Kennedy Jr.’s environmental colleagues urge him to drop presidential bid

As an independent candidate for the White House, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a former lawyer who went after New York’s polluters, claimed he would be the best environmental president in U.S. history.

But dozens of Kennedy’s former colleagues at the Natural Resources Defense Council have called on him to drop out of the race, with ads sponsored by the group’s political arm expected to appear in newspapers in six battleground states on Sunday.

Separately, more than a dozen other national environmental groups issued an open letter calling Mr. Kennedy a dangerous conspiracy theorist and science denier who promotes toxic beliefs about vaccines and climate change.

People involved in both efforts insist that Mr. Kennedy cannot win the presidency but could take votes away from President Joe Biden and help elect former President Donald J. Trump, who called climate change a hoax , and pledges to crack environmental laws and policies.

Newspaper ads that will run in Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania say a vote for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the vote to undermine that progress and return Trump to the White House. Signers include John Hamilton Adams, who co-founded the Natural Resources Defense Council and hired Mr. Kennedy in the 1980s, as well as the organization’s past and current presidents. They begged Mr. Kennedy to respect our planet and withdraw.

Mr. Kennedy resigned in 2014 after serving as senior counsel for the Natural Resources Defense Council for approximately 28 years.

In a phone interview Thursday, Kennedy pushed back against the idea that he might bring Trump back to the White House.

Mr. Kennedy said President Biden doesn’t need my help to lose to Donald Trump. He avoided speaking directly about the actions of Adams and other former colleagues, saying only that he and his mentor had political differences.

Instead, Mr. Kennedy criticized Mr. Biden and the environmental movement, saying it would be a mistake for the environmental movement to settle for less than the crumbs the Biden administration gives us.

Former colleagues in the environmental community were unabashed in their assessment of Mr. Kennedy.

‘The Bobby I knew is gone,’ said Dan Reicher, a senior energy fellow at Stanford University’s Woods Institute for the Environment. Mr. Reicher worked with Mr. Kennedy at NRDC and said he had a personal friendship with Mr. Kennedy that spanned decades, including river paddling together in the United States and Chile.

Gina McCarthy served as head of the Environmental Protection Agency under President Barack Obama and then chaired the NRDC during the Trump administration before returning to serve as Mr. Biden’s climate adviser until last year .

If people remember him as an environmentalist, he’s gone, she said of Mr. Kennedy. He’s anti-science, he’s anti-vaccine, he’s harping on climate. I don’t know what he represents.

Mr Adams said in a statement: “I mentored Bobby as a young environmentalist. I don’t know what kind of person he has become. His actions are a betrayal of our environment.

Mr. Kennedy’s professional colleagues condemned him after his siblings and other members of the Kennedy family supported President Joe Biden at a campaign rally in Philadelphia on Thursday. Mr. Kennedy is the nephew of former President John F. Kennedy and the son of former Attorney General and presidential candidate Robert Kennedy. Members of the Kennedy family said they were concerned that Mr. Kennedy’s campaign could swing to Mr. Trump’s.

Trump allies have been discussing how to promote third-party candidates like Kennedy in battleground states to shift votes away from Biden. They hope to highlight Kennedy’s background as an environmental activist in hopes of driving away some progressive voters frustrated by record levels of U.S. oil and gas production under Biden.

Stephen K. Bannon, the former White House chief strategist and 2016 Trump campaign chairman, told The New York Times earlier this month that the path to victory here is clearly to maximize the impact of these left-wing alternatives force.

Mr. Kennedy’s views on climate change were unconventional. He agrees with the overwhelming scientific view that carbon dioxide and methane, two greenhouse gases, are warming the planet and the evidence is clear. “All my senses tell me warming is happening,” he said in a video posted to X in July.

But in the same film, he also says that a carbon war is not the answer and that the crisis is being used as an excuse to suppress totalitarian control. He said the intelligence agencies, the World Economic Forum and the Davos Billionaires Club were behind the crackdown, and their goal was to make the rich richer. But soon after, he said free markets would solve the climate crisis.

Mr. Kennedy said he opposed federal subsidies for carbon capture and storage, a technology that captures greenhouse gases emitted by power plants or industrial processes before they are released into the atmosphere, where they contribute to global warming. Mr. Kennedy called it useless and a colossal waste for the industry and criticized Mr. Biden for agreeing to include the subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, the president’s landmark climate law.

Many environmentalists also oppose carbon capture technology because they want the country to stop burning fossil fuels and switch to wind, solar and other non-polluting energy sources.

But Mr. Kennedy’s agenda does not include any explicit policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

On Thursday, he said eliminating subsidies for fossil fuels and stricter enforcement of existing laws like the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act would be enough to combat climate change. President Biden has tried three times to eliminate fossil fuel subsidies, and each time Congress reinstated them. In a recent ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority limited the Biden administration’s ability to regulate greenhouse gases under existing law.

Mr. Kennedy also said that the environmental movement made a huge tactical error in focusing on climate change instead of less controversial environmental issues.

He accused Biden of turning his back on the environment by approving the $8 billion Willow oil drilling project in Alaska; overseeing record oil and gas production; and signing the Inflation Reduction Act to ensure the continuation of offshore oil drilling.

Mr. Kennedy said it was hard to understand how the environmental movement could now say this was OK. I think we need a bigger vision for the environment.

Manish Bapna, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council Action Fund, the political arm of the nonprofit environmental group, noted that Mr. Kennedy has also criticized federal subsidies that boost domestic electric vehicle and battery manufacturing as well as solar and wind energy production in the United States.

Mr Bapna said voters concerned about the environment should not be fooled.

Mr. Biden has set out the most aggressive climate agenda of any president. In addition to the Inflation Cut Act, which provides more than $370 billion for clean energy over the next decade, he would limit vehicle emissions, prepare to reduce carbon pollution from power plants, and control the future of oil and gas by limiting oil and gas drilling. Natural gas drilling.

The political ad did not discuss Mr. Kennedy’s record as a lawyer who helped clean up the Hudson River and launched a global movement to protect the waterway.

In 1999, Mr. Kennedy was named a Hero of the Earth by Time magazine for his work with Riverkeeper, one of the organizations credited with cleaning up the Hudson River. As founder of the Water Champions Alliance, he successfully closed a landfill in New York that was polluting the water supply and helped dismantle dams in Chile and Peru.