Credit: (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)Rep. Frank Pallone (D-6th)
WASHINGTON — While President-elect Donald Trump will likely withdraw the U.S. from a global climate agreement next year, other American leaders are committed to slashing the heat-trapping emissions that endanger Earth and its inhabitants.
That’s the message Rep. Frank Pallone (D-6th), other congressional Democrats, local and state officials and environmentalists have underscored after Trump’s election victory two weeks ago.
“We, collectively, should still strive to work towards the goals of the Paris agreement,” Pallone said at the Capitol on Monday night. “We’re still in, regardless of what Trump does.”
Pallone was one of nine members of Congress who traveled this weekend to attend a U.N. climate summit in Azerbaijan, an oil-rich nation between eastern Europe and western Asia, and to prod the oppressive nation on its human rights record.
Pallone was the only one of those members of Congress excluded from a meeting U.S. lawmakers had with Ilham Aliyev, Azerbaijan’s president, he and Sen. Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, said.
Enhance protections before Trump?
As the Biden administration winds down and a second Trump administration gets organized, Pallone, the highest-ranking Democrat on a powerful House committee with broad jurisdiction, is using his post to urge the outgoing administration to shore up environmental protections.
That includes closing off coastal waters from oil and gas extraction.
Given his spot on the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, Pallone will be central to the expected frenetic pace of congressional activity in the early months of the new Congress, when Republicans in both chambers and in the White House plan to carry out a sweeping domestic agenda, from mass deportations and tariffs to deep cuts in the federal budget and the elimination of entire federal departments.
The Energy and Commerce committee has jurisdiction over health care, health insurance, substance abuse and the federal programs Medicare and Medicaid. It also oversees environmental policy, air pollution, automobiles, national energy policy, consumer goods, product safety and electronics.
Republicans will hold a political trifecta of power from January 2025 to January 2027 with control of the House, Senate and White House. And they have said changing the 2010 health care law known as Obamacare and slashing environmental regulations are priorities.
Legislation on those topics would likely flow through the Energy and Commerce committee.
Not just the purview of Washington
Talking with reporters Monday night, Pallone and Markey, both influential environmental legislators for years, said more people than just the president set the course of U.S. climate policy.
Credit: (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) right, speaks about climate change on Capitol Hill, Oct. 7, 2021.
The U.S. is producing more oil than it ever has, Pallone said. “But that doesn’t mean you don’t move toward clean energy.”
Markey, one of the lead authors of climate legislation that died on Capitol Hill in 2010, noted big states, like California, will continue with their own environmental objectives despite rollbacks from Washington.
“The climate crisis was not caused by one president and the climate crisis will not be solved by one president,” Markey said. “New York, New Jersey, New England combined, would be the fifth-largest economy in the world,” he said. “We’re all in.”
In October, both men signed a letter urging Secretary of State Antony Blinken to demand Azerbaijan release “all political prisoners, hostages, and [prisons of war], including ethnic Armenians, to enable a more conducive environment” before the climate summit.
Azerbaijan’s human rights record
After decades of ceasefires in Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous region in Azerbaijan’s west inhabited by an ethnic majority of Armenians, the Azerbaijani military seized the area by force in September 2023.
More than 100,000 people, ethnic Armenians, fled west to neighboring Armenia rather than face Azerbaijani rule.
Pallone said he was excluded from a meeting with Aliyev that the rest of the congressional members attended, due to his criticism of the government.
“The authorities used the military victory to further cement their rule and entrench their clampdown on dissent,” humanitarian group Amnesty International says in a profile of Azerbaijan.
The Azerbaijani government limits dissent, controls the press and restricts free expression. Violence against women and girls is common, according to humanitarian groups.
The research group Freedom House ranks Azerbaijan as “not free,” giving the country a score of 7 out of a total 100 on its freedom index.
Pallone harassed in Baku
Protestors, organized by the government, harassed Pallone several times in the capital, Baku, this weekend, he said.
Credit: (Yevgeny Biyatov, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)Ilham Aliev, president of Azerbaijan
“If it wasn’t for the fact that the [U.S.] embassy hired security to protect me, I would have been in the hospital,” Pallone said. “I seemed to be the main target of what they were doing,” he said. “It was sort of like an exercise in what despots do.”
Markey said he too had a bodyguard protect him during his time there.
Pallone said he was excluded from a meeting with Aliyev that the rest of the congressional members attended, due to his criticism of the government.
His colleagues passed on his demands, Pallone said. “The idea was to really stress that we want conflict to end,” he said. “We don’t want more military aggression on the part of Azerbaijan.”
