United States President Joe Biden is facing stiff resistance in the US Senate to his nominations for multiple cabinet and agency positions — including Neera Tanden, who on Tuesday was pulled from the process to become budget director at the White House.
The political agenda for the first 100 days of his administration has been bogged down by the slow pace in congressional confirmation of Biden’s top picks.
But one of the most contentious approval processes yet is over Representative Deb Haaland, the Democrat from New Mexico tapped to lead the US Department of the Interior (DOI).
On Thursday, the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources voted 11-9 to advance Haaland’s nomination. A vote from Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski, who broke ranks with her fellow GOP committee members, put it over the top.
Haaland’s nomination now goes to the Senate floor for a vote. She is widely expected to be confirmed, but the hearings surrounding her nomination could signal a tough legislative road ahead for Biden’s climate agenda.
The DOI is one of four government agencies that administer some 640 million acres (260 million hectares) of federally owned lands. That real estate includes patches the US oil and gas industry and mining firms would like to develop for drilling, extraction and pipelines.
During Haaland’s confirmation hearings, supporters of the US fossil-fuel industry expressed strong opposition to the progressive nominee’s stance on climate change.
She has been an outspoken opponent of fracking — which catapulted US energy production to new heights. Haaland was also a cosponsor of the original Green New Deal resolution.
“If she’s allowed to pursue her Green New Deal-inspired policies at the Department of Interior, she will run Wyoming and other states’ economies into the ditch,” Senator John Barrasso, the highest-ranking Republican committee member, said on Thursday. “Representative Haaland’s extreme policy views and lack of substantive answers during the hearing, to me, disqualify her.”
Last week, in response to a grilling by several Republican senators who have received substantial campaign funds from oil, gas and coal companies, Senator Maria Cantwell, a Democrat from Washington state, told Haaland that her nomination “is a proxy fight over the future of fossil fuels”.
Cantwell went on to say that the debate over oil pipelines and drilling rights underlined a dramatic split between Republican and Democratic members of the committee, and differing visions for the DOI mandate in managing federal lands and public resources.
Haaland, who has vociferously advocated for climate action, told the senators at the hearing that fossil fuels will remain in the US economy for “years to come”.
Those assurances did not assuage Republican senators such as Barrasso — plus Louisiana’s Bill Cassidy and Montana’s Steve Daines — who set clear defensive lines in their fight to extend US reliance on fossil fuels.
‘Disparate impact’
Tara Houska, an attorney and Indigenous rights activist based in Minnesota, was recently arrested with more than 100 other environmental advocates for protesting the Enbridge Line 3 crude oil pipeline that runs through the northern part of her state.
That $2.6bn fossil-fuel infrastructure project is the sort of development that could face jeopardy under Biden’s new DOI secretary.
“We’re talking about the control of the fossil-fuel industry and the disparate impact it has had on Indian Country,” Houska told Al Jazeera.
For many vulnerable Native American groups like the Anishinaabe in the rural Midwest, safety concerns about pipelines and political questions about land sovereignty overlap with climate campaigners’ argument that…
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