President Trump didn’t offer an olive branch to environmentalists on climate change in his State of the Union address Tuesday night, but major groups say his call for infrastructure legislation could be an opening for cooperation.
The Natural Resource Defense Council, a major national environmental group, responded to the speech by urging Trump to include climate change-related measures in his infrastructure program.
“While we have fought against this administration’s efforts to gut protections for clean air and water, roll-back efforts to address climate change and lease public lands for oil drilling and mining, infrastructure is an opportunity for everyone in Washington to work together to achieve the investments we all need,” said Stephanie Gidigbi, infrastructure lead for the group.
The group will be leading a lobbying push in the 116th Congress to make infrastructure green again, said Gidigbi.
“We will be pushing lawmakers to pursue policies that would do two things: green it and protect it,” she said. “While many in Congress deny the cold reality of climate change, these twin approaches should be able to achieve broad consensus because they will create jobs here at home, while fixing it for the future.”
The environmentalists want to use infrastructure funding to upgrade bridges, roads, and other infrastructure to take into account the increasing severity of storms and flooding that result from a warming planet. Lawmakers have said those discussions will begin occurring this year as they begin to flesh out a new Highway Bill that is set to expire next year.
But other environmental groups do not see the infrastructure push as an opening, and want to work with the Congress on something completely new and outside of Trump’s priorities. Trump has failed to move an infrastructure bill through Congress over the last two years.
“We would welcome the president to this policy conversation, but so far, he has been not only resistant but counterproductive in the efforts to fight climate change,” Elizabeth Gore, senior vice president for the Environmental Defense Fund, told the Washington Examiner.
Gore says experts agree that any infrastructure package needs to include retrofitting and resiliency because of climate change, but the “crux” of the climate debate is about cutting emissions, not just adapting to global warming, “and bending the curve of climate pollution so that we can start addressing this crisis.”
