CONTACT: Anya Silverman-Stoloff | [email protected]
NATIONAL – This morning, Climate Justice Alliance sent a letter signed by 240 climate, environmental and social justice groups around the country to members of the U.S. House and Senate Appropriations Committees, condemning the 2025 Fiscal Year Appropriations bill for the Interior and Environment. The bill, if passed in its entirety, would derail decades-long progress on environmental and climate justice by rolling back important federal regulations, permitting rules and protections for communities; restoring oil and gas lease sales; and defunding the EPA.
Read the letter with full list of signers HERE.
Frontline and environmental justice groups including the Indigenous Environmental Network, Asian Pacific Environmental Network, and Green Workers Alliance as well as national groups like the Sierra Club, League of Conservation Voters, and the National Wildlife Federation, all signed onto the letter.
The letter reads:
“On behalf of our members representing thousands of communities across the country, climate experts, and the larger environmental and climate justice movement, we strongly urge you to oppose this dangerous bill that has tacked on more than 80 highly political, poison-pill policy riders, that will only exacerbate rather than improve the climate crisis and environmental injustice.”
The letter also points out some of the specific egregious environmental justice provisions in the bill, including:
- Requiring the Secretary of the Interior to resume quarterly onshore oil and gas lease sales and mandates new oil and gas leasing
- Slashing agencies’ resources, including the EPA budget by a whopping 20% or a $1.82 billion reduction, which means a significant loss in climate related action to cool the planet, regulate polluters and fund clean up measures
- Blocking the Administration’s NEPA rules which will essentially end any consideration for climate change and its impacts in new permitting processes
- Ending funding for eight of the Administration’s climate change executive orders including the Environmental Justice Executive Order that acknowledges the impact of climate change on vulnerable communities and aims to address it
- Blocking funding for American Climate Corps, Climate Justice Alliance, and eco grief counseling
“This extremist bill aims to turn back the clock when it comes to federal regulatory power and the environmental justice progress we’ve made to protect the health of our families and future of our children,” said Elizabeth Yeampierre, Executive Director of UPROSE in Brooklyn, NY and Co-Chair of the Climate Justice Alliance. “It also forges an insidious path forward for singling out and attacking our rights to exercise free speech and assembly, and our efforts to build a truly just democracy. We strongly encourage leaders in the House and Senate to refuse to pass the spending bill until these regressive, dangerous policy riders are removed.”
“This disastrous bill comes directly from the anti-environment attacks of the Project 2025 playbook,” said Maria Lopez-Nunez, Climate Justice Alliance board member and member of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council. “The policy riders demonstrate a shocking disregard for the climate progress that has been made in the past few decades, and is a move to bolster a dying fossil fuel industry at the expense of community public health, well-being and democracy. Absolutely none of them should be included in any must-pass spending bill that comes before the House or Senate.”
Last Friday, the Climate Justice Alliance sent a memo to the leadership of both the House and Senate Appropriations Committees raising their concerns, which you can find HERE.
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