www.cnn.com – 2023-05-31 13:24:00
CNN
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Sen. Joe Manchin’s monthslong effort to greenlight the controversial Mountain Valley Pipeline – a project that will pipe methane gas across parts of West Virginia and Virginia – is likely to prevail in the bipartisan debt ceiling deal, angering environmental groups and some Democratic lawmakers.
Manchin helped secure a provision in the deal that would compel federal agencies to approve all remaining permits for the approximately 300-mile natural gas pipeline, as well as shield the project from further litigation.
The conservative Democrat from West Virginia, who has been critical of the Biden administration’s environmental goals, praised the White House and congressional Republicans this week.
“All of a sudden, [the White House] did their job, they negotiated. And Kevin McCarthy did his job by putting something first and starting this negotiation. So, I applaud both sides,” Manchin said in a Tuesday interview on a West Virginia radio show, “Talkline.”
While attaching the pipeline to the must-pass legislation has delighted West Virginia lawmakers, environmental groups are furious that Congress stepped in after they had successfully challenged the pipeline in court. As recently as last month, the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit had struck down permits for the project on the grounds that they violate the Clean Water Act.
“Literally, they are changing the rules as we are playing the game,” Crystal Cavalier-Keck, co-founder of indigenous environmental justice group 7 Directions of Service, told reporters on a Tuesday call.
Environmental groups excoriated the effort to carve out exceptions for the pipeline as “immoral” and “unconscionable,” and some heaped blame on President Joe Biden’s administration as well as congressional lawmakers.
“For this administration to profess that it cares about environmental justice, and then greenlight Mountain Valley Pipeline while gutting the National Environmental Policy Act, is abhorrent and wrong,” Tennessee state lawmaker Justin Pearson, a Democrat, told reporters Tuesday.
But White House officials said they defended Biden’s major climate law in the debt ceiling talks and successfully pushed back on Republican efforts to further weaken environmental protections.
“President Biden protected his historic climate legislation, stopped House Republicans from clawing back record funding for environmental justice projects, and secured a deal to get hundreds of clean energy projects online faster all while protecting the full scope of environmental reviews,” White House spokesperson Abdullah Hasan said in a statement.
The 300-mile-long pipeline would transport gas from West Virginia’s Marcellus and Utica shale areas to Virginia. The pipeline…
