• Greenpeace response to President Trump Keystone/NoDAPL announcement

  Blogpost by Mike Hudema - January 24, 2017 at 12:24Add comment
  In response to President Trump signing executive orders to restart the Keystone and Dakota Access pipelines, Greenpeace USA Executive Director Annie Leonard and Greenpeace Canada Climate and Energy campaigner Mike Hudema had the following to say:

  Greenpeace USA Executive Director Annie Leonard

  “A powerful alliance of Indigenous communities, ranchers, farmers, and climate activists stopped the Keystone and the Dakota Access pipelines the first time around, and the same alliances will come together to stop them again if Trump tries to raise them from the dead. Instead of pushing bogus claims about the potential of pipelines to create jobs, Trump should focus his efforts on the clean energy sector where America’s future lives. Trump’s energy plan is more of the same — full of giveaways to his fossil fuel cronies at a time when renewable energy is surging ahead.

  “We all saw the incredible strength and courage of the water protectors at Standing Rock, and the people around the world who stood with them in solidarity. We’ll stand with them again if Trump tries to bring the Dakota Access Pipeline, or any other fossil fuel infrastructure project, back to life.

  “Renewable energy is not only the future, but the only just economy for today. Keystone, the Dakota Access Pipeline, and fossil fuel infrastructure projects like them will only make billionaires richer and make the rest of us suffer. We will resist this with all of our power and we will continue to build the future the world wants to see.”

  Greenpeace Canada Climate and Energy campaigner Mike Hudema

  “People on both sides of the border will be there to stand with Indigenous nations, and all those that believe in Indigenous reconciliation and a climate safe future to ensure these pipelines don’t make it in the ground.

  The question for Canadians is: will the Prime Minister continue to align himself with a climate denying Trump administration, or will he stand with the people and with science and start living up to his own commitments to the climate and Indigenous rights?

  The Prime Minister can’t keep saying he will lead on climate while building three new tar sands pipelines. Alternative facts may work in the U.S. administration but they shouldn’t be tolerated here.”

  Contact: Travis Nichols, Greenpeace US, 206.802.8498

  Contact: Mike Hudema, Greenpeace Canada 780.504.5601

WILL SCOTT PRUITT ABDICATE HIS RESPONSIBILITY?

Automakers have officially submitted a letter asking the new head of the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Scott Pruitt, to abdicate his responsibility for protecting the environment by loosening the fuel efficiency standards they agreed upon with the Obama administration in 2011. Pruitt, who calls himself a “leading advocate against the EPA” and has spent much of his life fighting against the agency, has received over $270,000 in lifetime campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry. Incidentally, Pruitt also denies that burning oil and gas causes global warming. Surely there’s no connection between that opinion and the campaign contributions he’s received.

The automakers claim that the 54.5mpg CAFE standard would be too costly to implement by 2025, and that consumer demand isn’t there for more efficient vehicles, even as EV sales continue to experience massive growth.

In totally unrelated news, as of three months ago, Tesla had well over half a billion dollars worth of customer deposits, most of which are for a car that nobody has even driven yet, but is significantly more efficient than the new rule requires. That car was unveiled a year ago as the biggest product launch of all time, with an unprecedented tens of thousands of customers camping out overnight or lining up early at stores worldwide to put a deposit of real, actual money down on a car they hadn’t even seen yet. Tesla’s 2014 CAFE performance was 278.9 mpg, over five times higher and eleven years earlier than the 54.5mpg 2025 target the automakers, who have much more experience than Tesla, claim they cannot possibly meet.

The group which submitted the letter, the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers (AAM), represents twelve companies and 77% of car and light truck sales in the United States. There’s no real surprise that they’ve submitted this letter, as we reported before that virtually all automakers except for Tesla and a few French automakers were lobbying the prospective administration for a loosening of any restrictions which might require them to be even the tiniest bit socially responsible.

In addition to causing global warming, oil and the pollutants emitted by burning it are responsible for heart disease, lung disease and brain dysfunction, among many other things. Presumably, most of the people associated with the AAM and EPA, including Pruitt himself, have lungs, and perhaps even brains and hearts (though evidence seems to be lacking for the latter two), and actually live in the environment they seem determined to do everything they can to destroy.

Lobbying efforts by polluters, like this one, are a reason why government officials often “look the other way” while they pollute the world in which all of us, environmentalists and otherwise, live. And because of governments looking the other way, dirty energy benefits from an estimated $5.3 trillion global subsidy, in terms of the damage pollution does to all of us and to the world economy.

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