Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

I like my movements nice and focused. I don’t think it’s good for gay groups to also be anti-war groups or that environmental groups should be particularly concerned with anything that isn’t the environment, fairly narrowly construed. By making a group’s area of concern too large, they become unfocused on their original goals and are likely to achieve little at all. Also, by taking extraneous stands on issues not related to their core concern, they can alienate potential supporters and unncessarily limit their appeal.

California environmental justice groups, I feel, are doing exactly that when they declare that they are opposed to cap-and-trade because they think it’s wrong for polluting companies to be able to purchase the “right” to pollute — oftentimes in areas that are mostly populated by poor, minority and indigenous populations. It’s not true, however, that all environmental justice concerns are misstated. One only needs to look at Cancer Row on the southern end of the Mississippi to see how concerns about pollution interact with problems of power and political agency. But in the case of being opposed to cap-and-trade, I feel like there isn’t much of an environmental justice case to be made against it. Most of the complaint is that a cap and trade system would basically concentrate pollution in the areas it is currently, which isn’t exactly where all the rich white people live. There are two problems with this.

One is that a cap-and-trade system, if implemented correctly, with the number of permits being adjusted and the permits being auctioned, then the effect of measures these groups support like a carbon tax, alternative energy investment or mandatory carbon reductions could all be achieved by a cap-and-trade system that auctions off the permits. In fact, that’s a unique advantage to cap-and-trade as opposed to mandatory carbon reduction. Also, for the time being, as Kate Sheppard noted, cap-and-trade is the most politically feasible mechanism to implement something approaching a long-term, noticeable emission reduction, or at least leveling off. And, when it comes to environmental justice, if it is to have any meaning, the quickest and most effective reduction of carbon emissions should be the overwhelming concern.

There are two simple reasons why just the speedy and effective reduction of emissions should override concerns about carbon pollution being concentrated in certain areas or businesses having “rights” to emit an amount of carbon they pay for. The first is a rather elementary one. Carbon pollution, as opposed to stuff like Sulfur Dioxide or Ozone, isn’t especially polluting in the local, hard to breathe sense (with the exception of coal plants, which are even getting better). But as far as automobile fuel and most carbon dioxide emissions go, the same environmental justice claims that work for dumping toxic sludge in a river upstream from a poor, urban community just don’t apply in the case of carbon emissions. But that’s not to say that environmental justice isn’t an important consideration for global warming. It’s just that global warming’s impact on environmental justice is similar to its impact on the environment, diffuse, global and concentrated on places far away from the United States. There are compelling arguments from a justice perspective that because global warming is likely to seriously screw over Bangladesh in a way it won’t affect, say, Chicago that would lend itself towards recommending that the countries that emit the most carbon should reduce those emissions…but it wouldn’t really matter how said emissions were brought down.

By pursuing this rather sketchy line of argumentation, these environmental justice folk are really driving an unncessary wedge between poor/marginalized people and environmentalists. What’s weird is that they support things like a carbon tax which would have not-the-best distributional impact on poor people, but that’s true with just about any politically feasible thing you can to decrease carbon emissions. What this appears to be, instead of any honest attempt to deal with the distributional problems of carbon emission reduction, is just groups who have cultural issues with the mainstream environmentalist movement and who want to stake their claim as contrary badasses by opposing some commonly respected policy.