For decades, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. worked as an environmental lawyer, filing lawsuits against polluters. He helped found a global environmental group that fought for clean water and helped defeat dam projects in Chile and Peru.
Yet even before announcing Friday that he was suspending his presidential campaign and endorsing former President Trump, Kennedy had repeatedly disappointed and angered dozens of environmentalists, who said he had abandoned his green roots.
“It’s a shock to me to meet the Bobby I knew,” said Dan Reicher, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Doerr School of Sustainability. “I would never have imagined him supporting former President Trump.”
Reicher, a former U.S. deputy secretary of energy, once worked with Kennedy at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and spent time kayaking with him on rivers in Chile and the United States.
Reicher said he was increasingly dismayed by Kennedy’s campaign positions and statements on the environment. He noted that Kennedy had not put forward any meaningful plans to reduce greenhouse gases. Instead, Reicher said, he had criticized the size of the hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies for clean energy projects in President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.
“He has dismissed many of the things we need to do on climate change,” Reicher said.
Long before he announced last year that he would run for president, Kennedy had become known as an environmental advocate for his work helping clean up New York's Hudson River with a group called Riverkeeper.
And until 2020, he was president of the Waterkeeper Alliance, an environmental group he helped found to fight for clean water around the world.
While that background appears to put Kennedy at odds with Trump, who has called climate change a “hoax” and rolled back numerous environmental regulations, some activists have grown increasingly concerned about her candidacy in recent months as she has questioned Biden’s policies. Some point to her post on X where she said, “Climate change is being used to control us through fear.”
In April, dozens of Kennedy’s former colleagues at NRDC, where he worked for nearly three decades, paid for ads in key states, calling on him to “honor our planet” by dropping out of the race.
“In a candidacy that is nothing more than a vanity issue, RFK Jr. has chosen to play the role of election saboteur for the benefit of Donald Trump, the worst environmental president our country has ever had,” the ad read.
That same month, a dozen environmental groups, including the Sierra Club and Earthjustice, signed a letter calling on Americans to vote against Kennedy.
“We cannot, in good conscience, allow him to continue to co-opt the credibility and successes of our movement for his own personal gain,” the groups wrote.
In some cases, Kennedy had spoken of policies that went beyond Biden’s. For example, he had aligned himself with many climate activists in calling for an end to U.S. exports of liquefied natural gas. The Biden administration said earlier this year that it was suspending approvals for new gas export terminals while it studied the economic and climate impacts of the exports.
Kennedy He told Politico who did not want an export ban for environmental reasons, but rather to protect US gas reserves from depletion.
In that interview, Kennedy also said he wanted to dismantle part of the Inflation Reduction Act that funded carbon capture projects, which are favored by the fossil fuel industry. He said he believed Biden had been manipulated by oil companies.
“It has played to the benefit of the carbon industry by focusing on geoengineering and carbon capture, and that to me is a disastrous outcome,” Kennedy said. “And it’s environmentally disastrous, and it’s also simply a subsidy for big carbon companies.”
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