North Carolina is, by most accounts, the birthplace of the environmental justice movement, which seeks to correct the systemic racism that puts communities of color at an increased risk from environmental damages.
It’s only fitting, then, that there has been an impressive amount of coverage about how Hurricane Florence (and Super Typhoon Mangkhut) disproportionately impacts poor and minority communities, and how corporations put their own needs before those of the people, even in times of disaster.
As if that wasn’t enough, our president only seems to care about the state of his own golf course, which is no comfort for residents who have a lot more than their next tee time to worry about. But a Republican president caring less about environmental justice than a Democratic one isn’t anything new. According to a Washington Post op-ed by professors Colin Provost and Brian Gerbet, enforcement of a 1994 EJ executive order appears to be broadly dependent on which party is in the white house, with Democrats focusing much more on the issue than Republicans.
But Republican voters are hardly immune to hurricanes, and white people struggle with environmental injustices too because it’s not only about race, but also economic class.
E&E News reported this week on the struggles low-income communities face when adapting to the changing climate. One woman interviewed, Mona Houser, didn’t mince words when describing the hardship of dealing with a flooded trailer home: "Us poor people, we're screwed.” Talking about how the melting ice caps are changing the weather, Houser talked about the impacts of climate change her community has observed: “I'm just a poor country girl, and I know about the environment," she told E&E.
Another NC resident, Laura Davis, told E&E that she thinks "every home in North Carolina should be covered for hurricanes. And we shouldn't have to pay for it, because it's not really our fault."
And there’s the crux. Who should be paying to repair homes and fortify communities from these stronger, wetter storms? It’s certainly not those who have profited least from the use of fossil fuels.
It’s not like the fossil fuel industry didn’t know decades ago that these problems would arise from the continued use of their product. As Ben Franta wrote in the Guardian this week, documents show that Shell and Exxon both knew in the 1980s that their products would lead to, in the words of one Shell analyst, “runoff, destructive floods, and inundation of low-lying farmland,” as well as other changes that “may be the greatest in recorded history.”
But instead of embarking on a project to tell the public the truth about the need to switch from fossil fuels to non-carbon energy sources to avoid floods and inundation like we’re now seeing, they did the opposite. Recent research tallied up the industry’s lobbying from 2000 to 2016, and found they spent $2 billion fighting against climate policy.
That’s twice as much as what the new “Oil and Gas Climate Initiative,” a coalition of oil and gas groups, has committed to spend, decades after recognizing the problem, on investment in carbon capture, methane reductions and other efforts. (Expect to see ExxonMobil use its participation in this group as evidence in court to argue its innocence in misleading investors and the public.)
That $2 billion on lobbying, and the new $1 billion on reconciling carbon fuels with a carbon-free future may not be enough to rebuild everything after Florence’s estimated $17 to $22 billion clean-up cost, but it would sure go a long way for folks like Mona Houser and Laura Davis. While the industry’s legal liability for damages and potential human rights abuses is hardly an easy case to solve in court, we all know the truth.
As Ms. Davis said, “we shouldn't have to pay for it, because it's not really our fault."
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