Statement of Center for Progressive Reform Executive Director Minor Sinclair on White House debt ceiling agreement
Washington, D.C. — The so-called “compromise” on the debt ceiling agreement smacks of a sell-out to big oil and gas interests — at the expense of clean energy and impacted communities — rather than any real compromise.
On the one hand, the crown jewel for natural gas companies, the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP), would be approved regardless of the pending environmental reviews and its destruction of riverways, climate and local communities. And on the same hand, basic environmental protections upheld in the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) are quietly and substantively removed.
Indeed, roughly a quarter of the 99-page-long debt ceiling bill is dedicated to watering down the basic protections NEPA has offered communities for the last 50 years, including the power to weigh in on environmentally destructive activities that threaten to harm them, their families, and neighbors. Low-wealth people and communities of color are most at risk.
That oil and gas exploration companies applaud the agreement for its fast-tracking of the MVP and the stunting of NEPA while clean energy and environmental justice advocates decry it shows how skewed this “compromise” is. One provision of the bill, charging oil and gas companies — instead of federal agencies — to hire and pay for their own experts to undertake environmental reviews puts foxes in the chicken coop.
Big polluters have long attempted to undermine the energy and environmental democracy offered by NEPA. Should this provision stand and become law, it would jeopardize the health and safety of our nation’s most marginalized communities and exacerbate environmental racism.
