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ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE, CLIMATE CHANGE, AND THE CRITIQUE OF NEOLIBERAL CAP-AND-TRADE POLICIES
Since the late 1990s, Professor Bunyan Bryant (Univ. of Michigan) has led efforts to document the environmental justice impacts of climate change. EJ scholars have for some time recognized that people of color, low income families, the elderly, third world rural inhabitants, and indigenous peoples are already experiencing the effects of climate change.
Surely, the planning "disaster" that followed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina demonstrated how much environmental racism is still institutionalized in our Federal government. The neoliberal policies of the Bush II administration allowed a "natural catastrophe," one likely compounded and associated with climate change and the destruction of wetlands and barrier swamps, to turn into an unmitigated civil, emergency relief, and planning disaster. The result is that close to 65,000 mostly African American and low income persons are still unable to return to repair and reclaim their homes in New Orleans. This illustrates a disparate impact in the policy failure to provide equitable relief from a natural event likely associated with climate change.
Growing awareness of the environmental justice implications of climate change has now led an EJ activist network in California to adopt a resolution on climate change. The California Environmental Justice Movement passed the following Environmental Justice Resolution on Climate Change:
Since the late 1990s, Professor Bunyan Bryant (Univ. of Michigan) has led efforts to document the environmental justice impacts of climate change. EJ scholars have for some time recognized that people of color, low income families, the elderly, third world rural inhabitants, and indigenous peoples are already experiencing the effects of climate change.
Surely, the planning "disaster" that followed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina demonstrated how much environmental racism is still institutionalized in our Federal government. The neoliberal policies of the Bush II administration allowed a "natural catastrophe," one likely compounded and associated with climate change and the destruction of wetlands and barrier swamps, to turn into an unmitigated civil, emergency relief, and planning disaster. The result is that close to 65,000 mostly African American and low income persons are still unable to return to repair and reclaim their homes in New Orleans. This illustrates a disparate impact in the policy failure to provide equitable relief from a natural event likely associated with climate change.
Growing awareness of the environmental justice implications of climate change has now led an EJ activist network in California to adopt a resolution on climate change. The California Environmental Justice Movement passed the following Environmental Justice Resolution on Climate Change:
BE IT THEREFORE, RESOLVED, that the California Environmental Justice Movement stands with communities around the world in opposition to carbon trading and offset use and the continued over reliance on fossil fuels; and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that the California Environmental Justice Movement will support conservation, regulatory, and other measures to address greenhouse gases only if they directly and significantly reduce emissions, require the shift away from use of fossil fuels and nuclear power, and do not cause or exacerbate the pollution burden of poor communities of color in the United States and developing nations around the world; and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that the California Environmental Justice Movement will oppose efforts by our state government to create a carbon trading and offset program, because such a program will not reduce greenhouse gas emissions at the pace called for by the international scientific community, it will not result in a shift to clean sustainable energy sources, it will support and enrich the state's worst polluters, it will fail to address the existing and future inequitable burden of pollution, it will deprive communities of the ability to protect and enhance their communities, and because if our state joins regional or international trading schemes it will further create incentives for carbon offset programs that harm communities in California, the region, the country, and developing nations around the world.
This is a significant statement that expresses some of the original critical spirit of the Principles of Environmental Justice and especially a justified disdain for capitalism and neoliberal or market-based approaches to environmental protection.
However, the California EJ Resolution overlooks some important dimensions of climate change that are already producing disparate impacts. One of these impacts stems from easily overlooked consequences of climate change in the worsening of the conditions that undercut food security and result in the loss of food sovereignty. Climate change affects the well-being of endangered indigenous cultures because drought and rising sea levels displace people from ancestral homelands, reducing their food self-sufficiency. So, the effects of environmental racism reach beyond disparate exposure of people of color to pollution to include various other social, economic, and environmental impacts of climate change.
The EJ network wisely opposes neoliberal "cap and trade" approaches to the reduction of greenhouse gases. However, what is not sufficiently addressed in this Resolution on Climate Change is the problem of "Peak Oil" and how this also is already leading to disparate impacts because low income workers and people of color have limited resources to expend on transportation costs like bus ridership. People are already forced to make a choice between a meal or a trip to the store and find they can no longer afford either. Sustainable and just transit options are lacking and this reinforces class/race privileges and over-consumption of fossil fuels.
Climate change and food security/sovereignty are bound together as policy problematics subject to the games of truth and the pirouettes of policy-making. There can be no environmental justice without a frontal attack on the capitalist nature of our economy which is based on the destruction of the natural conditions of existence and the exploitation of multifaceted human beings reduced to substitutable units of "abstract labor" time. Capitalism brought climate change about. Capitalism will fight efforts to address climate change as long as corporations can squeeze profits out of fossil fuels and other non-renewable resources. Then they will turn their attention to alternative energy but only as new commodity frontier.
Environmental justice activists need to make a stronger statement that retains a critical attitude toward the ideologies of capitalism that presume the end of history and thus a demand for blind faith in the unfettered market as ultimate champion of "sustainable development." We must make the case that capitalism is inherently antagonistic toward earth's life support systems and the diverse human communities that inhabit our imperiled planet.
Finally, EJ movement declarations on any given policy problem must go beyond simply working to perfect the "master's tools" (regulation, etc.) and instead should also directly embrace and express alterNative and autonomous possibilities for ecological democracy and environmental self-governance already emerging in our very own communities.
An important aspect of a post-Peak Oil sustainable and just world will be the capacity for low-income working-class people, communities of color, and indigenous nations to revitalize and strengthen resilient and just local food systems that are compatible with and based on traditional agroecological methods, the conservation of the diversity of heirloom crops and heritage cuisines, and the expansion of "the commons" against the privatization of all life and living processes under neoliberal capitalism.
This is a significant statement that expresses some of the original critical spirit of the Principles of Environmental Justice and especially a justified disdain for capitalism and neoliberal or market-based approaches to environmental protection.
However, the California EJ Resolution overlooks some important dimensions of climate change that are already producing disparate impacts. One of these impacts stems from easily overlooked consequences of climate change in the worsening of the conditions that undercut food security and result in the loss of food sovereignty. Climate change affects the well-being of endangered indigenous cultures because drought and rising sea levels displace people from ancestral homelands, reducing their food self-sufficiency. So, the effects of environmental racism reach beyond disparate exposure of people of color to pollution to include various other social, economic, and environmental impacts of climate change.
The EJ network wisely opposes neoliberal "cap and trade" approaches to the reduction of greenhouse gases. However, what is not sufficiently addressed in this Resolution on Climate Change is the problem of "Peak Oil" and how this also is already leading to disparate impacts because low income workers and people of color have limited resources to expend on transportation costs like bus ridership. People are already forced to make a choice between a meal or a trip to the store and find they can no longer afford either. Sustainable and just transit options are lacking and this reinforces class/race privileges and over-consumption of fossil fuels.
Climate change and food security/sovereignty are bound together as policy problematics subject to the games of truth and the pirouettes of policy-making. There can be no environmental justice without a frontal attack on the capitalist nature of our economy which is based on the destruction of the natural conditions of existence and the exploitation of multifaceted human beings reduced to substitutable units of "abstract labor" time. Capitalism brought climate change about. Capitalism will fight efforts to address climate change as long as corporations can squeeze profits out of fossil fuels and other non-renewable resources. Then they will turn their attention to alternative energy but only as new commodity frontier.
Environmental justice activists need to make a stronger statement that retains a critical attitude toward the ideologies of capitalism that presume the end of history and thus a demand for blind faith in the unfettered market as ultimate champion of "sustainable development." We must make the case that capitalism is inherently antagonistic toward earth's life support systems and the diverse human communities that inhabit our imperiled planet.
Finally, EJ movement declarations on any given policy problem must go beyond simply working to perfect the "master's tools" (regulation, etc.) and instead should also directly embrace and express alterNative and autonomous possibilities for ecological democracy and environmental self-governance already emerging in our very own communities.
An important aspect of a post-Peak Oil sustainable and just world will be the capacity for low-income working-class people, communities of color, and indigenous nations to revitalize and strengthen resilient and just local food systems that are compatible with and based on traditional agroecological methods, the conservation of the diversity of heirloom crops and heritage cuisines, and the expansion of "the commons" against the privatization of all life and living processes under neoliberal capitalism.
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