Big oil companies want infrastructure giveaways. Let’s stop them.
John,
President Biden’s infrastructure package is intended to rebuild the economy. Parts of the package are designed to help address climate change. But some members of Congress are proposing corporate pay-to-pollute schemes designed to boost Big Oil and Gas profits, allowing them to avoid taking meaningful action to control their emissions.
As our planet’s climate crisis intensifies, corporations and their friends in Congress are pushing schemes like cap-and-trade and so-called carbon taxes to keep policymakers from adopting real solutions to climate change, like the common-sense solution of regulating the pollutants that cause it. Giving corporations a blank check to pollute is dangerous and foolish.
These schemes don’t work. They’re nothing more than greenwashing tricks that give a false sense of progress when it comes to climate change — they mean more fracking, more pipelines, more pollution. More business as usual, with no actual progress.
Carbon pricing schemes don’t reduce emissions, but instead further entrench the oil and gas industry in our economy, while continuing pollution in low-income neighborhoods and Black, Brown and Indigenous communities, which are already overburdened with harmful pollution.
Our climate can’t wait.The fossil fuel era needs to end. Congress must pass an infrastructure package that invests in clean, renewable energy programs that put environmental justice and equality at the center — that’s the kind of long-term solution our country needs right now to rebuild.
Stopping climate change will require serious action on multiple fronts, including a plan to end our dependence on fossil fuels and transition to 100 percent renewable energy. No serious plan can include carbon pricing schemes, which inherently undermine these goals.
Food & Water Action is leading the fight to take on the fossil fuel industry directly. We’re at the center of the movement to ban fracking everywhere. We’ve banned fracking in three states and hundreds of communities across this country. We know that if we accept climate gimmicks that continue our reliance on fossil fuels, our climate crisis will get much worse. But if we continue to work together, we can win REAL climate solutions for this country.
Food & Water Action and its affiliated organization, Food & Water Watch, are advocacy groups with a common mission to protect our food, water and climate. This email was sent to [email protected] - and we're glad you got it, because it's one of the most important ways you can reclaim political power, hold elected officials accountable and resist corporate control.
