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As an unbiased candidate for the White Home, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claims he could be the “finest surroundings president in American historical past,” drawing on his previous as a crusading lawyer who went after polluters in New York.
However dozens of Mr. Kennedy’s former colleagues on the Pure Sources Protection Council are calling on him to withdraw from the race, in full-page ads sponsored by the group’s political arm which can be anticipated to look in newspapers in six swing states on Sunday.
Individually, a dozen different nationwide environmental organizations have issued an open letter calling Mr. Kennedy “ a “harmful conspiracy theorist and a science denier” who promotes “poisonous beliefs” on vaccines and on local weather change.
Folks concerned in each efforts preserve that Mr. Kennedy can’t win the presidency however may siphon votes away from President Biden and assist elect former President Donald J. Trump, who has known as local weather change a hoax and promised to unravel environmental legal guidelines and insurance policies.
“A vote for RFK Jr. is a vote to destroy that progress and put Trump again within the White Home,” says the newspaper advert that may run in Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Signatories embody John Hamilton Adams, who co-founded the Pure Sources Protection Council and employed Mr. Kennedy within the Nineteen Eighties, in addition to previous presidents and the group’s present president. They implore Mr. Kennedy to “Honor our planet, drop out.”
Mr. Kennedy was a senior lawyer for the Pure Sources Protection Council for about 28 years, stepping down in 2014.
In a phone interview on Thursday, Mr. Kennedy shot again in opposition to the concept that he may convey Mr. Trump again to the White Home.
“President Biden doesn’t want my assist to lose to Donald Trump,” Mr. Kennedy stated. He averted straight addressing the actions of Mr. Adams and different former colleagues, saying solely that he and his mentor “disagree with one another on politics.”
As a substitute Mr. Kennedy criticized Mr. Biden in addition to the environmental motion, which he stated “is making a mistake to accept crumbs which have been given to us by the Biden administration.”
Former colleagues in environmental circles had been unvarnished of their assessments of Mr. Kennedy.
“The Bobby I knew is gone,” stated Dan Reicher, a senior vitality researcher at Stanford College’s Woods Institute for Setting. Mr. Reicher labored with Mr. Kennedy at N.R.D.C. and stated he had a decades-long private friendship with Mr. Kennedy, together with paddling rivers collectively in the USA and Chile.
Gina McCarthy was the administrator of the Environmental Safety Company below President Barack Obama after which turned president of N.R.D.C. throughout the Trump administration, solely to return to nationwide service as Mr. Biden’s local weather adviser till final 12 months.
“If of us keep in mind him as an environmentalist, he’s no extra,” she stated about Mr. Kennedy. “He’s in opposition to science, he’s in opposition to vaccines, he talks jibber jabber on local weather. I don’t know what he stands for.”
Mr. Adams stated in an announcement: ”I mentored Bobby as a younger environmentalist. I don’t acknowledge the individual he has develop into. His actions are a betrayal to the environment.”
The rebuke from Mr. Kennedy’s skilled colleagues comes after his brothers and sisters and different members of the Kennedy household endorsed President Biden at a marketing campaign rally in Philadelphia on Thursday. Mr. Kennedy is a nephew of former President John F. Kennedy and a son of the previous lawyer normal and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy. Members of the family have stated they’re involved that Mr. Kennedy may tilt the race to Mr. Trump.
Allies of Mr. Trump have been discussing methods to raise third-party candidates like Mr. Kennedy in battleground states to divert votes away from Mr. Biden. They want to underline Mr. Kennedy’s background as an environmentalist within the hope of peeling away some progressive voters pissed off by the truth that below Mr. Biden, the nation has produced document ranges of oil and gasoline.
“The trail to victory right here is clearly maximizing the attain of those left-wing options,” Stephen Okay. Bannon, the previous White Home chief strategist who additionally served as Mr. Trump’s marketing campaign chairman in 2016, informed The New York Instances earlier this month.
Mr. Kennedy’s views on local weather change are unconventional. He agrees with the overwhelming scientific opinion that carbon dioxide and methane, two greenhouse gases, are heating the planet, and that the proof is seen. “All of my senses are telling me that the warming is going on,” he stated in a video he posted to X in July.
However in the identical video, he additionally stated {that a} “struggle on carbon” was not the reply and that “this disaster is getting used as a pretext for clamping down totalitarian controls.” He stated that the actors behind the clampdown had been “the intelligence companies, the World Financial Discussion board, the billionaire membership at Davos,” and that their aim was to make the wealthy extra rich. However moments later, he stated that free markets would clear up the local weather disaster.
Mr. Kennedy stated he opposed federal subsidies for carbon seize and storage, a expertise to seize greenhouse gasoline emissions from energy crops or industrial processes earlier than they attain the environment, the place they drive world warming. Mr. Kennedy known as it a “ineffective and large boondoggle to the trade” and criticized Mr. Biden for agreeing to incorporate these subsidies within the 2022 Inflation Discount Act, the president’s landmark local weather legislation.
Many environmental activists are additionally against carbon seize expertise as a result of they need the nation to cease burning fossil fuels and as an alternative swap to wind, photo voltaic and different nonpolluting vitality sources.
However Mr. Kennedy’s agenda doesn’t embody any clear insurance policies to chop greenhouse gasoline emissions.
On Thursday he stated eliminating subsidies for fossil fuels and harder enforcement of present legal guidelines just like the Clear Water Act and the Clear Air Act could be ample to combat local weather change. President Biden has tried thrice to eradicate fossil gasoline subsidies, and every time, Congress has restored them. And in latest rulings, the conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court docket has restricted the Biden administration’s means below present legal guidelines to control greenhouse gases.
Mr. Kennedy additionally stated the environmental motion was making “an enormous tactical error” in specializing in local weather change as an alternative of environmental points which can be much less divisive.
He accused Mr. Biden of turning his again on the surroundings by approving the Willow challenge, an $8 billion oil drilling challenge in Alaska; for overseeing document oil and gasoline manufacturing; and for signing the Inflation Discount Act, which ensures continued offshore oil drilling.
“It’s onerous to know how the environmental motion is now saying that that is OK,” Mr. Kennedy stated. “I believe we want an even bigger imaginative and prescient for the surroundings.”
Manish Bapna, the president of the Pure Sources Protection Council Motion Fund, the political arm of the nonprofit environmental group, famous that Mr. Kennedy had additionally criticized the federal subsidies that jump-started home manufacturing of electrical automobiles and batteries and photo voltaic and wind manufacturing in the USA.
“Voters who care in regards to the surroundings shouldn’t be fooled,” Mr. Bapna stated.
Mr. Biden has enacted essentially the most aggressive local weather agenda of any president. Along with the Inflation Discount Act, which is offering greater than $370 billion for clear vitality over the subsequent decade, he’s limiting emissions from cars, is poised to chop carbon air pollution from energy crops and has reined in future oil and gasoline drilling by limiting the obtainable tracts of land and water that corporations can lease.
The political advert doesn’t focus on Mr. Kennedy’s document as a lawyer who helped clear up the Hudson River and began a worldwide motion to guard waterways.
Mr. Kennedy was named a hero of the planet by Time journal in 1999 for his work with the Riverkeeper group, among the many teams credited with cleansing up the Hudson. As a founding father of the Waterkeeper Alliance, he efficiently fought to shut a New York landfill that was contaminating the water provide and helped defeat dams in Chile and Peru.
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