Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s former colleagues at an environmental advocacy nonprofit told the independent presidential candidate to drop out of the 2024 race in a new political advertisement, citing what activists perceive to be his climate denialism.
“Honor our planet, drop out,” nearly 50 current and former leaders, board members, and employees who worked with Kennedy at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) said in a direct message to Kennedy’s campaign. Sponsored by the group’s political arm, the full-page ad will run in the Sunday newspapers across six swing states: Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.
Despite serving as an environmental lawyer at the NRDC for 28 years, Kennedy has received criticism from his one-time allies for refusing to fully go along with the climate-change narrative. The ad specifically mentions this statement on Kennedy’s website as an example of his environmentally unorthodox views: “Climate change is being used to control us through fear.” Kennedy left the NRDC in 2014.
The ad also highlights former president Donald Trump’s embrace of Kennedy as a presidential contender who can siphon enough votes away from President Joe Biden, whom the NRDC endorsed as the “only one real environmental and climate champion in the presidential race.”
“In nothing more than a vanity candidacy, RFK Jr. has chosen to play the role of election spoiler to the benefit of Donald Trump – the single worst environmental president our country has ever had,” the ad reads.
A total of 46 individuals signed the statement opposing Kennedy’s presidential run. Among the most notable NRDC colleagues named in the ad include president and CEO Manish Bapna and co-founder John Adams, who hired and mentored Kennedy in the 1980s.
“I mentored Bobby as a young environmentalist. I do not recognize the person he has become. His actions are a betrayal to our environment,” Adams told the New York Times.
Kennedy did not directly address the ad in an interview with the Times, though he did say the environmental movement “is making a mistake to settle for crumbs that have been given to us by the Biden administration.”
He also rejected the idea that he acts as a potential spoiler in bringing Trump back to the White House. “President Biden does not need my help to lose to Donald Trump,” said Kennedy.
In addition to the ad, a dozen other environmental organizations signed an open letter rebuking Kennedy’s “false environmentalist claims” and “toxic beliefs” on vaccines and climate change. The letter, issued Friday, claims Kennedy is not an “environmentalist” and calls him a “dangerous conspiracy theorist” and “science denier.”
“He may have once been an environmental attorney, but now RFK Jr. is peddling the term ‘climate change orthodoxy’ and making empty promises to clean up our environment with superficial proposals,” twelve national environmental groups wrote. “The truth is, by rejecting science, what he offers is no different than Donald Trump.”
Kennedy’s campaign declined to comment on NRDC’s ad and the environmental groups’ letter.
Both scathing statements come after the Kennedy family endorsed Biden at a campaign event in Philadelphia on Thursday over their own relative. Many family members, including his brothers and sisters, have openly denounced Kennedy, the son of former U.S. attorney general Robert F. Kennedy and nephew of former president John F. Kennedy, since he announced his 2024 campaign exactly a year ago from Friday.
The political scion initially ran as a Democrat, but because the Democratic Party shut him out of the race, Kennedy switched to an independent candidacy last fall.
While agreeing with the scientific opinion that carbon dioxide and methane are warming the planet, Kennedy told Jordan Peterson in an interview last year that the climate crisis “is being used as a pretext for clamping down totalitarian controls.” In his mind, intelligence agencies, the World Economic Forum, and the “billionaires boys club at Davos” are behind the climate-change fearmongering.
If elected, Kennedy pledged he would be the “best environmental president in American history.”