Response to the Inflation Reduction Act

Holding Climate Gains Hostage to the Fossil Fuel Industry is NOT Climate Justice

Last week, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senator Joe Manchin reached a deal on long-sought climate legislation by releasing the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (IRA). While the bill contains some energy production and carbon emissions reforms for which frontline communities have worked and organized, it holds much-needed measures hostage to continued subsidization of extractive industries.

The Inflation Reduction Act is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It masquerades as a win for the climate while perpetuating  the oil and gas industry and other corporate-supported false solutions to the climate crisis like carbon capture and storage, biofuels, nuclear energy, and blue or gray hydrogen. Among the most insidious provisions is a requirement that all new solar and wind energy development on federal lands and waters must have a prerequisite oil and gas lease sale. The bill also mandates oil and gas lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico and Cook Inlet, Alaska, where the federal lease sale was canceled earlier this year because of lack of industry interest. Mandated drilling in these special places perpetuates the treatment of them as sacrifice zones. Sacrifice zones are incompatible with a Just Transition, period. We cannot support the continued destruction of Alaskan ways of life in exchange for promises of lower emissions elsewhere.

Frontline communities fought for and won many historic investments in this bill. These include dozens of environmental justice programs, support for community-led efforts to clean up toxic pollution and adapt to climate change, and justice and labor standards. But these communities did not fight so hard only to trade these gains for giveaways to the fossil fuel industry that will continue to cause them harm. 

We call on Congress to remove all harmful provisions in the bill, and we call on President Biden to utilize every tool available to him to mobilize the federal government to respond to the climate crisis in ways that invest in communities and do not perpetuate environmental racism.