Your Help Is Needed to Face Down the ‘Dirty Deal’ September 23, 2022

Call to Action Against the ‘Dirty Deal’

Sen. Manchin’s ‘Permitting Reform Bill’ Is Hitting a Wall of Protests, from Members of Both Parties and 100s of Environmental Justice Organizations — Including PSR-AZ

“These dangerous permitting shortcuts have been on industry wish lists for years. And now they’ve added the Mountain Valley Pipeline approval as the rotten cherry on top of the pile.”

– Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.).

As part of the push to pass President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer promised Democratic outlier Joe Manchin that he would add the West Virginia senator’s controversial fast-track permitting bill to next week’s short-term government funding measure vote.

Schumer said on Tuesday that he “intends to add permitting reform to the spending bill and ‘get it done.’”

As of yesterday, the voices against Manchin’s fossil-fuel-friendly bill were getting louder and stronger: Adding insult to injury, the “dirty deal,” as environmental justice groups term the concession, now includes fast-tracking the fracked-gas Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) that links southern Virginia to Manchin’s West Virginia.

Building what the group People vs Fossil Fuels calls an “unnecessary pipeline” would not only violate Indigenous sovereignty and property rights, but also “threaten endangered species, devastate sensitive Appalachian ecosystems, further degrade hundreds of critical waterways, and disproportionately harm low-wealth communities and communities of color.”

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“Investing in new fossil fuels infrastructure is moral and economic madness.”

— United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres

Your Voice Is Needed and Necessary!

What can we do? What we do best: Express ourselves by calling and tweeting our objections to what, as People vs Fossil Fuels also noted, could be “responsible for an additional 89 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions annually, the equivalent of 26 coal plants” — and that’s just from the MVP plant. “New fossil fuel infrastructure projects, including MVP, are flatly incompatible with limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.”