SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
For Immediate Release
September, 27 2021, 05:54pm EDT
Contact:
Doug O’Malley, Environment New Jersey State Director, 917-449-6812, domalley@
Morgan Folger, Environment America Destination: Zero Carbon Campaign Director, 203-343-1736, mfolger@environmentamerica.org
Taran Volckhausen, Communications Associate, 720-212-9955, tvolckhausen@
Advocates, Land Owners and Environmental Regulators Win Watershed Victory Against Bi-State Gas Pipeline
PennEast Pipeline Co. announced on Monday that it was pulling the plug on its proposed 116-mile gas pipeline that would have crossed Pennsylvania and New Jersey to deliver methane gas from Pennsylvania fracking wells. The announcement came on the heels of a Supreme Court decision that granted PennEast the right to use eminent domain to seize public and private lands for the pipeline. Nevertheless, the proposal faced stiff environmental permitting challenges from the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP) under the Clean Water Act.
WASHINGTON
PennEast Pipeline Co. announced on Monday that it was pulling the plug on its proposed 116-mile gas pipeline that would have crossed Pennsylvania and New Jersey to deliver methane gas from Pennsylvania fracking wells. The announcement came on the heels of a Supreme Court decision that granted PennEast the right to use eminent domain to seize public and private lands for the pipeline. Nevertheless, the proposal faced stiff environmental permitting challenges from the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP) under the Clean Water Act. The company cited environmental permitting difficulties in its decision to withdraw the project.
The pipeline would have damaged 235 waterways, including 31 pristine streams in New Jersey, and 4,300 acres of preserved lands. It would also have led to more than 460 new fracked gas wells, and increased fracking water demands by 880 million gallons. The decision ends a seven-year battle between PennEast and New Jersey landowners, advocacy organizations, including Environment America affiliate Environment New Jersey, and environmental regulators, especially with the Murphy administration.
Doug O'Malley, director of Environment New Jersey, issued the following statement:
"This is a watershed victory to stop fossil fuel companies from destroying our natural lands and waterways, and polluting our climate. This is a win for the public, a win for the environment and a win for the climate. We've been waiting for this victory for seven years.
"After standing up for the environment in a legal battle that went all the way to the Supreme Court, residents are shedding tears of joy today. This victory wouldn't have been possible without the Murphy administration and the NJDEP standing up to PennEast's environmental bullying. Today is proof that you can fight the gas industry and win.
"Today has exposed the gas industry's deceptive practice of building new gas pipelines without proving the need for gas. Today the gas industry's willingness to bully landowners using the threat of eminent domain died a little bit more. PennEast spent the last seven years bullying New Jersey - from landowners to state government - and this win is a testament that you can't bulldoze the public and the environment."
Congresswoman Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-12), who represents portions of the communities PennEast would have intersected, also issued a statement:
"I am grateful for all of the work that has been accomplished by the advocacy groups on the ground these last few years, fighting this unnecessary and dangerous proposal. I also thank the residents and communities on the front line of the proposed route for their tireless efforts. My work is not done. I will continue to commit to this fight for comprehensive oversight by FERC. We must have accountability when it comes to proposed projects and take a cumulative approach of the need and the environmental impact when pipelines are put forth into consideration. Make no mistake, though, today is a great win."
With Environment America, you protect the places that all of us love and promote core environmental values, such as clean air to breathe, clean water to drink, and clean energy to power our lives. We're a national network of 29 state environmental groups with members and supporters in every state. Together, we focus on timely, targeted action that wins tangible improvements in the quality of our environment and our lives.
(303) 801-0581LATEST NEWS
Look to Analilia Mejía's Victory, Says Bernie Sanders: 'This Can Be Done Everywhere'
"The American people want real change," the senator said. "Let's do it."
Feb 11, 2026
Recent progressive electoral victories have been followed by assurances from centrist Democratic politicians and strategists that such successes can't be replicated elsewhere, and congressional candidate Analilia Mejía's primary win this week was no exception—but Sen. Bernie Sanders implored voters not to listen to the naysayers who continue to insist that "moderation" is the key to winning elections for Democrats.
Emphasizing that Mejía, a grassroots organizer, was known to just 5% of voters in New Jersey's 11th Congressional District when she launched her campaign in November, Sanders said Wednesday: "Make no mistake. This can be done everywhere."
Mejía ran against 10 other candidates, including former US Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-NJ), in the Democratic primary ahead of the April 16 special election to fill the seat left vacant by Gov. Mikie Sherrill.
The progressive candidate was outspent 4-1, said Sanders, but proved unstoppable "because she had the courage to stand up for the working class in her area and throughout this country."
Mejía is a vocal supporter of shifting from the for-profit health insurance system to Medicare for All and has called for other progressive policies including tuition-free community college, a moratorium on new artificial intelligence data centers, and a federal law guaranteeing paid sick leave.
She has also called to abolish US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the 23-year-old agency that President Donald Trump has deployed to cities across the US to carry out his violent mass deportation agenda, demanded an end to ICE's mass surveillance, and held training sessions for voters on anti-authoritarianism, civil disobedience, and how to prepare for encounters with federal immigration agents.
After Malinowski conceded to Mejía, Democratic strategist Steve Schale, who led former President Barack Obama's campaign operations in Florida in 2008, attempted to throw cold water on the progressive victory.
“The loudest voices are on the progressive left, but I don’t know if that’s where the party is,” Schale told The Hill Wednesday, asserting that Democratic voters in “southern states with large Black populations... don’t sound like progressives in New York and Northern New Jersey."
After New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani's victory in the Democratic primary last June against former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg—who has been named as a possible contender in the 2028 presidential race—was similarly dismissive, even though Mamdani, like Mejía, went from being barely known among voters to beating his establishment rival in just a few short months after focusing relentlessly on affordability and working-class issues.
Other progressive victories victories could be on the horizon in Maine, where Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner has had a double-digit lead over Gov. Janet Mills in polls ahead of the June primary and raised three times as much as Mills and Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) combined in small donations in the final quarter of 2025; and North Carolina, where Durham County Commissioner Nida Allam is challenging Rep. Valerie Foushee for a second time after losing a close race in 2022.
Allam raised more than twice as much money as Foushee in the last quarter, according to numbers released last week.
Like Sanders, the New Jersey Working Families Party expressed optimism about Mejía's victory, with Antoinette Miles, the party's state director, saying Tuesday that "she has sent a clear signal that it’s a new day in New Jersey politics, and that our country is ready for bold, working-class leadership."
"In just 10 weeks, through the dead of winter, Analilia built a grassroots campaign for and by all New Jerseyans. Her bold message of an economy that works for all of us and an end to ICE’s brutality resonated with voters who are fed up with the status quo," said Miles. "Together, we’ve proved that organized people can defeat organized money."
Sanders added that "what Analilia did in New Jersey can in fact be done in every part of this country."
"The American people want real change," he said. "Let's do it."
Keep ReadingShow Less
'Truth Cannot Be Erased': Vance Deletes Posts Honoring Armenian Genocide, Which Trump Admin Doesn’t Recognize
"This is brazen genocide denial," said the policy director for the Armenian National Committee of America.
Feb 11, 2026
The office of Vice President JD Vance made multiple posts commemorating the Armenian genocide on Tuesday, but was forced to take them down because the Trump administration doesn't formally recognize that the genocide happened.
Vance's X account posted a photo of the vice president and his wife, Usha, attending a wreath-laying ceremony at a memorial in the Armenian city of Yerevan. The post said the Vances were there "to honor the victims of the 1915 Armenian genocide."
But the post was swiftly taken down, with a Vance spokesperson blaming it on a staff member.
"This is an account managed by staff that primarily exists to share photos and videos of the vice president's activities," they said. "For the vice president's views on the substance of the question, I refer you to the comments he made earlier on the tarmac in response to the pool's question."
This was referring to Vance's comments to reporters about visiting the memorial, which were posted by an official White House account. "I'm the first vice president to ever visit Armenia. They asked us to visit the site... I wanted to go and pay my respects."
That post has since been deleted as well.
Alex Galitsky, the policy director for the Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA) reacted: "This is brazen genocide denial. An insult to the memory of the 1.5 million victims of the Armenian Genocide—and an affront to a community that fought tirelessly for decades to ensure recognition of that crime."
Historians widely agree that the Ottoman Empire's systemic killing and deportation of mostly Christian Armenians during the First World War constitutes one of the 20th century's worst genocides. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum:
There were approximately 1.5 million Armenians living in the multiethnic Ottoman Empire in 1915. At least 664,000 and possibly as many as 1.2 million died during the genocide, either in massacres and individual killings, or from systematic ill treatment, exposure, and starvation.
But the government of Turkey continues to adamantly deny the genocide committed by its predecessor state to this day. And due to Turkey's status as a NATO ally, US presidents dating back more than half a century have likewise refused to describe the historic crime as a "genocide."
This began to change in 2019, when Congress passed a historic resolution finally recognizing the genocide more than a century after it began. In 2021, then-President Joe Biden became the first US president to formally acknowledge the genocide without ambiguity.
But in April 2025, after President Donald Trump returned to office, he rolled this acknowledgment back, referring to the mass killing as a "great catastrophe" and "one of the worst disasters of the 20th century" while evading the term "genocide."
Julien Zarifian, a professor of US history at the University of Poitiers in France, wrote that "Trump's reversal seemed to make genocide recognition taboo not only in the White House, but in the whole executive branch."
The return to a denialist stance put the US back into line not only with Turkey, but with Azerbaijan, with which Armenia has been locked in conflict over the disputed Nagorno‑Karabakh region for decades.
In 2023, more than 100,000 Armenians—virtually the whole population—were forced to flee the territory in what has been described as an ethnic cleansing by Azerbaijan, which occupied large parts of the area.
While the US has remained formally neutral in the conflict, it has provided hundreds of millions of dollars of security assistance to Azerbaijan under presidents of both parties, which critics say has emboldened Azerbaijan to act more aggressively. Azerbaijan notably has the steadfast backing of Turkey in the conflict, as well as key US ally Israel.
Vance's visit to Armenia was the first leg of a trip that continued to Azerbaijan, where he met with its leaders to discuss ending the conflict and to shore up an agreement that would give the US greater access to the region's natural resources.
Last August, Trump boasted of brokering a “peace deal” between the two nations, but Azerbaijan had not signed anything—only agreed to further talks.
One of the provisions of the deal pushed by the Trump administration is that Armenia would drop any legal claims against Azerbaijan over its human rights abuses, which Just Security analysts David J. Simon and Kathryn Hemmer said would be "thereby depriving Nagorno-Karabakh’s 150,000 victims of justice."
During a summit with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, Vance laid on the flattery: "Other than President Trump, the only leader in the world that has really good relations with both the Turks and the Israelis is President Aliyev," he said. "That means one, the food must be really good here, or two, he must be really charming. I can confirm that he's very charming."
Gev Iskajyan, the advocacy director of ANCA, responded: "Vance thinks Aliyev is really charming. Especially when he’s committing war crimes, rigging his own elections, or ethnically cleansing an entire people."
Keep ReadingShow Less
214 House Republicans Just Tried to Give 'Mad King' Trump Even More Tariff Powers
"The trade powers Trump is illegally usurping are expressly granted to Congress under the Constitution," said Rep. Don Beyer.
Feb 11, 2026
Republicans in the US House on Tuesday tried—and narrowly failed—to advance a measure containing language that would have temporarily blocked votes on resolutions disapproving of President Donald Trump’s tariffs.
Democrats voted unanimously to defeat the measure, and were joined by just three House Republicans—Don Bacon of Nebraska, Thomas Massie of Kentucky, and Kevin Kiley of California—in a final vote of 214 in favor to 217 opposed.
As reported by MS NOW, House Republicans tucked language preventing challenges to Trump's tariff policies into a rule setting up floor consideration for legislation related to US energy security.
While a similar provision was passed in the House in September before expiring at the end of January, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) was unable to cobble together votes to get it passed this time.
Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) celebrated what he described as a "heartening" victory, while expressing concern that the vast majority of Republicans were comfortable letting the president take their constitutionally mandated power over taxation.
"Most Republicans again tried to surrender Congress’ power as a coequal branch of government to check a president who is behaving like a mad king," Beyer wrote in a social media post. "The trade powers Trump is illegally usurping are expressly granted to Congress under the Constitution."
Matt Fuller, director of congressional reporting at MS NOW, similarly argued that "it's a lot more notable to me that 214 House Republicans voted to hand Donald Trump unchecked authority to levy tariffs until August than it is that three House Republicans said 'no.'"
While Tuesday's vote suggests a narrowly divided House, Punchbowl News co-founder Jake Sherman argued that it actually represented a "watershed moment" that could open the door to several defeats for the Trump administration on the House floor in the coming days, as Democrats prepare to hammer the GOP with tariff disapproval resolutions.
"Now Democrats have the opportunity to force unlimited votes on the president's global tariffs, putting Republicans on the spot all the time," Sherman explained in a Wednesday social media post. "If Dems handle this well, this is going to get bad for rank and file House Republicans. And it will piss off Trump."
Sherman's assessment of the situation was echoed by the Wednesday edition of Politico Playbook, which noted that Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-NY) is already teeing up a resolution to overturn Trump's tariffs against Canada that is set for a vote on Wednesday afternoon.
"Given the current mood in the House—every single Dem showed up to vote last night, while plenty of Republicans are uncomfortable with tariffs—Johnson looks all but certain to lose," Politico declared.
Matt Maasdam, a Democratic US House candidate running in Michigan's 7th Congressional District, started putting pressure on incumbent Rep. Tom Barrett (R-Mich.) the morning after the Michigan Republican voted to protect Trump from tariff resolutions.
"Tom Barrett has voted over and over to protect the Trump tariffs that make costs go up," wrote Maasdam on social media. "The tariffs on Canada hit Michigan hard. Auto parts for a car made here cross the border multiple times—in a trade war, it’s our workers and businesses who get hurt."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular