Time to Finish the Injustice of ‘Environmental Justice’
https://dcjournal.com/time-to-end-the-injustice-of-environmental-justice/
by Donna Jackson
Excerpt: President Trump’s recently proposed budget continues to slash spending for the federal government’s environmental justice programs. Eliminating such wasteful spending would be good news for taxpayers — and even better news for the low-income and minority communities that are the alleged beneficiaries of the environmental justice agenda.
There is out of touch, there is laughably out of touch, and then there is environmental justice. Communities struggling with crime, drugs, failing schools, few job opportunities and broken families are getting government-funded solar panels, bike paths and electric vehicle charging stations — not to mention an invading army of bureaucrats and others foisting their green wish list on people who never asked for any of it.
The fact that environmental fads are less popular in poor and minority communities is not an injustice that needs to be rectified with multibillion-dollar federal programs. If anything, it is a perfectly rational response from those who face real problems in their daily lives and can’t be bothered with fashionable causes.
Even worse than what the environmental justice crusaders want to bring into the community is what they want to keep out — jobs, and especially good-paying, blue-collar jobs. The 20th-century migration of poor southern Blacks to the industrial North is a success story worth retelling. There, millions escaped poverty by taking factory jobs that served as a gateway to the middle class and a better life for themselves and their children. That same opportunity awaits millions more today and is a major reason the administration has emphasized policies to expand domestic manufacturing. It can’t happen if the environmental justice crowd gets its way and blocks these industrial projects in the communities that need them most.
Environmental justice bureaucrats and lawyers treat manufacturing facilities as public enemy No. 1. Any company considering locating anywhere near any community of color would likely face a federally financed legal onslaught predicated on hype about pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.
This is where the environmental justice agenda has it backward. Fearmongering about industrial pollution disproportionately harming these communities is built on weak evidence, to put it mildly. In truth, any manufacturing facility must comply with the most stringent air and water pollution requirements anywhere in the world, and such emissions have declined dramatically over the last several decades. The real problem is poverty, not pollution, and the solution is good-paying jobs — the jobs often blocked by the environmental justice bureaucracy.