Securing a just transition for all

We can’t afford to leave anyone behind in our new clean energy economy.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is one of the key pillars of U.S. legal protection against discrimination. Because the landmark law explicitly prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, sex, national origin, and religion, it’s used as a legal basis when that right is suspected of being violated.

We’re now almost 60 years out from the passage of the Civil Rights Act, and our common understanding of the factors that lead to unequal opportunity and unequal treatment has evolved considerably. Our language around social determinants of discrimination has expanded to include the interactions between certain variables—say, race and gender—which sometimes compound into more than just the sum of their parts. This leads to disproportionately oppressed sub-groups within populations, as in certain experiences of Black women relative to either white women or Black men in the U.S.

Over the past couple of decades, the concept of environmental justice emerged as a way to describe one such set of demographic interactions. When factors like poverty, race, and education level intersect with proximity to a fossil-burning power plant, for example, we see dramatically lower health outcomes for those communities. Later emerged the related concept of climate justice, which points to disparities in how different populations will be affected by the climate crisis, and how those negative effects will also compound when they intersect with things like marginalized racial groups and poverty.

A bill with broad public support, the Environmental Justice for All Act, has been introduced in Congress as a way to do three important things: 1) amend the Civil Rights Act so environmental justice communities have a basis to seek legal recourse, 2) standardize and publish ongoing data collection on environmental justice disparities, and 3) lift up environmental justice communities with training and financial assistance in order to level the playing field in our post-fossil fuel economy.

If passed by Congress, it would be the first law to explicitly focus on environmental justice communities, going beyond the environmental equity measures included the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). And the IRA’s historic potential to rapidly accelerate the next chapter in our clean energy transition means we need to be more explicit than ever about giving environmental justice communities a seat at the table.

The exciting news is that the bill has already passed out of the House Natural Resources Committee, which means it could be voted on by the full House of Representatives. Now it’s up to us to help continue the momentum in both the House and Senate to get it across the finish line. Let’s be part of history together.