On Earth Day yesterday, one of Arizona’s Representatives and Senators, Yassamin Ansari and Mark Kelly, condemned corporatist Donald Trump and MAGA Congressional Republicans for instituting anti-environmental and anti-sustainability policies designed to turn the clock back on clean energy projects while exploiting and ravaging the resources on public lands and national parks.
In a video released by the Congressional Group, Natural Resource Democrats, Representative Ansari, along with fellow Committee members Maxine Dexter, Val Hoyle, Teresa Leger Fernández, and Jared Huffman, showcased how the Trump/Vance Pro Polluter and Land Exploiting Regime is harming the American People.
The transcript of their presentation is below:
Representative Huffman: Donald Trump and Republicans are selling off your public lands, your clean air, your clean water.
Representative Ansari: They promised you lower energy costs. Then they handed over your public lands and your waters to the oil and gas industry. They’re making billions while you still pay more for electricity.
Representative Huffman: The parks your family saves up all year to visit on vacation, the clean air you breathe, the clean water you drink, all of it is up for grabs so that Donald Trump can enrich billionaires and oil executives.
Representative Dexter: Trump fired a thousand park rangers. Now he wants to cut thousands more. So, when you pull up to Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon this summer with the kids in the back seat, you’ll be met with longer lines, dirtier bathrooms, and closed campgrounds.
Representative Ansari: He killed dozens of clean energy projects and thousands of good-paying jobs along with them.
Representative Dexter: Then he fired thousands of forest service workers.
Representative Hoyle: The people who keep our forests from burning, the people who clear brush, maintain fire trails, keep the fires from becoming the kind that burn down whole towns.
Representative Fernández: Trump is handing our public lands to foreign corporations, including our adversaries like China and Russia. This is land that belongs to Americans. This is land that belonged to tribes. And they must be included in any conversation about what to do with American resources.
Representative Dexter: The worst part is they’re doing everything they can to keep you from finding out. Our job is to keep the receipts. Every firing, every sweetheart deal, every dollar that disappears, we are tracking it. And the American people are going to see exactly who cashed in while you paid more of the pump.
Representative Huffman: Here’s the thing. Public lands, clean air, clean water, our parks, these things don’t belong to Donald Trump.
Representative Dexter: They don’t belong to Donald Trump.
Representative Hoyle: They don’t belong to his donors or his billionaire buddies. And they’re not his to sell.
Representative Dexter: We’re not going to let him get away with this.
Representative Huffman: We only have one Earth.
Representative Dexter: And it’s worth fighting for.
On the Senate side of Congress, Mark Kelly, along with 34 other Democratic Senators, penned a letter to the Deputy Secretary of Agriculture expressing concerns about that Department’s reorganization of the United States Forest Service, writing:
“Given changes to the USFS in the last year and its ongoing, critical work, it is unclear how the announced reorganization will improve the USFS’s ability to deliver on its statutory responsibilities, including mitigating wildfire risk, executing forest and watershed restoration projects, and increasing trail maintenance. In addition, given the potential for an active and extreme wildfire season, the USFS should prioritize preparing for such a wildfire season rather than hastily executing a reorganization that will impact large swaths of its agency. It is likely that this sort of disruption will have lasting impacts on forest management as a whole, and wildfire preparedness and response, specifically…
“The USFS serves a key role in supporting local economies, stewarding natural resources, and performing world-class research. The workforce reductions over the last year have already diminished the USFS’s ability to deliver its mission, and the recently announced USFS reorganization could further exacerbate those losses.”
Representative Dexter is right when she says there is only one Earth.
There is nowhere else for humanity to go in the foreseeable future.
People had better take care of it and replace the people in responsible positions who will not.
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