Environmentalists plan to descend on the White House grounds Friday evening to protest President Trump’s decision to approve the Keystone XL oil pipeline, but not before celebrating a victory over the failure of Republicans’ Obamacare replacement bill.
“We don’t know whether to celebrate that the bill was pulled or to be horrified that the reason it failed was because it wasn’t cruel enough for some Republicans,” said billionaire climate activist Tom Steyer. “Abandoning 24 million Americans wasn’t enough for a party that advances corporate interests at the expense of people’s lives.”
Major environmental groups had been fighting President Trump’s bid to replace former President Barack Obama’s healthcare law, even while preparing to fight Trump’s bid to approve the Keystone XL crude oil pipeline.
Trump approved the project Friday morning, and many groups have said they will sue the administration. They are confident the litigation will stall the construction of the project for years to come.
Myron Ebell, Trump’s former head of the Environmental Protection Agency transition team, said Friday that he wasn’t confident the White House is prepared to take on the environmentalists.
“The climate industrial complex has a huge amount of money at stake and therefore they are prepared to spend a huge amount of money to keep there mandates and subsidies and handouts,” he said.
He was speaking at a big conference of climate change skeptics in Washington about withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement, which many of the other environmental rules Trump wants to repeal hinge on. He said that if Trump does not act to permanently reverse U.S. involvement in the accord, the environmentalists will use that as a foil to keep much of Obama’s climate agenda.
On the healthcare fight, groups such as the Natural Resources Defense Council and former Vice President Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project had been lobbying behind the scenes to see Trump’s bid to replace the Affordable Care Act fail.
A letter that was sent to congressional leaders Thursday pressed them to keep Obama’s plan in place or risk the unreasonable effects on economically disadvantaged communities due partly to climate change.
“While the health impacts of industrial pollution, environmental disasters and climate change affect our society as a whole, low-income communities and people of color frequently bear the heaviest burden,” the letter said.
The groups said Planned Parenthood has been on the front lines of preserving a cleaner environment and keeping the healthcare law intact would keep funding for those programs going.
“It is critical to preserve providers working within these front line communities, especially those who are willing to act during environmental disasters such as Planned Parenthood Michigan who provided water source screenings and joined efforts to pass out bottled water during the Flint water crisis and the Planned Parenthood program in southern Florida piloted to reach over 30,000 people in minority communities with information and emergency kits to combat the risk of being exposed to the Zika virus,” the letter said.
The environmental groups are now looking to make Trump’s decision on Keystone XL a failure, rather than a triumph for energy independence as the president said Friday, according to the head of NRDC.
Before the pipeline will go forward, “they’ll have to face NRDC in court first,” said Rhea Suh, president of the group in a message to supporters. “We’re filing suit to stop this disastrous pipeline in its tracks.
“We need to make sure they also face massive public resistance,” she said. “Let’s send President Trump and his climate-denying Cabinet of Polluters a powerful message — that we, the American people, stand together in unity in total opposition to the Keystone XL.”
Members of Sierra Club and climate activists from 350.org, along with Native American groups, will be speaking tonight at the White House protest that will extend to the nearby Trump International Hotel.
The groups, in addition to suing the administration, also will be prodding the Nebraska Public Service Commission not to approve the Keystone XL’s construction permit that is now before the commission.
The commission, not the governor, has the final say on allowing the pipeline to cross through Nebraska.
Groups on a call Friday said the process could take a year to hash out before the commission makes a decision, which they are hopeful will result in denying TransCanada’s application to build the pipeline.
