Climate groups support Biden despite broken oil drilling promises

Four of the country’s largest environmental organizations said they endorse President Biden’s bid for re-election despite activists’ anger over his approval of a series of fossil fuel projects, including a massive oil drilling plan in Alaska and a natural gas pipeline from West Virginia. through Virginia.

The League of Conservation Voters, the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council and NextGen America said they are putting aside concerns about those projects — and the warming emissions they will release.

The endorsements are some of the first by major environmental groups in a presidential contest. It is also the first time that the four groups have given joint approval.

Standing behind the president more than 16 months before the election, some advocates said they hoped to remind Democratic voters that Mr Biden had enacted the largest climate legislation in US history, spending at least $370 billion in clean energy and electric vehicles. His government has also proposed strict rules on pollution from cars, trucks and power plants designed to reduce the country’s emissions to their lowest level in decades.

“This is a government that has done more to advance climate solutions than ever before,” said Tiernan Sittenfeld, senior vice president of government affairs for the League of Conservation Voters.

The joint endorsement was announced Wednesday evening at the League’s annual dinner in Washington, where Mr Biden made comments about his environmental record. He is expected to receive another endorsement, from the AFL-CIO, at a labor meeting in Philadelphia on Saturday.

“We certainly don’t agree with every decision they’ve made, but on balance this government has done a lot more than ever before,” Ms Sittenfeld said. She said the groups plan to recruit members to raise money for Mr Biden’s campaign, participate in phone banks and attend rallies, especially in battlefield states.

Mr Biden campaigned in 2020 for the most ambitious climate agenda of any candidate and pledged to roughly halve US emissions this decade. Young voters, who surveys show are particularly concerned about global warming, turned out strong in those elections. Half of voters between the ages of 18 and 29 vote in that electionone of the highest participation rates since the voting age was lowered to 18, according to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University.

The groundbreaking climate bill that Biden signed last year is expected to reduce America’s climate-warming carbon dioxide emissions by up to a billion tons by 2030, and the proposed regulations could eliminate as much as 15 billion tons of carbon dioxide by 2055.

But Mr. Biden also promised “no more drilling on federal lands, period. Period, period, period.”

Despite that promise, he has agreed to greenlight a drilling project known as Willow on pristine federal land in Alaska and has mandated the sale of offshore drilling contracts as part of a deal to pass climate law. During debt ceiling negotiations with Republicans last month, Mr. Biden agreed to accelerate the $6.6 billion Mountain Valley Pipeline, intended to carry natural gas about 300 miles from West Virginia’s Marcellus shale fields through Virginia to the North Sea. Carolina Line. Environmentalists have been fighting that project for nearly a decade.

For many young climate activists, it was the last straw.

“You can’t honor the president and call him a climate champion if he’s actively approving new fossil fuel projects,” said Michael Greenberg, president of Climate Defiance, a nonprofit organization that has disrupted events with Biden administration officials and other Democrats.

Climate Defiance members planned to protest outside the League of Conservation Voters dinner on Wednesday evening, Mr Greenberg said.

At a demonstration against the Mountain Valley pipeline last week in front of the White House, Alice Hu, 25, said Mr Biden’s climate legacy was being undermined by his endorsement of oil and gas development. As the smoke from hundreds of Canadian wildfires hung in the air, Ms. Hu said the president would have to compete with the fossil fuel industry to get her vote.

“If he wants to count on progressive votes, if he wants to count on youth votes, he needs to stop being a climate villain,” she said.

Cristina Tzintzun Ramirez, president of NextGen America, which focuses on young voter participation, said her group hoped to counteract that discord by backing Biden now. She noted that since Mr Biden was elected in 2020, 17 million people have reached voting age.

“We know we have to spend the time and money telling young people why their voice still matters, which is why we’re doing this support so early,” she said.

The front-runner in the 2024 Republican field, former President Donald J. Trump, has attacked Mr. Biden’s climate policies, mocking climate science and defending the production of the fossil fuels primarily responsible for global warming.

Geoff Garin, a Democratic strategist and pollster, said young, climate-conscious voters will be critical to Biden’s re-election. But he also argued that while young people want the president to do more to tackle climate change, there is little evidence that those angry with Willow or the Mountain Valley Pipeline will have much influence.

Still, Mr. Garin said, the Biden campaign needs to better communicate its climate performance. “For Biden, with young voters, he is dealing with a lack of acknowledgment of what he has done, rather than hostility to a particular decision or policy,” he said.