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Start free trial →Heatmap News · Climate & Energy · November 2026
Asked what keeps her up at night about a permitting bill her group endorses, Moffitt names the Clean Water Act changes and expects more gas pipelines as a result. She then argues that fighting projects one at a time was never the endgame for the climate movement.
…is the second highest cost for families in America, also the single largest source of greenhouse gas emissions. Let's get more transit built and streamlining and lessening the requirements for clean transportation projects to have to go through lengthy NEPA reviews is a good thing for the climate.
What keeps you up at night about the bill?
That's a really hard one. I literally have had nightmares about pipelines. I'm going to be honest. More gas pipelines probably will come in the next couple of years. The Clean Water Act streamlining is extremely painful. That is a straight give to the fossil fuel industry. And it's a give in response to effective organizing, frankly. But are those bills the tools we need to solve the climate crisis? They're not. They're just not. I think we've been effective at using them, but the climate crisis is getting worse. And we never set out to go permit by permit forever when I started working on Keystone XL in 2010. We wanted to stop as many horrible projects as we can and stand hand in hand with frontline allies like the First Nations people in Canada and the Appalachian people in the mountains of North Carolina and build up a movement that was strong enough to elect leaders who would pass comprehensive policy that would more systematically get us off of fossil fuels. At the time, I thought that was maybe going to be cap and trade. I maybe thought that was going to be another carbon…
You both framed the bill as optimistic. What needs to happen for the bill to be as good as it can be for the climate?
Pete and I were talking to another former Biden person, actually, about the bill and about what needs to happen going forward. And there is a lot in this bill that hangs on federal regulators. I want to be transparent about that too. If folks haven't read the text like we have, like we know FERC is…
I would start from there. I've always argued that if you just level the playing field. Clean is going to keep expanding because it is the one that is cheap and getting cheaper. It's going to be really hard to get cheaper with mining coal and bringing it to a coal plant. I am also the one, someone…