Senator slams Biden’s EPA for awarding $50 MILLION to ‘pro-Hamas’ climate ‘justice’ group

On Tuesday, Capito revealed that one of her staffers discovered that the EPA awarded a $50 million grant through the IRA to Climate Justice Alliance. "Time and again when EPA officials come before our committee, they say 'if only we had more money, more resources, more staff.' This is what they’re spending it on?" Capito asked. "Many of us warned of the waste, fraud, and abuse. No one could have dreamed it could be this bad."

She said that images found on the group’s website and social media depict “the bulldozer that went through the fence when Hamas attacked Israel on October the 7th,” in addition to other antisemitic, anti-Israel, and pro-Hamas imagery.

She continued, “If you dig deeper they want to defund the police, defund the military, either them—or their affiliates—want to have very radical, drastic initiatives that I think are anti-American, and they certainly are anti-Israel and anti-Semitic.” The group explains the link between climate and the war in Israel by saying that they use "an anti-colonial framework to show how Climate Justice and the liberation of Palestine are connected." They claim that "colonized places" are at specific risk of exacerbated problems due to the "climate crisis." They claim that it is through the "restoring of indigenous sovereignty" the "climate crisis" can be improved.

Capito then asked if the Climate Justice Alliance would actually be cleaning up the environment, or funding terrorism adding that the Environment and Public Works Committee would continue to follow the money to find out where American taxpayer dollars are going.

Climate Justice Alliance states that their intentions for how to use the money are "to serve as a bridge, model, and catalyst among organizations nationwide to confront the legacy of environmental harms; strengthen the environmental justice movement; mitigate the effects of climate change; support frontline communities in enacting their localized visions for thriving communities; and pilot co-governance between the EPA and frontline communities hit first and worst by environmental injustice and the climate crisis."

In July 2022, West Virginia’s other Senator Joe Manchin (D) worked with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to create the IRA. Manchin has since criticized the implementation of his own bill. Of the IRA, the White House famously said "The Inflation Reduction Act is a transformative law that is helping the United States meet its climate goals and strengthen energy security, investing in America to create good-paying jobs, reducing energy and health care costs for families, and making the tax code fairer."