RFK Jr. Abandons Environmentalist Role by Endorsing Trump

For decades, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. worked as an environmental lawyer, suing polluters. He helped found a global environmental group that fought for clean water and helped defeat dam projects in Chile and Peru.

But 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 know the Bobby I knew,” said Dan Reicher, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Doerr School of Sustainability. “I never could have imagined him supporting former President Trump.”

Reicher, a former U.S. deputy secretary of energy, worked with Kennedy at the Natural Resources Defense Council, or NRDC, and spent time kayaking with him on rivers in Chile and the United States.

Reicher said he has grown increasingly dismayed by Kennedy’s campaign positions and statements on the environment. He noted that Kennedy has not presented any meaningful plan to reduce greenhouse gases. Instead, Reicher said, he has criticized the size of the hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies for clean energy projects in President Biden’s inflation-reduction law.

“He ignored a lot of what we need to do to combat climate change,” Reicher said.

Long before he announced his presidential run last year, Kennedy had become known as an environmental advocate for his work cleaning up New York’s Hudson River with the group 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 context may seem to put Kennedy at odds with Trump, who has called climate change a “hoax” and rolled back numerous environmental rules, some activists have grown increasingly concerned about his candidacy in recent months as he has questioned Biden’s policies. Some point to his post on X where he 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 nothing more than a vanity bid, RFK Jr. has chosen to play the role of election spoiler for Donald Trump – the worst environmentalist president our country has ever had,” the ad reads.

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 appropriate the credibility and successes of our movement for his own personal gain,” the groups wrote.

In some cases, Kennedy had outlined policies that went further than Biden’s. For example, he had aligned himself with many environmental activists in calling for an end to U.S. exports of liquefied natural gas. The Biden administration announced earlier this year that it was suspending permits for new gas export terminals while it studied the economic and climate impacts of such exports.

Kennedy told Politico that he did not want an export ban for environmental reasons, but rather to protect U.S. gas reserves from depletion.

In that interview, Kennedy also said he wanted to roll back part of the Inflation Reduction Act that funded carbon capture projects favored by the fossil fuel industry. He said he believed Biden had been manipulated by oil companies.

“He’s played into the hands of the carbon industry by focusing on geoengineering and carbon capture, which to me is a disastrous outcome,” Kennedy said. “It’s disastrous from an environmental perspective, and it’s also just a subsidy for the carbon giants.”