Campus Progress:
Yesterday, the White House held its first-ever forum on environmental justice. The all-day event was meant to signal a shift toward putting people of color and low-income communities at the heart of the Environmental Protection Agency’s work, a goal that’s laid out in their EJ 2014 plan.
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According to the Office of Minority Health, African Americans are three times more likely to die from asthma than white people.
"Mortality rates for cancer are higher for African Americans than any other community, and heart disease is the most fatal illness in the black community," Jackson said. "Latinos make up nearly 9 in 10 farm workers nationwide, and among minority communities Latino children suffer from the highest rate of leukemia, a disease clearly linked to pesticide chemicals."
To most decent people, the issue of industries pumping out disproportionately high levels of air pollution into lower-income minority communities is an important one. To right-wingers, it's communism.
Let's begin with an article that was published last month in the always wingnutty Investors Business Daily:
One might think that the federal government has harmed the poor enough with policies that undermine opportunity and prosperity in the name of some variant of social justice.
But, poverty serves as an irresistible excuse for expanding government. And what better way to expand government than with policies that keep that excuse alive by further hampering the ability of the poor to improve their conditions, and doing it in the name of an elusive goal such as environmental justice?
Not being content with efforts to fine-tune global temperatures, the Environmental Protection Agency is also concerned with achieving a pattern of environmental quality consistent with social justice. This concern was first raised in 1994 when President Clinton signed an executive order to eliminate "environmental racism" and promote "environmental justice."
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It is true that poor people, whether minorities or otherwise, typically live in more polluted areas than do rich people. But this is the result of poor people having the freedom to make their own decisions about what is best for them and their families, not the result of a social injustice that can be eliminated by government policy.
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Property values in those areas with more pollution would be lower than in comparable areas with less pollution. This pattern of property values would reflect people's preference for nicer places to live, not racism or social injustice.
Those with lower incomes would naturally be more likely to choose living in the more affordable areas with less environmental quality than would those with higher incomes. Any government attempt to prevent the poor from making such a choice would make them worse off by restricting their options.
Couldn't the EPA prevent the poor from having to face this choice by promoting environmental justice with policies that reduce pollution in those areas inhabited primarily by minorities and the poor? No.
Wow...
I mean wow. These people are moral monsters. This is like the Larry Summers memo, except this time its being published openly in a prominent conservative periodical instead of a secretive World Bank backroom. I mean shit, what about the property rights of the poor? Isn't air pollution and water contamination a violation of the integrity of their private property?
More wingnuttery follows.
For example, here's a post from the official blog of the National Association of Manufacturers:
The trouble with "environmental justice" is that it means whatever the activists and grievance groups want it to mean. For some, it’s compensation because their ethnic groups or communities were exposed to pollution, for others it’s elevating their particular environmental cause over others, as the claim, "Environmental justice is climate justice." It might be federal direction of local urban planning, more funding for mass transit and bicycles or promoting "green jobs."
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And if the low-income and minority communities shoulder an unacceptable burden of pollution, of course it’s business that causes that pollution. "Environmental justice" then becomes a bludgeon with which to beat up the private sector.
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The Obama Administration talks about policies to promote growth and job creation at every turn, this week embracing private-sector companies as partners. Yet at the same time the White House sponsored a conference that evinced deep skepticism if not hostility toward business while endorsing the federal government as the ultimate actor on every possible economic issue. At best, that’s a muddled message, and it sure doesn’t look like a "path toward economic success."
This post is currently getting a lot of currency in the right-wing echo chamber. So far American Spectator and Michelle Malkin have linked to it with very little commentary of their own. One thing that is obvious to me is that these people have no idea what the ever-loving fuck they are talking about. All they know is that "environmental justice" sounds kind of like "social justice" so they just assume it's "OMG COMMUNONAZIFASCISM" or whatever.
The federal government should play a role in undoing the horrible damage wrought upon low-income communities by polluters. The IBD editorial is a good summary of the wingnut philosophy.