RFK Jr. sheds environmentalist mantle with Trump endorsement

For many years, Robert. F. Kennedy Jr. labored as an environmental lawyer, submitting lawsuits towards polluters. He helped discovered a worldwide inexperienced group that fought for clear water and helped defeat dam tasks in Chile and Peru.

But even earlier than he introduced Friday that he was suspending his presidential marketing campaign and supporting former President Trump, Kennedy had repeatedly disillusioned and angered dozens of environmentalists, who stated he had deserted his inexperienced roots.

“It’s a shock to me realizing the Bobby I used to know,” stated Dan Reicher, senior scholar at Stanford’s Doerr College of Sustainability. “I couldn’t have imagined him supporting former President Trump.”

Reicher, a former U.S. assistant secretary of Power, as soon as labored with Kennedy on the Pure Assets Protection Council, or NRDC, and frolicked kayaking with him on rivers in Chile and the U.S.

He stated he had change into more and more dismayed by Kennedy’s marketing campaign positions and statements on the surroundings. He pointed to how Kennedy had not offered any significant plans for slicing greenhouse gases. As a substitute, Reicher stated, he had criticized the scale of the tons of of billions of {dollars} in subsidies to scrub power tasks in President Biden’s Inflation Discount Act.

“He’s dismissed plenty of what we have to do on local weather change,” Reicher stated.

Lengthy earlier than he introduced final yr that he was operating for president, Kennedy grew to become generally known as an environmental advocate for his work in serving to to scrub up the Hudson River in New York with the group known as Riverkeeper.

And up till 2020, he was the president of the Waterkeeper Alliance, an environmental group he helped discovered to battle for clear water all over the world.

Whereas that background would appear to place Kennedy at odds with Trump, who has known as local weather change a “hoax” and overturned quite a few environmental guidelines, some activists grew more and more involved about his candidacy in current months as he questioned Biden’s insurance policies. Some level to his put up on X the place he stated, “Local weather change is getting used to regulate us by means of concern.”

In April, dozens of Kennedy’s former colleagues at NRDC, the place he labored for practically three a long time, paid for commercials in swing states, calling for him to “honor our planet” by dropping out of the race.

“In nothing greater than a conceit candidacy, RFK Jr. has chosen to play the function of election spoiler to the good thing about Donald Trump — the one worst environmental president our nation has ever had,” the advert learn.

That very same month, a dozen inexperienced teams, together with the Sierra Membership and Earthjustice, signed a letter calling on Individuals to vote towards Kennedy.

“We are able to’t, in good conscience, let him proceed co-opting the credibility and successes of our motion for his personal private profit,” the teams wrote.

In some circumstances, Kennedy had spoken of insurance policies that went additional than these of Biden. For instance, he had aligned himself with many local weather activists in his name to finish American exports of liquefied pure fuel. The Biden administration stated early this yr that it was pausing approvals of recent fuel export terminals whereas it studied the financial and local weather impacts of the exports.

Kennedy advised Politico that he didn’t need an export ban for environmental causes, however reasonably to guard U.S. fuel reserves from being depleted.

In that interview, Kennedy additionally stated he wished to roll again a part of the Inflation Discount Act that funded carbon seize tasks, that are favored by the fossil gasoline business. He stated he believed that Biden had been manipulated by oil firms.

“He’s performed into the palms of the carbon business by specializing in geoengineering and carbon seize, and that’s to me a disastrous endpoint,” Kennedy stated. “And it’s disastrous from an environmental standpoint, and it is also only a subsidy for Massive Carbon.”