PART 2. Democracy Dies in Darkness ~ MVP Deal ‘left us to burn’

~ Howard Zinn (1922 - 2010) would be 100 this month.

From an Article by Ellie Silverman, Washington Post, August 23, 2022

The landmark Inflation Reduction Act will significantly advance the fight against climate change, spending about $370 billion to bring the country closer to achieving the emissions cuts scientists say are required to avoid the devastating consequences of the Earth’s warming.

The White House said environmental justice leaders were key to developing the bill, calling it “the most significant investment in climate, clean energy, and environmental justice in U.S. history and defeating the special interests who for decades have blocked progress.”

Rally organizers argue the side deal “guts bedrock environmental protections, endangers public health, fast-tracks fossil fuels, and pushes approval for Manchin’s pet project, the Mountain Valley Pipeline,” according to a messaging guide from the People vs. Fossil Fuels coalition sent to community members and climate activists.

“Just the fact that something has passed has given people some sense of optimism,” said Russell Chisholm, the Mountain Valley watch coordinator for Protect Our Water, Heritage, Rights (POWHR), a coalition representing groups from West Virginia and Virginia that has been in opposition to the Mountain Valley Pipeline project. “And there’s also a deep frustration of how that came about and the compromises in there, and everyone is really struggling with that right now.”

Last fall, the People vs. Fossil Fuels coalition organized five days of protests, including Indigenous-led marches to the White House and the U.S. Capitol, and an occupation at the Interior Department, to demand that the Biden administration declare a climate emergency and take more urgent actions to curb carbon-producing fossil fuel projects at a time when scientists say the world needs to sharply cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Advocates are again returning to reemphasize these calls at a time when they say mostly White climate activists seem to be celebrating, without acknowledging the concessions made to pass this bill.

“They rode the roller coaster of compromise all the way into the ground and left us to burn in the flames,” said Ashley Engle, 38, who lives in a rural community outside Tulsa, is enrolled with the Absentee Shawnee tribe of Oklahoma and also descended from the Lakota nation. “This is not only not enough, but it’s really harmful, and we need Biden to step up.”

The project, first proposed in 2014 and mostly finished, is a key priority of Manchin’s. It would transport Appalachian shale gas about 300 miles from West Virginia to Virginia. A proposed 75-mile extension would reach central North Carolina.

Manchin and supporters have argued that this project, designed to carry 2 billion cubic feet of gas a day, would increase the nation’s exports of liquefied natural gas, which the United States is sending to help Europe during the war in Ukraine.

Opponents like Cavalier-Keck have protested, lobbied lawmakers and fought permits in court, successfully stalling a project they say will be devastating to their ancestral homelands, cutting through rivers and rolling hills and damaging access to clean water.

NOTE: Part 3 to appear tomorrow. See also: Stop MVP Coalition (People vs. Fossil Fuels)