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.

The news

The Biden administration took action Friday to block new oil and gas leases on federal land around New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon, one of the country’s oldest and most culturally significant Native American sites. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland announced that her agency would block public lands within a 10-mile radius of Chaco Canyon and the area around it, known as Chaco Culture National Historical Park, from accessing new oil and gas leases for 20 years. a 2021 pledge from President Biden to protect the area from drilling. The move will not affect existing oil and gas land leases or drilling on private property within a 10-mile radius.

The plan of Mrs. Haaland, the first Indian cabinet secretary, came about after decades of tribal requests. It is intended to underscore President Biden’s efforts to focus on Native American issues and expand the preservation of public lands. But it has also drawn opposition from Republicans and New Mexico’s oil and gas industry. The announcement comes during a week in which environmentalists have been outraged by the Biden administration’s decision to expedite a 300-mile natural gas pipeline in West Virginia as part of the deal to raise the debt ceiling.

Why it matters

An area of ​​about 30,000 acres in the high desert plateaus of northwestern New Mexico, Chaco Canyon Park was established in 1907 by President Theodore Roosevelt. A UNESCO World Heritage Site, it is home to an extensive network of pre-Columbian ruins. Between the ninth and thirteenth centuries, the area was a center of Pueblo culture, with multiple settlements of multistory homes and sacred sites. But for the past decade, Pueblo and other Indigenous groups have worried that oil and gas projects were threatening the park.

While Congress has enacted some short-term drilling bans around the park, there is no long-term or permanent policy to block drilling at the edges.

“Today marks an important step in fulfilling President Biden’s commitments to Indian Country by protecting Chaco Canyon, a sacred site that holds deep meaning to the indigenous peoples whose ancestors have called this place home since time immemorial,” he said. Mrs Haaland in a statement.

This year Mr. Biden a new national monument, Spirit Mountain, in Nevada, which isolates half a million acres of development revered by Native Americans. He also restored and expanded protections for Bears Ears National Monument and Grand Staircase-Escalante in Utah, places sacred to Native Americans that had been opened up to mining and drilling by the Trump administration.

Background

The Bureau of Land Management has not issued an oil and gas lease within the 10-mile buffer around Chaco Canyon in about 10 years, and New Mexico stopped mineral leasing around Chaco Canyon through a state-level moratorium in 2019. A federal moratorium on new mining claims have been in effect since January 2022, when the Department of the Interior published a notice of the proposed withdrawal in the Federal Register. The proposal was open to a 120-day public comment period, which included six public meetings and generated more than 110,000 oral and written comments. That input, along with consultations with 24 tribal nations, helped shape the final plan, the agency said.

What’s next

Oil and gas drilling is an important part of New Mexico’s economy. When Mr. Biden announced his plans to protect the Chaco Canyon area, a spokesperson for the New Mexico Oil & Gas Association called the move “arbitrary” and said it would limit economic opportunities in that part of the state, potentially for generations long. come. It’s unclear if the industry will try to challenge the new protections.