For years, a coalition of community and faith leaders, Baptists and yogis, landowners, and climate advocates have fought to defend people, land, water and climate from new oil and gas pipelines, and a string of successes have the fossil fuel industry on its back foot.
The Trump Administration’s Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette recently credited (blamed) activists for these hard-fought wins (setbacks) and added that he’s “not quite sure what they’re cheering except for perhaps the loss of jobs all throughout America.” (Note to Dan: They’re celebrating that they won’t face the risk of becoming the latest person killed by an exploding pipeline that wasn't even necessary anyway, that their land and water won’t be polluted by one of the constant pipeline leaks and that, even if it actually functioned properly, it won’t be locking in decades of fossil fuel emissions that make climate change worse.)
But others, who aren’t required to at least pretend to abide by the Hatch Act, which prevents administration officials from using their office to campaign, have a different idea about who’s responsible.
According to the ever-honest Wall Street Journal editorial board, Dominion and Duke energy’s decision to stop trying to make the Atlantic Coast Pipeline happen isn’t the result of the legal challenges they keep losing and fact that costs have nearly doubled to $8 billion, like they claim, but instead is “Joe Biden’s First Energy Casualty,” the headline reads.
“[Dominion and Duke Energy] didn’t mention Mr. Biden,” they acknowledge, “but you can bet his big lead in the polls was on their mind.” Apparently in addition to knowing climate science better than climate scientists, the Journal’s editorial board are mind readers!
Or, more realistically, they’re partisan hacks clumsily toeing the party line. You would think they’d be the sophisticated communicators, but for a glimpse of how the talking points were supposed to come out, we have a story at the Washington Times, where reporter Valerie Richardson (once again) turns some tweets and press releases from fossil-fuel-funded spokespeople into what’s supposed to look like news.
Her headline is, “Obama judges undermine pipelines in ‘sneak peek of the Biden energy plan;' simultaneously placing blame on a president who hasn’t been in office for over three years, and a candidate who hasn’t even been elected yet!
But at least she properly captured the future-tense nature of the talking points coming from various fossil-fuel-funded deniers arguing that Biden will be bad for pipelines, as opposed to the WSJ’s ham-fisted claim that the decision is “an early economic consequence” of a Biden presidency. That logic implicitly suggests that not only that Biden will win the election, but that his power as president will be so great that he has traveled back in time to shut down the ACP!
In their defense, they haven’t had a whole ton of time to fine-tune the talking points, as not even a full month ago, the WSJ editorial board was laughing at the Lorax’s loss to polluters when SCOTUS ruled in favor of the ACP.
Looks like the Lorax gets the last laugh on this one!