Climate politics

It’s invigorating to see some of our leaders finally reckon with the most abiding problem of American climate politics: that green does not always mean equitable.

Many well-meaning climate policies have in fact exacerbated class, gender, and race inequities for decades. In Hawaii, working people subsidize property relocations for wealthy snowbirds who recklessly built their homes too close to our rising seas. In New York, insatiable developers collect public dollars for ill-defined “weatherization” projects, which too often translate to gentrification.

Across rural areas and the southern United States, sky-high electricity bills stretch working families thin, leaving only corporations and the wealthy able to reap the rewards of rooftop solar. Mix in systemic racism and a global pandemic, and it’s baffling how so many of us climate organizers of color have remained hopeful enough to carry on this far.

But here we are. Our communities flipped the House, Senate, and White House – and things are finally looking up. Congresswoman Cori Bush and Senator Ed Markey have introduced landmark Environmental Justice legislation (the Environmental Justice Mapping and Data Collection Act of 2021), just one day after President Biden announced his “Justice40'' initiative, along with an ambitious suite of executive orders geared towards climate jobs and justice.

This unprecedented spate of good news marks a massive shift of focus for Democrats: from regressive “carbon pricing” to a whole-of-government, intersectional approach to climate action. It’s a rebirth of the hope organizers have so desperately needed to breathe new life into our communities and keep building the cross-class, multiracial coalition that we need to win.

Still, our optimism is set against the backdrop of experience. We’ve learned through countless political bouts that the success of these policies will depend on the specifics of their implementation. Especially when federal policy meets frontline communities, the devil is in the details.

Take President Biden’s “Justice40” initiative, for example. Biden aims to deliver 40 percent of federal climate investments to “disadvantaged communities," i.e., mostly Black, Latino, and Indigenous communities. This set-aside would apply to his $2 trillion “Build Back Better” green stimulus, and could radically transform our communities (through home retrofits, increased public transit, healthy green retrofits for schools, remediation of existing pollution, etc.) as early as this Spring.

But in order for the Justice40 policy to work as intended, the Biden administration must first specify how they are mapping and defining ‘disadvantaged communities’. What unit of analysis will it use?

The finer the scale, the more targeted the investment can be in low-income communities and communities of color. The wider the scale, the more it risks plowing money into wealthy communities that already have resources.

Excerpted: ‘With Environmental Justice, the Devil Is in the Details’

Commondreams.org