September, 23 2020, 12:00am EDT

For Immediate Release
Contact:
Email:,info(at)fwwatch(dot)org,Seth Gladstone -,sgladstone@fwwatch.org
Over 100 Groups Oppose Democrats' Energy Bill as Insufficient
Array of progressive, climate, and environmental orgs call for more meaningful climate action, oppose ‘false solutions.’
WASHINGTON
Over 100 groups -- including major environmental, climate and progressive organizations -- released a letter urging members of Congress to oppose the Clean Economy Jobs and Innovation Act (HR 4447), the massive energy bill that Democrats are pushing forward for a vote this week.
As the impacts of the climate crisis are evident from coast to coast, the heaviest burdens continue to fall on low-income communities and communities of color. While the bill advances some helpful environmental justice protections, it fails to offer a plan that would directly curtail fossil fuel production.
The letter -- signed by Food & Water Action, Climate Justice Alliance, Friends of the Earth, Sunrise Movement, Public Citizen, 350.org, Indigenous Environmental Network, GreenLatinos, League of Women Voters, Breast Cancer Action, Center for Biological Diversity, People's Action, Endangered Species Coalition, Oil Change, Global Witness, GreenFaith, Seeding Sovereignty and Zero Hour -- comes at a critical moment, as Democrats balance a desire to pass climate legislation with growing calls from grassroots movements to deliver a more ambitious strategy.
"As we have said repeatedly, the continued extraction, processing, and burning of fossil fuels is incompatible with passing a habitable planet to future generations," said Food & Water Action Policy Director Mitch Jones. "Unfortunately, House Democratic leadership has decided that they'd rather score a 'win', than pass truly innovative energy legislation. But this would be a pyrrhic victory. The House should reject this legislation and pursue meaningful climate action that will be centered on the twin pillars of a fair and just transition for workers and frontline communities and the end of our addiction to fossil fuels."
"At a time when the West is burning, the Gulf South is being assaulted by climate change-fueled storms, and frontline communities nationwide are reeling from a global pandemic that's stolen over 200,000 lives, mostly Black, Brown and Indigenous, it's extremely disheartening to see the House Democrats pushing a dirty energy bill littered with false solutions and fossil fuel subsidies," said Angela Mahecha Adrar, Executive Director of the Climate Justice Alliance. "The environmental justice provisions contained therein are nothing more than an afterthought- aimed to serve as a shiny ribbon wrapped around a dirty package. If passed as written, this bill will decrease environmental justice and increase environmental racism. How many more of our communities need to be sacrificed before we stop playing politics and start defending people and the planet?"
"With wildfires and hurricanes devastating families across the country, the need for bold action from Congress to fight climate change is clearer now than ever. But we must ensure that those actions are also just and equitable. Expensive and failed false solutions like carbon capture and storage will only exacerbate the already disproportionate impact that fossil fuel projects have on marginalized communities," said Nicole Ghio, Fossil Fuel Programs Manager for Friends of the Earth.
"As we continue to see the impacts of the climate crises across our country and world, we cannot afford to promote false solutions. This bill does not do what science says is necessary to avoid irreversible climate catastrophe," said Natalie Mebane, Associate Director of U.S. Policy at 350.org. "We need to fully invest in an ambitious and bold, just transition to 100 percent clean and renewable energy. The Clean Economy Jobs and Innovation Act (H.R. 4447) is nowhere near what we need it to be."
The groups point out that the legislation advances false solutions like carbon capture sequestration (CCS), a much hyped technology that is the backbone of many of the weak plans that aim to achieve 'net zero' emissions. This year, one of the most highly touted carbon capture plants in the country was shuttered after falling well short of expectations. The letter points out that relying on this 'ineffective gimmick" means the bill would likely fail to reduce carbon emissions.
"Progressive Democrats of America (PDA) encourages all members of the U.S. House of Representatives to vote against HR 4447. We applaud the environmental justice measures in this bill, but cannot support legislation that extends our country's reliance upon fossil fuels," said Alan Minsky, Executive Director of Progressive Democrats of America.
As the letter states: "We cannot perpetuate false solutions to the climate crisis that keep our reliance on fossil fuels--as this legislation proposes to do--and have any hope of ending the climate or environmental justice crises brought about by dirty energy. We hope we can count on you to stand against this legislation and embrace policies that will truly support a just and equitable transition to clean renewable energy."
Food & Water Watch mobilizes regular people to build political power to move bold and uncompromised solutions to the most pressing food, water, and climate problems of our time. We work to protect people's health, communities, and democracy from the growing destructive power of the most powerful economic interests.
(202) 683-2500LATEST NEWS
At Least 95 Palestinians Killed in Israeli Attacks Including Massacres at Beach Café, Aid Points
"I saw body parts flying everywhere, and bodies cut and burned," said one eyewitness to a strike on the popular al-Baqa Café.
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Israeli forces ramped up their genocidal assault on the Gaza Strip Monday, killing at least 95 Palestinians in attacks including massacres at a seaside café and a humanitarian aid distribution center and bombings of five school shelters housing displaced families and a hospital where refugees were sheltering in tents.
An Israeli strike targeted the al-Baqa Café in western Gaza City, one of the few operating businesses remaining after 633 days of Israel's obliteration of the coastal strip and a popular gathering place for journalists, university students, artists, and others seeking reliable internet service and a respite from nearly 21 months of near-relentless attacks.
Medical sources said at least 33 civilians were killed and nearly 50 others wounded in the massacre, including footballer Mustafa Abu Amira, photojournalist Ismail Abu Hatab—who survived an earlier Israeli airstrike and is reportedly the 227th journalists killed by Israel since October 2023—and prominent artist Frans Al-Salmi, whose final painting depicting a young Palestinian woman killed by Israeli forces resembles photographs of its slain creator posted on social media after her killing.
Warning: Photos shows image of death
Survivor Ali Abu Ateila toldThe Associated Press that the café was crowded with women and children at the time of the attack.
"Without a warning, all of a sudden, a warplane hit the place, shaking it like an earthquake," he said.
Another survivor of the massacre told Britain's Sky News: "All I see is blood... Unbelievable. People come here to take a break from what they see inside Gaza. They come westward to breathe."
Eyewitness Ahmed Al-Nayrab toldAgence France-Presse that a "huge explosion shook the area."
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Witnesses and officials said Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) troops opened fire on Palestinians seeking food and other humanitarian aid from a U.S.-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation distribution point in southern Gaza, killing 15 people amid near-daily massacres of aid-seekers.
"We were targeted by artillery," survivor Monzer Hisham Ismail told The Associated Press. Another survivor, Yousef Mahmoud Mokheimar, told the AP that Israeli troops "fired at us indiscriminately." Mokheimar was shot in the leg, another man who tried to rescue him was also shot.
IDF troops have killed nearly 600 Palestinian aid-seekers and wounded more than 4,000 others over the past month, with Israeli military officers and soldiers saying they were ordered to deliberately fire on civilians in search of food and other necessities amid Israel's weaponized starvation of Gaza.
Another 13 people were reportedly killed Monday when IDF warplanes bombed an aid warehouse in the Zeitoun quarter of southern Gaza City, according to al-Ahli Baptist Hospital officials cited by The Palestine Chronicle. IDF warplanes also reportedly bombed five schools housing displaced families, three of them in Zeitoun. Israeli forces also bombed the courtyard of al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, where thousands of forcibly displaced Palestinian families are sheltering in tents. It was reportedly the 12th time the hospital has been bombed since the start of the war.
The World Health Organization has documented more than 700 attacks on Gaza healthcare facilities since October 2023. Most of Gaza's hospitals are out of service due to Israeli attacks, some of which have been called genocidal by United Nations experts.
Israel's overall behavior in the war is the subject of an ongoing International Court of Justice genocide case, while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, including murder and using starvation as a weapon of war.
Since October 2023, Israeli forces have killed or wounded more than 204,000 Palestinians in Gaza, including over 14,000 people who are missing and presumed dead and buried under rubble, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, whose casualty figures have been found to be generally accurate and even a likely undercount by peer-reviewed studies.
The intensified IDF attacks follow Israel's issuance of new forced evacuation orders amid the ongoing Operation Gideon's Chariots, an ongoing offensive which aims to conquer and indefinitely occupy all of Gaza and ethnically cleanse much of its population, possibly to make way for Jewish recolonization as advocated by many right-wing Israelis.
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Since launching the retaliatory annihilation of Gaza in response to the Hamas-led October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, Israeli forces have killed at least 56,531 Palestinians and wounded more than 133,600 others, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which also says over 14,000 people are missing and presumed dead and buried beneath rubble. Upward of 2 million Gazans have been forcibly displaced, often more than once.
On Sunday, U.S. President Donald Trump reiterated a call for a cease-fire deal that would secure the release of the remaining 22 living Israeli and other hostages held by Hamas.
In addition to Tlaib, the letter to Rubio was signed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Democratic Reps. Greg Casar (Texas), Jesús "Chuy" García (Ill.), Al Green (Texas), Jonathan Jackson (Ill.), Pramila Jayapal (Wash.), Henry "Hank"Johnson (Ga.), Summer Lee (Pa.), Jim McGovern (Mass.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (Minn.), Chellie Pingree (Maine), Mark Pocan (Wisc.), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.), Delia Ramirez (Ill.), Paul Tonko (N.Y.), Nydia Velázquez (N.Y.), and Bonnie Watson Coleman (N.J.).
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"Jake Sullivan's been a critical decision-maker in every Democratic catastrophe of the last decade," said one observer. "Why is he still in the inner circle?"
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Amid the latest battle over the direction the Democratic Party should move in, a number of strategists and political advisers from across the center-left's ideological spectrum are assembling a committee to determine the policy agenda they hope will be taken up by a Democratic successor to President Donald Trump.
Some of the names on the list of people crafting the agenda—named Project 2029, an echo of the far-right Project 2025 blueprint Trump is currently enacting—left progressives with deepened concerns that party insiders have "learnt nothing" and "forgotten nothing" from the president's electoral victories against centrist Democratic candidates over the past decade, as one economist said.
The project is being assembled by former Democratic speechwriter Andrei Cherny, now co-founder of the policy journal Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, and includes Jake Sullivan, a former national security adviser under the Biden administration; Jim Kessler, founder of the centrist think tank Third Way; and Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress and longtime adviser to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Progressives on the advisory board for the project include economist Justin Wolfers and former Roosevelt Institute president Felicia Wong, but antitrust expert Hal Singer said any policy agenda aimed at securing a Democratic victory in the 2028 election "needs way more progressives."
As The New York Times noted in its reporting on Project 2029, the panel is being convened amid extensive infighting regarding how the Democratic Party can win back control of the White House and Congress.
After democratic socialist and state Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani's (D-36) surprise win against former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo last week in New York City's mayoral primary election—following a campaign with a clear-eyed focus on making childcare, rent, public transit, and groceries more affordable—New York City has emerged as a battleground in the fight. Influential Democrats including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) have so far refused to endorse him and attacked him for his unequivocal support for Palestinian rights.
Progressives have called on party leaders to back Mamdani, pointing to his popularity with young voters, and accept that his clear message about making life more affordable for working families resonated with Democratic constituents.
But speaking to the Times, Democratic pollster Celinda Lake exemplified how many of the party's strategists have insisted that candidates only need to package their messages to voters differently—not change the messages to match the political priorities of Mamdani and other popular progressives like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).
"We didn't lack policies," Lake told the Times of recent national elections. "But we lacked a functioning narrative to communicate those policies."
Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez have drawn crowds of thousands in red districts this year at Sanders' Fighting Oligarchy rallies—another sign, progressives say, that voters are responding to politicians who focus on billionaires' outsized control over the U.S. political system and on economic justice.
Project 2029's inclusion of strategists like Kessler, who declared economic populism "a dead end for Democrats" in 2013, demonstrates "the whole problem [with Democratic leadership] in a nutshell," said Jonathan Cohn of Progressive Mass—as does Sullivan's seat on the advisory board.
As national security adviser to President Joe Biden, Sullivan played a key role in the administration's defense and funding of Israel's assault on Gaza, which international experts and human rights groups have said is a genocide.
"Jake Sullivan's been a critical decision-maker in every Democratic catastrophe of the last decade: Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign, the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Israel/Gaza War, and the 2024 Joe Biden campaign," said Nick Field of the Pennsylvania Capital-Star. "Why is he still in the inner circle?"
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