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As New York Officials Push Clean Hydrogen Project, Indigenous Nation Sees a Threat to Its Land

Inside Climate News · By Nicholas Kusnetz · last updated
The Tonawanda Seneca see the industrial development next door as a threat to the woods they depend on for game and medicines, and the failure of the company and permitting agencies to consult them as another assault on their treaty rights.

By Nicholas Kusnetz

When Chief Roger Hill speaks about the clean energy project going up along the border of the Tonawanda Indian Reservation, he turns quickly to the past. Hill’s Seneca ancestors once controlled a large territory across the rolling, wooded hills in what is now western New York, but most of their lands were taken through a series of treaties that shrank the reservation to its current size.

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More than 30 years after the last major update of the Clean Air Act, the U.S. Supreme Court has upended the ability of Congress to give the Environmental Protection Agency and other federal agencies broad scope to combat air pollution, including the emission of greenhouse gases. Meanwhile, further Biden administration efforts to limit emissions face opposition in the courts. 

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