Good morning everyone and thanks for joining us today. My name is Joshua Detman and I am the Executive Director of the Labor Network for Sustainability. We connect trade unions, worker centers, and climate and environmental justice groups to build a just transition to an ecologically sustainable and economically just economy and we are opposed to the bipartisan Affordability and Jobs Act for many reasons.

Primarily, we know that temporary and short-term jobs do not support families and should never come to the cost of the entire community’s health and well-being. Faster project approvals alone do not guarantee good jobs, lower energy costs, or healthy communities. Today, you’ll hear from a group of environmental policy experts, climate justice leaders, community leaders, and elected officials who represent thousands of communities across the United States, territories throughout Indian country.

What they have in common is their profound belief that people and the land, air, and water that we survive on is worth protecting. This bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act ensures the opposite and is the most egregious attempt yet to give big oil, gas, and tech a free pass to pollute and lock in harm for generations. Permitting reform is necessary.

Our speakers are here to tell you why and what their communities and constituencies think about it. We’ll hear from the following, John Beard Jr., founder and CEO of Port Arthur Community Action Network in Texas. We appreciate him for joining us last minute and claiming the Southwest.

On short notice, Kashawn Pearson had an unexpected travel come up and won’t be with us today. We’ll also hear from Daisy Maldonado, community organizer with Fight Tichuan Desert Extraction in New Mexico. Eric Schenker Goodrich, executive director of Western Environmental Law Center.

John Harmon, policy analyst and legislative advocate at the Indigenous Environmental Network. And finally, U.S. Representative Rashida Tlaib, who has served the people of Michigan since 2019, representing the 12th Congressional District. Each speaker will have about five to seven minutes, so we have time for Q&A at the end.

Please put your name, organization, and any questions you have for the speakers in the chat, and we’ll try to get to as many as we can count, as many as we can at the end of the press conference. Without further ado, I’ll pass it over to John to get us started. Mr. Beard.

John Beard Jr. Thank you, Mr. Dedron. Good morning, everyone. I hope you’re doing well, or wherever you are this morning here.

Hopefully we have an international audience on this because it’s a very critical matter for the entire nation, as well as for those of us here in the Gulf South, as we call it in Texas. And I am John Beard, the founder and CEO of the Port Arthur Community Action Network, an environmental, social justice, and community development organization located in the corner of Southeast Texas, near Louisiana, in the Gulf of Mexico. Mr. Beard, I’m so sorry to interrupt, but the Congresswoman will need to leave very shortly, so I think we need to let her speak first.

I’m so sorry to interrupt. That’s fine. Yeah, I’m so sorry.

I have to head to Southwest Detroit, just getting calls and stuff. It looks like I might have gotten the director of ICE to remove them, but I really apologize. But I hope I helped set the tone and everything, because I’m really angry right now, John.

So I’m gonna be able to go. Thank you so much for always inviting me to this space. I know you all have been so unified, so loudly in saying no to this horrible permitting reform bill.

And we are not getting fooled by the titles. I have been in Congress and unbelievable in seeing so-called big, beautiful bill and all of the different titles that they have that they add to the bill, but all it is is poison. The bipartisan, so-called bipartisan—I hate even calling it—the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act.

The fact that they even can call it bipartisan breaks my heart. We all know it’s a gift to big oil and big tech. Our communities will be left paying the price.

We’ve seen this already from my community, where I thought that smell was normal. I thought that many folks having asthma and respiratory issues, and even Sierra Club Detroit doing a White Cross campaign of people with cancer or survived cancer or died of cancer, suffering—all of them watching all the crosses on people’s front of their lawns, small crosses, again, symbolizing the fact that we are sacrifice zones. We know the bill is 417 pages of empty promises.

We’ve got to get that out to our community, written in secrecy with no public input. The thing is, we can’t get too technical with our residents. One of the things I always tell folks, you know, they’re building these structures and these policies so that we can’t understand it easily.

Even as a lawyer, as an advocate that worked in nonprofit sector, I still literally struggle in understanding these permitting processes. Again, it’s done in a way, to me, as one resident said, Rashida, just call it permission to pollute process, because that’s what it feels like. We know it’s a shame that we have to fight so hard for our elected officials to do the right thing—Democrats and Republicans—to stand up for their residents and vote this down.

Even in our own backyard, I watch our governor literally roll out the red carpet in Michigan for data centers. The permitting reform deal, we know, would speed up those construction of those data centers. Right now, communities all across the country—I mean, what’s incredible is seeing the different backgrounds of people.

You know, they all think this is a Democratic issue. I said, no, this is an American issue. I don’t care if you up north in Michigan, where it’s a little, you know, probably leaning more Republican, to over here in Wayne County.

You see a unified message. We don’t want this in our community. I am so proud in my own backyard, a city of Inkster.

Residents came together and successfully defeated a data center proposal by flooding the city council meeting. I’ve never seen anything like it. And people came together in a unified message.

We don’t want this in our backyard. We also know that this bill also make it easier for fracked gas pipeline projects. We know that the fossil fuels, fuel damage, damages our environment are accelerating the climate crisis.

I just did an op-ed about how our children are suffering so much because we actually have to have days because it’s so hot out that our kids can’t even go to school because they don’t have HVAC and we don’t have the resources. So our kids are staying home because the heat is so high and they could, again, it’s harmful to have them go to school like that. Again, the impact of the climate crisis is already here.

So that’s why, so why is our government making it easier for big polluters? We all know why, right? This is corporate money into politics and corrupting our democracy. We know the bill strips away what little tools our communities have to defend ourselves from corporate polluters. It threatens tribal nations, sacred sites and cultural resources.

We should be strengthening these environmental protections, not tearing them down. And please don’t settle for the crumbs. I remember under the Biden administration, the Biden administration licensed more fossil fuel projects than any previous president.

And it’s something he actually touted about and then gave us a little bit of funding and grants for addressing the climate crisis. But I just don’t understand how do you do both? So what good are laws like the Clean Water Act if Congress allows polluting companies to exploit and extract our water, right? So enforcement matters. We’re facing a public health crisis.

Neighborhoods are suffering from toxins in their air and water. I’m tired of hearing our families say, Rashida, I can’t even afford, you know, I can’t afford my water bill. But on top of that, they’re paying for poisoned water.

Our families are struggling to keep up with the energy cost. Every single time I turn around, we have our monopoly utility companies here in Michigan raising the cost on all of us. And, you know, again, these are the consequences of our government’s own action.

I am so proud that Congresswoman Summer Lee and Adelita Garjava and I in March started the People’s Environmental Justice Caucus. This is your caucus. Use us.

Use this caucus to make sure that our voices are heard all throughout the halls of Congress. So I’m standing strong with all of the groups, 200 community labor environmental justice groups, many of whom are on this call today. Thank you.

Thank you for rejecting this power grab. Thank you for speaking the truth. It is a growing movement that I know will push Congress to do the right thing.

But again, it is important for you all to know how incredibly bipartisan this is, which means when the Democrats, if they do get the gavel, John, Joshua, Jordan, all of you on the call, I’m looking at all of you, when they get the gavel, I hope you understand that doesn’t mean we’re safer. That doesn’t mean they’re going to address the issue. Because one of the things I’ve noticed, and we had a trifecta, we still were seeing, again, the lack of urgency in addressing some of these issues.

And I’m sad to say that we’re going to have to make sure that as they are trying to repeal all the bad things that Trump has done, that they also include this. This is where we all come in and push back against, again, this narrative that, oh, this is not the time. It has been the time.

And so please don’t settle for crumbs. Do not settle for the press conferences. Settle for real action.

We’re not going to be putting these folks in power and advocating and showing people why we have more dirtier water now. It’s not just lead anymore. You guys know this.

It’s plastic. It’s everything. And so let’s just really, really work together.

So let me go out there and beat up on ICE, but thank you all so much for coming together. And thank you. Thank you for squeezing me in and early because this is the neighborhood I grew up in and I’m devastated.

Thank you, Congresswoman Tlaib. Just to return to, we appreciate the sentiments that were given and the encouragement. We encourage you to go and challenge ICE to the best of your capability.

And we want to return to our initial schedule and we want to return to Mr. Beard. Thank you, Joshua. Appreciate it.

Appreciate the words from the Congresswoman with regard to that. And once again, good morning to all of you that are here today. A lot has been said already.

It really covers a lot of this, but I want to bring you a snapshot of what this bill is going to do closer to home here. Port Arthur, Texas is in what I call the belly of the beast. And if you don’t know what that term means, it means the worst and direst of situations that you could ever be in.

Why do I say that? Because I’m looking out of my window right here on my patio and I can see less than a quarter mile away, the largest refinery in the country. And to my, what would be your right, which would be my left, less than a half mile away is another major refinery, Valero, which had a major explosion and fire back in March of this year that shook my home. I thought initially a plane had crashed into my house.

The wall danced like it had legs. And then subsequently just this past September, we had the tropical storm Eduardo. And that storm caused major releases from these plants that were so severe that you could see the chemicals in the rain that were falling on your house, on your car, and on the streets and driveways.

That leaves that iridescent sheen that you know when there’s the presence of oil or some hydrocarbon. Well, yes, we experienced that. We had people tell me that it was just my car leaking oil, but I said, then what am I doing parking on the roof showing my home and my neighbor’s home? But back to this bill.

This bill is what we call a dope deal. It’s a bad bill. It’s a bill that is going to further harm communities like Port Arthur, who have been overburdened since 1903, when the first refineries were started here, and now continues even to this day.

You may want to know how it’s going to harm us. Well, here’s how. First of all, it’s going to gag and mute our voices, because this bill is not about affordability, because the very thing it’s going to do is going to increase the burden on people, which we are already seeing.

The cost of electricity and utilities has gone up substantially. Some of the highest in the country are right here in Texas, where I live. It is going to also mute our voices by taking away the ability to utilize the court system, and also to utilize the laws that are currently already on the books that force the companies to take due diligence to notify and inform the public in a timely fashion, so that we can look at, examine their proposals, and respond in ways that protect our communities.

It will shorten that statute of limitation from six years to 150 days. As you well know, with a lot of the regulatory agencies and political government bodies signing NDAs, and also signing confidentiality agreements, that these things are used to keep the information from us. And as I was just told recently by a government body here that, oh, we’re going to bring in an open session in our meeting and discuss it, and you can come then.

But we all know that by the time it gets to the board, or to the city council, or county commission’s court, or whatever governing body, the deal has already been done, and the decision is made, and we will be effectively locked out. Well, this bill will help do that. It will also harm us, because it strips away the protections of NEPA, the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Air and Clean Water Act.

And already, we have some of the worst conditions here, environmentally speaking. A U.N. study attests to that. And also other studies that were done, that this is some of the most contaminated air in the country, with formaldehyde, nitrous oxides, and others that are present here.

And how do we know that? Because we see in Port Arthur twice the state and national average for cancer, and that people of color have a 40 percent higher chance of dying from cancer who live in close proximity to these plants within 25 miles than people who live further away. This bill is not about affordability. It is about giving a blank check to the oil and gas industry.

It is about giving a blank check and free rein to the data centers and all these other businesses that are trying to come into our communities without our consent, without our voices being heard. It is undemocratic because it takes away our ability to speak to the things that help us. So I’m here to speak on behalf not of just Port Arthur, but of Lake Charles, Louisiana, of Brazoria, Brazoria County, of Corpus Christi, Brownsville, of my friends and brothers and sisters in Appalachia, and all who are affected by pipelines, by transmission lines, by all of these things that are going to hurt and harm our communities without our having a say in the matter.

Suffice it to say that if this bill passes, it will be the end of environmental justice if we know it in this country. Our voices have been muted, neutered, neutralized, and snuffed out if this bill is allowed to pass. So we say no to the BAAJA.

We say no to muting our voices. We say no to hurting and harming our friends, relatives, neighbors, and our very own families. I have family members too that have been affected by the releases and all of this.

So I’m going to end here and pass this on to my colleagues, but I want it to be known and said that we say no, we stand against this bill because of the harms it would create, and we urge you to talk to your senators and congressmen and tell them to do the same. This bill must be DOA. The BAAJA must be DOA.

Thank you. We’d like to bring in Daisy. Yeah, good morning everyone.

My name is Daisy Maldonado and I’m an organizer and co-founder for the organization named Fight Chihuahuan Desert Extraction, and we are serving the community in Dona Ana County in southern New Mexico. And thank you for this opportunity to speak about this bill, but also about my home and just how much it’s related to our communities here. So I was born and raised here in the borderlands in the desert southwest, and so this conversation about this bill, about this policy, is not an abstract debate for me.

This is about my home. Currently there’s a data center project named Project Jupiter that is being constructed in our backyard. The plan includes a gas-powered microgrid fuel cell plant along with four data centers.

And are you at all curious how they’re going to get the gas to these, what they’re calling microgrids, microgrid fuel cell plants? Well, they’re going to use pipelines, right? Of course they are. And so one or a couple of lateral pipelines, but the intention eventually is to come off a very extensive 520-mile methane gas pipeline that they’re naming the Desert Southwest Pipeline. So not the southwest that’s on the other side of Texas, the southwest on this side, yeah, closer to New Mexico, right? And this 520-mile methane gas pipeline would cross three states.

It would cut through mountains. It will tunnel beneath rivers. It will run underneath farmland, and it will destroy miles and miles of untouched desert.

These places are sacred to our people. They’re where we live. They’re where we work, where we farm.

And this isn’t just lines on a map, right? This isn’t, well, where’s the pipeline going? No, these are our homes. Again, this is where we live. This is where our ancestors called home and where people here in the southwest and here in the borderlands are really afraid of this bill, this policy, this act, because of all the potential about how it can destroy our homes.

And so that’s why the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act, you know, again, really worries us. It is being sold as a bill for, again, affordability and jobs. And I’ll tell you what, our community here, those two words, affordability and jobs, are buzzwords.

And they say, yes, project comes in, right? If it’s about jobs, then yes. If it’s making our lives more affordable, why would we say no? But the reality is, that’s not true. That’s not true at all about what this bill is going to do, what it wants to do, and how it, again, will destroy our homes.

Because in fact, it would weaken environmental protections. It will make it harder for people to challenge decisions that’s going to affect the health, the land, the water in our communities. A pipeline that I had just mentioned, that would put people at risk, should not be waived, right? Like asking for permission, wanting those permits, should not be waived in the name of economic development or energy expansion.

The bill was negotiated behind closed doors, which is part of the course these days, right? Unfortunately. And the Senate wants to pass it, right, as soon as November 9th, or at least they want to take the vote. You know, people deserve time to understand what is in this bill, what’s in this policy.

People deserve time to understand and know what is going to be constructed in their backyards. And they have a right to voice their opinions and to also say no. They have a right to say no to harmful construction projects that would impact their health and well-being.

So this bill would shrink opportunities, right, for that to happen. That would shrink opportunities for the courts to intervene. It would undermine protections, right, under the laws, including the Clean Water Act, including the Endangered Species Act, and the National Historic Preservation Act, which helps protect tribal communities, protect their sacred sites.

It would also weaken safeguards for communities, again, already burdened by pollution, including low income and communities of color. And I’ll just say specifically about Project Jupiter, where this is going to be constructed, and again, where, along the southern part of New Mexico, where this pipeline is intended to get built, it’s already an EPA non-attainment zone. So the air already is unsafe to breathe, and now they want to construct more harmful projects, and they want to make it easier for billionaires to make that happen.

And so, again, this is about people’s health. You know, toxic pollution can increase risks of asthma, cancer, and premature death. Families, again, should not have to be forced to bear any sort of risk so that billionaires and billionaire companies can make more money faster.

Right? So it’s not just about more money, they want to do it faster and exponentially. And so who’s asking for all this? Again, the tech oligarchs, the billionaire class, major corporations, companies that already exploit our communities. Companies that already exploit people of color, already exploit, you know, impoverished and disenfranchised areas.

And so this bill also raises serious questions, again, when I was talking about data centers, because these facilities require enormous amounts of energy and water. And going again, back to Project Jupiter, the data center project in our backyard, they wanted initially to construct two microgrids. They wanted to initially emit an additional 14 million tons of CO2 into the air.

And they got a lot of pushback. So they said, okay, companies, they decided to change that and instead we’re going to try this. So instead of 14 tons, we’re going to do 10 tons.

And we said, no, that’s still too much. They said, okay, okay, okay, you’re right. Instead, we’re only going to do 8.8. And that’s better for your community.

Instead of the 14. Well, any additional CO2 in our air is not safe, right? Any additional CO2 is not good for the environment. And again, why do we have to suffer from such construction? Why do we have to suffer from such projects? And this bill would just open the door to such types of construction and types of projects without community being able to weigh in and allowing these tech billionaires to cause all that harm and lay it at the feet, right? Lay it at the feet of the people where, again, they won’t have to suffer.

Why? Because they don’t even live. They don’t live in these communities. They do not have to suffer any of the harm that they are trying to cause.

So I will say, I oppose the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act and the Senate should not rush it through. It should be rejected a process that again, that shuts down communities. And yes, everyone call your Senator.

The borderlands and my home, we are not a sacrifice zone. Nobody on this call, you know, that has to suffer this. We are not sacrifice zones.

We deserve to live in our homes, you know, free of such pollution. And yeah, they should not pass this at all. And thank you.

Thank you so much, Daisy. And thank you, John. Previously, Eric, we’d like to call you in.

Hey, folks, it is very lovely to follow on Daisy, my neighbor down in County Eric Schlenker Goodrich. I am the executive director of the Western Environmental Law Center. I’m based up in Taos.

We wholeheartedly oppose the Baha, the permitting deal negotiated behind closed doors in the Senate. We don’t think that this is a close call. We understand that folks are saying that it’s a close call, but we think that this is purely a function of the politics around this bill, namely that Senator Whitehouse and Senator Heinrich, who have been erstwhile champions on the climate and conservation front, helped negotiate this bill.

But it is a terrible bill. And trust and credibility is earned. And this bill betrays that trust to the climate community, to the environmental community, to the environmental justice community.

Now, I want to talk about some of the details on this bill. And I’m glad Daisy mentioned the Desert Southwest Pipeline, because that factors into what this bill’s harms would do. Now, first point I want to make is that when you take a look at the permitting deals provisions, you have to map it onto what has been happening in the Trump administration through its deregulatory actions, much of which was articulated in the Project 2025 playbook that they have been executing ruthlessly and relentlessly for the past 18 months or so.

We have witnessed over 550 deregulatory actions by the Trump administration. So the notion that we are going to move forward in a lame duck session, a 417-page bill that further erodes bedrock statutory protections under the Clean Water Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, the National Historic Preservation Act, this seems, this is flat out absurd. Now, with the Desert Southwest Pipeline, keep in mind that this bill in Section 1102 would exclude the vast majority of natural gas pipelines from any environmental review under the National Environmental Policy Act.

No more environmental review for those pipelines. So those laterals that Daisy is talking about really depends on the facts, but around the country, what we’re going to see is many of those pipelines just get bulldozed through without any environmental review and without any public participation in those decision-making processes. Even worse, even if they weren’t excluded from review, because there are certain projects that will still be subject to review, the public has no recourse in federal court.

Sure, they can file litigation and go to court. However, as John Beard mentioned before, the statute of limitations has been cut down to 150 days. Set that aside, if you go to court, and even if you are able to prove a violation of either the National Environmental Policy Act or the National Historic Preservation Act, a court is deprived of its longstanding authority to vacate that underlying federal permit or license.

And further, they’re deprived of their equitable authority to impose an injunction to prevent irreparable harm. That’s unacceptable. That’s just flat-out unacceptable.

And relative to the deregulatory agenda, keep in mind too that just yesterday, the Trump administration announced that it was going to roll back Environmental Protection Agency methane protections from oil and gas. So you have a highly polluting upstream oil and gas industry no longer subject to methane safeguards. Then you have midstream natural gas pipelines that are excluded from federal environmental review, with the public deprived of its ability to participate in those decision-making processes.

And for what? With the Southwest Desert Pipeline, we know they’re taking natural gas from the Permian Basin, punching that west across New Mexico and into Arizona to power AI data centers. We know this for a fact. Now let’s talk about the permit certainty provisions in the bill, because these are arguably even more troubling than the erosion of those bedrock environmental protections, which is wild to even say.

Now there are two provisions here that are deeply troubling in particular. Section 1401 creates an incentive for fossil fuel industry data centers to stockpile permits and authorization during dependency of the Trump administration while they are able to enjoy a highly deregulated state where many of the federal regulations have been rescinded or watered down. A future president would find it very, very difficult, but maybe not impossible, but extraordinarily difficult to unwind those permits.

What is perhaps even more alarming is that Section 1401 would prohibit the ability of a future president to repair those public health and environmental safeguards, and then to apply and enforce them against Trump-era permits. So it would freeze in place the regulatory state as the Trump administration understands it. Section 1402.

So Section 1401 looks back, really freezes in that deregulatory state, incentivizes AI data centers, fossil fuel companies, other extractive interests to stockpile permits. Section 1402 looks forward, and it looks forward by taking power away from people and from future presidents to unwind the harm that this current administration has caused. It would chill and hobble the ability of a future president to put in place a robust climate agenda and conservation agenda and environmental justice agenda.

And it does that by allowing fossil fuel and other energy interests to claim that they are in effect a protected class, and 1402 prohibits disparate treatment against those particular energy sources. This is noxious because this protective standard for those interests, it’s pulled from civil rights and anti-discrimination law. And it’s applying that anti-discrimination law, putting it into statute, and then applying it to corporate energy and data center interests.

That is astounding. And so if a future president decided we need to transition away from fossil fuels to renewables, that could be used per the statute as evidence that the president is disparately treating fossil fuels, and that will be a weaponized against the administration’s efforts to put in place strong rules and a strong agenda to transition from fossil fuels to renewables. Now, let’s move forward and think about this bill in a broader context.

What I think this bill reflects is a withering of climate ambition, in particular by the energy wonk crowd. We’re now narrowly fixating just on infrastructure and technology as the solution to what we need to do about the climate and suspect thinking about how the markets will play out. There is no carbon signal in this bill.

There is nothing that limits climate pollution. It is all based on wishful thinking about how the markets will play out. Now, I do want to acknowledge that we know that Rhodium, as well as Resources for the Future, that they’re looking at the greenhouse gas emissions estimates for this bill, and that our understanding is that they have found and will publish hopefully soon.

I mean, we have a vote coming up on November 9th. It’d be nice to have this analytical data in advance so that we could actually scrutinize it. I mean, I trust Rhodium and Resources for the Future.

But then at the same time, it is an assumption laid in process to move forward with a model. It is not a prediction. It is a data point.

Now, that data point can be useful for making an informed case for this bill, but it is not a substitute for wisdom and judgment and the values that we care about relative to the communities and places that we love, that we live in, that we call our home. Now, what we think Rhodium and Resources for the Future are going to find is that this may reduce greenhouse gas emissions relative to the status quo. That is not a reassuring finding, and it’s not a reassuring finding, and let me put this in colloquial terms.

It’s akin to acknowledging that, let’s say you have a credit card and you’re putting more and more money on your credit card every single month. Really difficult to pay that down. We’re still adding with this bill more and more debt to our credit card, our carbon credit card, every single month, even with this bill.

It just makes it a little, little less than what we were doing before. So as we run up continuing that carbon credit card, it’s better than nothing, but it’s not exactly a compelling argument for a deal that would nonetheless still add vast quantities of greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere, and because of that Section 1402 provision and Section 1401 provision, erode the optionality of a future president to unwind the harm that President Trump is causing and to put us on a pathway to true climate action. The other key point I want to make here is greenhouse gas emissions are one component of this deal.

This deal has massive implications to communities and people and public lands, wildlife and watersheds, cultural resource protections, all across the country, in all of our communities. And there is no analysis of what this bill’s impacts would be. And in fact, this is one of the reasons we think that Senator Heinrich—and I say this as a New Mexican who has voted for Senator Heinrich, who has worked with Senator Heinrich for 20 some odd years—that we feel betrayed, because they are not having an honest conversation with us about those trade-offs.

They just talk in very generalized terms. Well, there are trade-offs. We need trade-offs.

What are those trade-offs? In New Mexico, we’re talking about the Southwest Desert Pipeline. We’re talking about Greater Chaco, a place that Senator Heinrich has purported to defend, that this bill would, with the Trump administration revoking protections for Greater Chaco, allow oil and gas companies to really hit Greater Chaco and bulldoze over it. So this bill, this bill isn’t about good policy.

It’s about power. And it shifts power from the public and from future presidents to capital and markets. That is why we oppose this bill tooth and nail, and we will fight it till it’s dead.

I’ll pass it on to Jordan. Okay. Thank you, Eric.

Hi. My name is Jordan Harmon. My clan is the Deer Clan.

My tribal town is Chiaha. I’m a Muskogee Creek citizen based in Oklahoma in the Muskogee Reservation. I’m a policy specialist at the Indigenous Environmental Network, and we at IEN represent and support the Indigenous grassroots and environmental justice movements in Turtle Island, as well as solidarity with Indigenous peoples globally.

And I do want to give a shout out, Mado. Thank you so much to Representative Tlaib for standing with communities and tribal nations in opposition to this environmental disaster bill. She had to run to protect her community from an ice invasion, because that’s just who she is.

She actually cares. And if you saw the ACLU letter that came out, you know that this bill would create an expansion of ice facilities, which is just another reason to vote it down. And it is with the interests of Indigenous peoples’ sovereignty and the well-being of Mother Earth in mind that we must urge Congress to oppose this poison pill bill, vote no on the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act, stand up for tribal consultation, and stand up for the health of all of our communities within every congressional district.

The sweeping and unnerving changes proposed specifically to the tribal consultation process under the National Historic Preservation Act, Section 106, can be seen as no less than an outright attack on tribal sovereign rights and Indigenous peoples. The NHPA Section 106 is the only codified standard for government-to-government tribal consultation that is a mandated duty under the legal trust and treaty obligations. And this is an incredibly important law for tribes and for our communities.

And in 1835, when my people were forcibly removed from our homelands and forced to make the long walk from Georgia to Oklahoma, now it is thanks to the Section 106 consultation process that our sacred mound sites still exist in our homelands, and I have been able to make the journey home and pray with our ancestors at our sacred sites. That might not have been possible without this process. And rather than bringing tribal nations, Indigenous communities, and traditional knowledge holders to the table for meaningful consultation regarding one of the most important laws that exists in Indian law, Senators Martin Heinrich and Sheldon Whitehouse chose to betray the trust of Indian country and used our sacred sites as a backroom negotiating deal.

Instead of listening to the tribal nations in his state who reached out in good faith, Senator Heinrich turned his back on prayer and ceremony and walked out of a meeting with Pueblo leaders. That is unacceptable behavior and it really reflects his lack of regard for our lands and rights as sovereign peoples. You cannot support his bill.

If the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act is passed as is, tribal voices will effectively be shut out of the process with regard to our own sacred and cultural sites. With this bill, the federal government is seeking an authoritarian control over determining whether a tribe’s historical site is important enough to count and whether it deserves protection. This would inevitably lead to the unnecessary destruction of important Native American sacred sites.

Most of this country does not support doing that. Most voters don’t want to destroy Native American sacred sites. This would have lasting generational impacts akin to assimilation era policies.

It’s an extension of a genocide. Once our sacred sites are gone, they’re gone. We don’t get a second chance at getting those back.

You have to include tribal voices. Congress members must understand that Section 106 is non-negotiable. It must be off the table, period.

All of Indian country is united on this. Voting to take away tribal consultation in this way would be an unforgivable act for a Congress member to do. There are a handful of very wealthy greenwashed organizations investing a lot of PR money into the narrative that, as John says, the BAAJA is a necessary measure for clean energy.

But the reality is that taking the public voice out of decision-making actually paves the way for more unwanted polluting industries like hyperscale data centers and fossil fuels. Our voice was never the red tape in the way of permitting. Public input, thorough environmental assessment, and meaningful tribal consultation was never what was causing permitting delays.

Most permitting delays under the NEPA and NHPA process are not caused by public input or tribal consultation. They’re caused by staff shortages, communication delays between project developers and permitting agencies, and the facts show that it is a lack of public engagement that frequently causes permitting delays for clean energy projects. When you shut out the people and communities from decisions impacting their homes, their health, their livelihoods, and sacred sites, opposition to a project should not be surprising to you.

In fact, it should be expected at that point. Early stakeholder engagement, meaningful tribal consultation leads to better decision-making, and ultimately faster project completion. And we do have ideas about how to improve permitting, actually.

Early and meaningful tribal consultation and look at the Environmental Justice for All Act that we’ve been working on. The justifications for this bill are simply not sound. Trust me that Indian country is by and large on board with clean energy transition.

Most tribal nations want clean energy, actually. And trust me when I say that we as Indian people want and need lower utility bills. I’m literally just about priced out of my house and home over here with these high utility bills.

I’m not even joking. But this bill, the BAAJA, is not a magic fix for that. In fact, the opposite is true in that it contains a lot of harms against the most vulnerable among us and is a blank check for fossil fuels.

We need our champions and allies in Congress to publicly stand with us. We need our so-called progressive allies to stop selling the lies that we as Indigenous people are worth sacrificing for the sake of transmission lines. It’s not worth the sacrifice, and we’re not going to just lay down and let it happen.

We need our Congress members to vote with the best interests of the people in mind, not the interests of billion-dollar industry and not the interests of their own campaign fundraising. This will be a legacy vote. You will have to ask yourselves what you want your legacy in Congress to be.

Do you want to be the one who voted against tribal sovereignty? Do you want to be the one who voted to revive genocidal assimilation-era tactics against Indigenous peoples and destroying our ancient cultural sites? Or do you want to be the one who stood with us and protected our sacred sites? It is that deep. Protect the NEPA. Protect the Clean Water Act.

Protect the Endangered Species Act. And please, whatever you do, protect the tribal consultation process under the NHP Section 106. That is all we have.

Do the right thing and vote no on the Bipartisan American Affordability and Job Act. It’s a crap bill. Thank you, Mado.

Thank you, Jordan. I would love to just take a moment to thank all of our speakers, Congressman Tlaib, Mr. Beard, Eric, Jordan, and of course, Daisy, for your time and your efforts and for your committed challenge to challenging this Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act, which pits always corporations and prioritizes corporations, prioritizes oil and gas over the lives of people and over the life of our planet. I would like to take questions at this moment.

Please drop any questions you have for our panelists in the chat. And we’ve already gotten a few that I’d like to start from the bottom up. So starting with Jordan, back up to Mr. Beard.

And the question that we have is permitting reform always bad? And what does a good version of permitting reform look like? So folks could really elaborate on what does good permitting reform look like? Would you like me to go first on that? Yep. Okay. Yeah.

Well, first, thank you for that question. And yeah, like I mentioned before, community groups, environmental justice groups have been working on environmental justice for all act that would ensure that community input is taken into consideration. Those harms are avoided in the first place, which will avoid opposition and avoid legal challenges and everything that actually causes delays.

And you’ll have better projects that are better for the communities. And frankly, Indian country has been telling you for the past several months, really a lot longer than that, what it could take to have better permitting and that is early, meaningful tribal consultation that can be improved. The permitting bills that we’ve been getting ever since the IRA, the Inflation Reduction Act, the big beautiful bill, the bipartisan Infrastructure and Jobs Act, and now this, those are dirty bathroom deals.

They are all bad, actually, because you have Republicans and far right people and people in the fossil fuels industry pushing for these reforms. The permitting reforms that will improve our communities come from us, the communities that actually have to live near them. And I’ll pass it on from there.

I’ll happily address this question as well, that the permitting reform debate is a fundamental misdiagnosis of many of the problems. It fixates in on the point when a permit is issued. It does not look upstream at what the mission of the agencies who are moving through the permitting process, what they are charged with actually doing in terms of delivering on the public interest, because it doesn’t.

It’s based on this all of the above or tech neutral agenda that essentially cedes power from the government to determine what kind of technologies and energy sources we should be using, where they should be located and how, and then it cedes that to capital and markets. So if you want to really fix the permitting process, the first thing you need is a good mission for agencies that serves the public interest. The second thing you need to do is you need to actually invest in those agencies, that you need to provide them with the resources to assess permit applications, to figure out what should get priority, and then to move deliberatively through those decision-making processes.

So really focus upstream on mission and agency capacity. And that is essential. And that is what the literature says.

I know that everybody’s inundated with all these PDFs and reports from all these billionaire funded think tanks that, oh, the problem is NEPA or the NHPA or the Clean Water Act or whatever. Like, that’s bogus. Look to the law professors, the academics, the domain experts like the folks here who have worked with these processes, and you know that that is not the problem, but there are solutions out there, and we are open to that conversation.

Let me also chime in on that. There’s what permitting reform looks like. It looks transparent.

It looks inclusive of the parties and people who are being effectively locked out. It looks engaging to be able to bring all of those parties to the table to make these decisions and to talk about this. And Eric is correct that this is really a misnomer because it’s not really about permitting reform.

It’s about giving free reign to the oil and gas industry to push their projects through unheeded and unimpeded. And that is not reform. That is simply wiping out the democratic process that gives people such as BIPOC communities and also indigenous communities a voice in these matters.

They deserve to be heard because they are being effective, and they’re willing to sit at the table. Environmental justice in terms of this, as well as this bill, looks like the EJ for All Act that is inclusive, comprehensive. It brings everyone to the table who is involved, and these things can be worked out.

But I find it funny, as you should too, I think his name is Eddie that’s in the chat, that these things don’t take them into account. They exclude the very people that are being effective. That is not a good bill.

That is not a fair or democratic bill. It is at the worst, authoritarian, and even fascist, because it eliminates the very people who are supposedly designed to protect and removes those protections that are already there from them. Improvements can be made, but the problem does not lie in permitting itself.

It lies in the delays and the things that are done that are trying to be done in a way which goes against the needs of people who are going to be affected and who also are end users of all of these things that we call affordability-based. Thank you. We’re getting a few questions in the chat, and so I want to kind of continue to move the needle a bit.

So we want to address what are the most harmful aspects of this bill that has been done without public input. Joshua, let me address something I didn’t get to say earlier. I hate that I did it, but the good time is now.

This bill is a slap in the face to me because Senator Sheldon Whitehouse back in 2004, I think it was, visited Port Arthur. He and Representative John Paul from Washington State came to Port Arthur and took my toxic tour that I give of the refineries and polluting places. They had a chance to meet with community members and talk to them, some of whom are people that are two-time cancer survivors, some who have lost family relatives and loved ones to the air pollution because of COPD and heart disease and other things.

They’ve been here. He’s seen this up close and personal. How dare he put a bill out here that does not take us into consideration, that does not bring us to the table to discuss this and how we should do it.

It is absolutely wrong. It is a part of what’s going on in this country that is wrong every way you can conceivably look at it. It is not inclusive.

It is not American. It does not involve the indigenous rights of people. It does not involve the rights of people in their community where pipelines are being placed in close proximity to their homes.

Those people have a right to be heard and to mute their voices, to take actions that make it difficult for them to have a voice and to say that this is very democratic, no such animal. We will fight back. We will resist.

We will kill this bill. This bill will be dead on arrival because we’re going to do everything in our power to make sure we are heard, seen, and felt. This shall not come to pass.

We will do everything in our power to make sure that it doesn’t. Senator Whitehouse, if he’s here or anybody knows how to get in touch with him besides me, which I’m going to do, I want to remind him of the fact he came here and he saw this. Once again, how dare you give a slap in the face to not just my community, but to me, who invited you here to see this up close and personal, and you will put this kind of bill before the people.

Thank you, Mr. Beard, for your profound power and enthusiasm. I think we may have time for one more question, and I do want to address the idea of the fact that we can’t just count jobs. We have to measure job quality, and this act really strikes the ability to measure and know what are safe and clean jobs.

I think the last and final question is what powers would this bill give the Trump administration to further his war on renewables? We’ll start with Daisy and for anyone else who wants to answer. This will be our final question. Yeah, thank you for that, and I think that Eric had mentioned about Senator Heinrich and the propaganda machine around how this is about renewable energy is just false, because in fact, it’s the opposite, right? Senator Heinrich has been making the rounds talking about how this would be good for New Mexico, this would be good for our country, and this would move forward energy plans that have been bucked up against roadblocks.

In fact, those are pipelines, those are gas plants that are seeking approval without permits so that they don’t have to construct renewable energy. In fact, that they can, again, pollute and make as much money as they want off the backs of working everyday people. But I think also some more technical stuff could be shared by other folks who can answer that in a more comprehensive way.

Thank you. Any other panelists want to approach that question? I would just say that there’s a couple of provisions, the project certainty and disparate treatment provisions that are going to basically guarantee that the Trump administration’s priorities with regard to the data center and AI build out as well as natural gas and fossil fuel build out are pretty much locked in stone. And it’s not something that, let’s just say hypothetically, a progressive president comes back into office, they can’t just undo that if they even would want to.

Yeah, I’ll just mention, with the project certainty provisions in this bill, they’re truly troubling because it essentially allows capital markets to take over the direction of how energy is developed in the United States. That doesn’t make it impossible, but what it will do when you layer it onto all the erosion of the bedrock environmental laws is it creates what may be generations long harms to communities and generations long work that we will then need to put in motion to try to remedy much of the harm that this bill will cause on the ground. And that’s what the problem is.

We don’t have that kind of time. I mean, people keep claiming that, oh, there’s urgency to move this bill over the lame duck session as if Democrats aren’t about to win at least the House and perhaps the Senate next week on November 3rd, where they’ll have more leverage. And the notion that somehow that there is no possibility of moving forward with something better than, frankly, this really terrible bill just seems absurd to me.

The timing issue actually plays in favor of opposing Baha because we need to maximize the opportunity for our communities and for future presidents to unwind the harm that this administration has caused and to put us on a true path to progress. Thank you, Eric. And thank you everyone for joining us today.

Please feel free to reach out to us for any follow-up questions or anything else you would like to know pertaining to this press conference and our position against the bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act, not affectionately known as Baha. And we’ll send this recording out shortly after this call. And if you’d like to talk more, please feel free to respond to the speakers as we send out the emails and information of the speakers and the panelists.

We’ll do our best to connect you with the panelists. And please have a great rest of your day. And thank you.