Climate activists have stepped up protests over the inclusion of a provision to speed up a controversial gas pipeline’s completion in the deal to raise the debt ceiling as Congress prepares to vote on Wednesday, aiming criticism at Democrats Chuck Schumer and Joe Manchin.
The pipeline project has long been championed by Manchin, the West Virginia senator who was the top recipient of fossil fuel industry contributions during the 2022 election cycle.
Activists, led by the advocacy group Climate Defiance and supported by Food and Water Watch, Climate Families NYC, Center for Popular Democracy, Sunrise Movement NYC and others, rallied outside the Senate majority leader ’s home in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood on Tuesday evening, chanting “Schumer, stop the dirty deal” and demanding the $6.6bn Mountain Valley Pipeline be stripped from the legislation.
Schumer has also received donations from one of the companies behind the pipeline.
The protests came hours after nearly 200 groups sent a letter to Schumer and members of Congress remove the pipeline from the deal.
“The unscrupulous brinkmanship on display in Washington is endangering our very future,” Eric Weltman, senior New York organizer at the environmental advocacy group Food and Water Watch, said in a statement. “Our climate and communities are not for sale – any deal that holds the economy and climate hostage for the profit of dirty energy donors is a betrayal.”
Last year, Manchin failed to make the approval of the pipeline part of the Inflation Reduction Act. But in exchange for his crucial vote for the legislation, he secured a commitment from Schumer to pass a separate bill to expedite the pipeline’s construction and help fast-track the construction of other energy infrastructure. The permitting legislation failed at the hands of Senate Republicans who were unhappy with the compromise.
NextEra Energy, one company behind the Mountain Valley pipeline, is a major contributor to Manchin and Schumer. In the 2022 cycle, the company’s employees and political action committees gave $60,000 to Manchin and a stunning $302,000 to Schumer, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics.
Food and Water Watch is also doing daily phone banks and has set up a dedicated hotline to Schumer’s office. Meanwhile, Appalachian Voices is holding three rallies at Senator Mark Warner’s Virginia office pushing for a debt deal that does not include the pipeline.
“President Biden made a colossal error in negotiating a deal that sacrifices the climate and working families,” said Jean Su, energy justice program director at the national environmental organization Center for Biological Diversity.
House and Senate lawmakers from both parties have also filed amendments to strip the Mountain Valley pipeline from the debt ceiling deal. A group of House Democrats from Virginia have led the push to cut the provision.
Democratic senator Tim Kaine plans to file a similar Senate amendment.
“Senator Kaine is extremely disappointed by the provision of the bill to greenlight the controversial Mountain Valley pipeline in Virginia, bypassing the normal judicial and administrative review process every other energy project has to go through,” a Kaine spokesperson said in a statement. “This provision is completely unrelated to the debt ceiling matter.”
Environmentalists have spent a decade fighting the construction of the $6.6bn Mountain Valley pipeline, which is intended to carry natural gas 300 miles from the Marcellus shale fields in West Virginia to Virginia, crossing nearly 1,000 streams and wetlands. A report from Oil Change International last year found the project would result in the emission of 89m metric tons of planet-heating pollution annually, or the equivalent of building 26 new coal power plants.
The pipeline has long faced scrutiny in courts. Since construction began in 2018, the Mountain Valley pipeline has been cited for hundreds of violations in West Virginia and Virginia. Last month, a US court of appeals struck down certain permits for the project on the grounds they would violate the Clean Water Act.
The Biden administration has in recent months signed off on several necessary federal permits for the Mountain Valley pipeline. But the debt ceiling legislation would go even further by shielding the project from future litigation.
“Singling out the Mountain Valley pipeline for approval in a vote about our nation’s credit limit is an egregious act,” said Peter Anderson, Virginia policy director with Appalachian Voices, an activist group which has fought the project for years.
“By attempting to suspend the rules for a pipeline company that has repeatedly polluted communities’ water and flouted the conditions in its permits, the president and Congress would deny basic legal protections, procedural fairness and environmental justice to communities along the pipeline’s path.”
Climate groups, led by the Virginia and West Virginia organization Protect Our Water, Heritage, Rights are also planning to rally in front of the White House next week.
Source: The Guardian
