We take on many of the biggest environmental and health challenges of our time and stick with them. The law makes change.
Because the earth needs a good lawyer.
President Biden just signed the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) into law. After decades of advocates, policymakers, and activists pushing for legislation that matches resources with the true scale of the climate crisis, we are on a path to real climate solutions.
This is a big deal. The Inflation Reduction Act is an enormous opportunity to confront the climate crisis by making transformative investments in clean energy and the communities most impacted by pollution and the climate crisis. It gives us the tools we need to replace our dirty and unsustainable fossil fuel economy with a clean energy future that will improve health, secure justice, restore the planet, and generate new jobs in the process.
While there is much to celebrate, there is much to mourn as well: The IRA contains provisions that will inflict immediate harm and slow our long-term climate progress. The fossil fuel industry convinced their allies in Congress to include poisonous handouts and sweetheart deals that threaten to further entrench fossil fuels into our economy, expose frontline communities to even more pollution, and actually delay climate progress.
As an organization that uses the power of the law to advance justice for people and our planet, it is our responsibility to ensure both that we secure the positive potential of the IRA’s beneficial investments and that we prevent new fossil fuel subsidies from harming communities that have already suffered too much at the hands of polluting industries. This means ensuring that the federal and state governments implement IRA investments in an equitable and just way while fighting any effort to expand or prolong our use of fossil fuels. It also means vigorously opposing efforts to weaken bedrock environmental laws like the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) that protect communities.
That’s why, for Earthjustice, the work is just beginning. Here’s what we’re going to do:
The investments in the Inflation Reduction Act give us the opportunity to do what the fossil fuels industry never did. We can build out the clean energy infrastructure of the future while also installing guardrails to protect the places and communities most impacted by development. We can work to ensure that the Biden administration implements the climate provisions of this new law in the most impactful, just way possible while fervently fighting every bad provision that endangers the lives, livelihoods, and health of frontline communities. For the sake of our future, we can’t afford to wait.
Based in Washington, D.C., Sam leads our Program Leadership Team, which develops Earthjustice’s strategy for carrying out our mission through litigation, lobbying and regulatory advocacy, and communications.
Earthjustice’s Washington, D.C., office works at the federal level to prevent air and water pollution, combat climate change, and protect natural areas. We also work with communities in the Mid-Atlantic region and elsewhere to address severe local environmental health problems, including exposures to dangerous air contaminants in toxic hot spots, sewage backups and overflows, chemical disasters, and contamination of drinking water. The D.C. office has been in operation since 1978.
Workers install solar panels on a parking structure at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado.
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