court’s new majority has hobbled EPA’s ability to reduce pollution from power plants, expanding an obscure doctrine into an all-purpose tool for the Court to stop agencies from acting on the most significant threats to human health and the environment,” said CLF President Bradley Campbell. “By arbitrarily limiting EPA’s explicit and broad authority under the Clean Air Act to require the use of less polluting systems, the Court has consigned millions of Americans to more illness, shorter lives, and greater poverty in an overheated climate, while giving itself nearly unlimited authority to invalidate protections and safeguards intended by Congress.”
