The nation’s halting and uneven clean energy rollout—exacerbated by President Donald Trump’s hostility to anything green—threatens our prosperity, our climate, and our communities. Left unchecked, rising temperatures—driven largely by fossil fuels and the industries that burn them—will destroy ecosystems, disrupt our economy, and destabilize our society.

Some opportunistic politicians think they have a solution in the latest media fad, the so-called “Abundance” movement. They argue that the rules and regulations put in place to protect the environment are in fact obstacles impeding our ability to build the clean energy our climate needs. Their logic is nonsensical: Cut environmental regulations to protect the environment and unleash energy abundance.

But we’ve been down this path, and it leads not to abundance, but impoverishment. We’ve seen the havoc that unrestricted exploitation of nature brings to our health, our communities, and our environment: Barren hillsides. Air too dangerous to breathe. Workers’ lives devastated, and too often lost. Toxic rivers and underground fires.

In 1971, damage like this led Pennsylvanians to rise up and demand the passage of the state’s Green Amendment. Led by visionary State Sen. Franklin Kury, Pennsylvania became the first state in the nation to enshrine in its constitution a revolutionary recognition of the People’s right to pure water, clean air, and healthy environments, and to create a constitutional obligation for leaders to protect these rights. Pennsylvania’s Green Amendment is now being used to ensure that industry—including a vibrant clean energy sector—is able to advance while also protecting Pennsylvanian’s inalienable right to a clean, safe, and healthy environment, and all the economic benefits that flow therefrom.

Rather than regulatory rollbacks, we need a reorientation—one that advances clean energy abundance without empowering fossil fuels.

But in pushing a stale deregulatory agenda, the Abundance movement threatens to undo the balance healthy environments provide and open the door to a fossil fuel industry more focused on profits than people—an industry that has always overpromised on job creation and economic benefits, while consistently downplaying the harm it causes to our environment and our health.

And make no mistake, the harms are........

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