Top Biden Bureaucrat Consulted With Eco-Activists To Justify Infusing Social Justice Into Wind Program

 

A senior Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) official consulted climate activists about finding legal justification for the agency’s push to get developers to invest in “underserved communities,” according to communications obtained by Protect the Public’s Trust.

Marissa Knodel, a senior adviser at BOEM who formerly worked for eco-advocacy group Earthjustice, sought the advice of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the Ocean Conservancy, two environmental activist groups, in 2021. Knodel was looking for a legal explanation as to how encouraging offshore wind developers to invest in “underserved communities” aligns with BOEM’s mission, the discovered emails reveal.

...“These records are very revealing about the Biden administration’s grossly disparate treatment of different segments of the energy industry,” Michael Chamberlain, executive director of Protect the Public’s Trust, told the DCNF. “While it appears BOEM was bending over backwards working with special interests to try to tie offshore wind to their environmental justice goals, they were simultaneously twisting themselves in knots looking for ways to prohibit those same rules from benefiting oil and gas producers.”...more