This Is Not a Climate Solution: Indigenous Land Defender Warns Senate Bill Will Aid Fossil Fuels

We look at ​​the Democrats’ sweeping $739 billion bill just passed by the Senate in part to address the climate crisis. Democrats in the Senate passed the Inflation Reduction Act on Sunday with votes from West Virginia’s Joe Manchin and Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema, and the House will vote on the package Friday. The reason the bill exists at all is due to Senator Bernie Sanders and grassroots organizing to demand action on climate change, says Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen. Indigenous lawyer Tara Houska says the bill’s climate provisions cede too much to Big Oil companies in pursuit of renewable energy. “Black and Brown people continue to disparately experience the effects of extractive industry,” she adds. Bishop William Barber, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, says the bill contains too much compromise. “Part of the bill was putting a pipeline that Black and white and Brown and poor people in frontline communities are fighting right now,” he says.

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