Climate and Environment

This is the latest installment of a new biweekly blog series from RDP. Every two weeks, we call out ongoing trends in media coverage of the Justice Department’s focus and priorities, giving context from our past DOJ oversight work as needed, with an eye to the impact of DOJ capacity and resources, as well as alignment with the Biden administration’s professed goals.

If we at the Revolving Door Project could exhort the Biden administration to do anything, it would be this: Choose the right enemies—rich, powerful corporations that harm the public, most often with impunity. Sometimes you will lose, but that doesn’t mean you should forfeit the fight. And getting caught trying can inspire the public to rally around a political party and its leaders.

The SVB collapse rubs in our collective faces the fact that the financiers with great influence over our political economy are, by and large, a pack of greedy idiots.

Just last week, I highlighted the enormous stakes of the Justice Department’s long-anticipated filing in a climate liability case brought by Boulder County, Colorado against fossil fuel companies Suncor Energy and ExxonMobil seeking damages for their campaign of corporate deception. […] Yesterday, the Justice Department finally offered its answer.

In response to the U.S. Department of the Interior approving three drilling pads to allow the controversial Willow Project to advance, Revolving Door Project Climate Research Director Dorothy Slater released the following statement:

Over halfway through Biden’s term, Attorney General Merrick Garland is maintaining the Trump Justice Department’s position on an alarming number of legal cases. Our litigation tracker documents approximately 40 such cases across education, immigration, the environment, criminal justice, transparency, agriculture and other issues. It is by no means a comprehensive list.

A 38-car train wreck. Toxic chemicals seeping into water and soil, and a black plume rising in the sky. Sick people, sick pets. As the Prospect’s Jarod Facundo wrote last week, the national spotlight remains fixed on the ecological consequences of the February 3 derailment of a Norfolk Southern train carrying hazardous chemicals in East Palestine, Ohio.

In the context of this ecological disaster, arguing for a reduced budget for federal investigators, air and water quality testing, and programs that hold polluting corporations accountable for proper cleanup and restitution is sheer madness. But that’s exactly what the current right-wing push for massive government spending cuts in the name of deficit reduction would entail.

“Corporations do not respect Buttigieg as a regulator.”

But succeeding at his Cancer Moonshot’s goals will require more than funding research into cancer treatments. As the first day of February marks the beginning of National Cancer Prevention Month, it’s worth acknowledging that cancer prevention requires different approaches than treatment, and must include a reckoning with the carcinogens that pervade our environment. If Biden really wants to fight cancer in America, he’s going to have to challenge the fossil fuel and petrochemical industries. Among other things, this means confronting an Achilles heel of the Democratic Party: domestic fracking.