Climate and Environment

We hope that these one-pagers help political professionals, the press, and onlookers to better understand the facts surrounding the reappointment debate.

“It’s extremely disappointing to see this long-awaited report be so watered down by what can only be described as climate apathetic FSOC members.”

President Biden has failed to live up to his promise to progressives to be a climate president. U.S. emissions continue to rise. Last week, 23 unique plant and animal species were declared extinct. A catastrophic pipeline oil spill in California is actively killing fish, birds, and wetland ecosystems. And in violation of treaty rights that are constitutionally the supreme law of the land, Biden allowed Enbridge’s Line 3 tar sands pipeline to become operational on October 1, which will add emissions equivalent to 50 new coal-fired power plants and will inevitably spill. Biden is standing in support while water protectors are violently arrested and the Anishinaabe peoples living in the path of the project are terrorized and abused.

Alumni of Gibson Dunn, the law firm that helped Chevron go after Steven Donziger, have influential executive branch jobs under Biden.

President Biden announced Wednesday that he’s nominated Massachusetts State Representative Maria Robinson to be the Assistant Secretary in the Office of Electricity at the Department of Energy. 

In his time on D.C.’s Public Service Commission and before that as a corporate lawyer, Phillips consistently sided with utilities over the public interest.

Phillips has done the bidding of utilities giants during his time on the D.C. Public Service Commission, and spent years working for corporate BigLaw firms which represent oil and gas interests.

A financial disclosure reveals that Special Envoy for Energy Affairs Amos Hochstein operated a shadow consultancy with foreign fossil fuel clients.

The U.S. Court of Appeals is set to rule on the Biden Administration’s eviction moratorium sometime this week. No matter how it decides, however, it is already clear that those who argued against a new moratorium were wrong. A Trump judge has acknowledged that she must, begrudgingly, sustain it for now. By fighting, rather than preemptively surrendering, the administration has ensured that millions of Americans can stay in their homes for weeks longer. That is undoubtedly worth any embarrassment that government lawyers may feel from potentially eventually losing a case.   

Joe Biden has been president for nearly seven months, and he still has not appointed an Administrator for the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA).

Hochstein is not even a skeptic of the fossil fuel industry, much less an environmentalist. His life’s work has been planting American flags on global fossil fuel reserves, facilitating the drilling and pumping of their contents, and inflicting pain on anyone who gets in the way.

Today, a coalition of 23 environmental, labor, and good government organizations called on President Biden to remove Thomas Workman from his role as the independent member with insurance expertise on the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC), the interagency panel which identifies and addresses systemic risks to the financial system. 

President Biden has repeatedly declared himself “the most pro-union President you’ve ever seen.” But a pro-labor President should also support the workers for whom he’s the boss — namely, the federal civil service.

A Republican majority on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission impedes action on fossil fuels.

Workman came with exactly zero experience as an insurance regulator, but plenty of experience from the opposite side of the courtroom: for 17 years, he’d been the President and CEO of the life insurance industry’s main lobbying group in the state of New York, the Life Insurance Council of New York (LICONY).