Robert F. Kennedy Jr. likes to hold himself up as an environmentalist and, as a former senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, he once really was one. But those who know him say he has changed into somebody they no longer recognize. For example, Gina McCarthy, Obama’s EPA administrator, NRDC president during the Trump administration and now President Biden’s climate adviser, was quoted by The New York Times as saying, “If folks remember him as an environmentalist, he is no more … He’s against science, he’s against vaccines, he talks jibber jabber on climate. I don’t know what he stands for.”
McCarthy and dozens of her fellow NRDC alums have gotten together to run ads in six swing state newspapers calling for RFK Jr. to drop out, The Times reported.
There's also an open letter from 12 environmental groups, such as Sierra Club and Sunrise Movement. They didn’t mince words when they ripped Kennedy as “a dangerous conspiracy theorist and science denier whose agenda would be a disaster for our communities and the planet.” The letter also said, “In the fact-free world that both he and Trump live in, objective reality simply does not exist. Their policy platforms are instead driven by what will benefit Big Oil and the greedy corporations that fund them.”
It's not just that Kennedy’s policies are dangerous and wacky, it’s that his sure-to-fail candidacy could be a huge gift to Donald Trump and his anti-climate agenda.
More from The Times:
People involved in both efforts maintain that Mr. Kennedy cannot win the presidency but could siphon votes away from President Biden and help elect former President Donald J. Trump, who has called climate change a hoax and promised to unravel environmental laws and policies.
“A vote for RFK Jr. is a vote to destroy that progress and put Trump back in the White House,” says the newspaper ad that will run in Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Signatories include John Hamilton Adams, who co-founded the Natural Resources Defense Council and hired Mr. Kennedy in the 1980s, as well as past presidents and the group’s current president. They implore Mr. Kennedy to “Honor our planet, drop out.”
President Biden, on the other hand, has taken more climate action than any other administration in history, the Center for American Progress reported last month. For example:
When the Biden administration set the 2030 emissions target, U.S. policy was set to deliver less than half of the pollution cuts needed—so the Biden administration changed U.S. policy. Working with a zero-vote margin in the Senate and a seven-vote margin in the House, President Joe Biden signed into law the Inflation Reduction Act—the most consequential climate legislation in history, winning the votes of every single Democratic member of Congress over the opposition of every single Republican member of Congress. Meanwhile, House Republicans have voted 31 times to repeal climate provisions of the law. As part of the administration’s broader economic agenda, the new legislation makes sweeping investments in efforts to clean up every polluting sector of the economy. The Inflation Reduction Act doesn’t only cut costs for households’ energy use; it also amended the Clean Air Act to empower strong protections against carbon pollution—and now, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is advancing a comprehensive suite of standards that cut pollution from power plants, passenger vehicles, oil wells, trucks, and more. Through relentless executive action and landmark legislation, the Biden administration’s new investments and standards have at last put the 2030 climate goals within reach.
And he’s just getting started, CAP said, adding: “The administration is preparing to finalize pollution standards on power plants and vehicles, energy standards on furnaces, management plans for old-growth forests, and more.”
Just on the issue of climate change and the environment, alone, the choice could not be more clearcut.
