Just six days after being sworn into office in January 2021, President Joe Biden signed Executive Order 14008. The ambitious presidential action includes the establishment of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council as well as the Justice40 Initiative, which mandates that 40 percent of the benefits of federal investments go toward “disadvantaged communities”—thereby putting environmental justice at the forefront of the President’s climate agenda.
That April, one of the most progressive members of Congress, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, declared, “The Biden Administration and President Biden have definitely exceeded expectations that progressives had.”
We need to replicate and scale up state and local grassroots-led initiatives that have the capacity to eventually direct federal policy.
Unfortunately for Biden and the Democrats, governing entails more than executive orders and good intentions. It also requires enacting actual policy funded by Congress. The President, it seemed, grasped this idea and was up to the challenge. Passage of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act in March 2021 provided momentum toward the next ambitious goal—a sweeping, trillion-dollar infrastructure package intended to spur job creation and address climate change.
In October 2021, the White House released the Build Back Better framework, a massive $3.5 trillion budget proposal, including $555 billion earmarked for climate-related investments. Senator Bernie Sanders, Independent of Vermont, touted it as the framework for “the most consequential piece of legislation passed since the Great Depression.”
Josefina Fernandez Moran
Anthony Karefa Rogers-Wright
With the endorsement of the Senate’s sole democratic socialist, who himself once proposed a $16 trillion comprehensive climate package, as well as that of members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, the winds appeared to be at the backs of the Democrats and their agenda. But the smooth air in the sails quickly turned into a tempest that threatened to alter the course of Build Back Better. And it wasn’t the GOP that was responsible for the impending legislative interdiction.
When Charlamagne Tha God famously asked Kamala Harris “who the real President of this country is—is it Joe Biden or Joe Manchin?” the Vice President and others took great umbrage. But the question was not without warrant, as Manchin, the Democratic Senator from West Virginia, proved to be the biggest impediment to Biden’s signature legislation.
After singlehandedly slashing the amount of Build Back Better funding to $1.75 trillion, Manchin delivered a knockout punch to the legislation on a Sunday morning interview on Fox News when he announced that he would not support it.
Manchin, it turns out, has received more than $600,000 from the oil and gas industry during the current two-year election cycle, far more than any other Senator. He has also personally pocketed more than $4.5 million from two coal companies he co-founded, including $500,000 last year from one of them, which his son now runs.
Ironically, while Manchin’s coffers are being flooded with cash from coal, his hometown of Farmington, West Virginia, is being, well, flooded. As The New York Times reported, rainstorms are causing the river that runs through the community to swell, “inundating homes along its banks. They burst the streams that spill down the hills on either side of this former coal-mining town, pushing water into basements. They saturate the ground, seeping into Farmington’s aging pipes and overwhelming its sewage treatment system.”
The bad moon of Manchin began rising in 2018, the day Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York, agreed to his appointment as chair of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. And with midterm elections on the horizon, the sun has all but set on Build Back Better and federal climate policy initiatives for the foreseeable future.
But that doesn’t mean that hope is gone or the ability to make meaningful resistance to climate change is lost.
Black feminist writer adrienne maree brown once remarked, “It was and is devastatingly clear to me that until we have some sense of how to live our solutions locally, we won’t be successful at implementing a just governance system regionally, nationally, or globally.” These words are most germane at a time when many people are asking what’s next for climate justice, especially since the last three years have proven that the most effective pieces of climate policy have been enacted at the state and local levels of government.
For instance, in 2019, Maine passed a series of bills to achieve 80 percent renewable energy by 2030 and reduce emissions by the same percentage by 2050. That same year, New Mexico ratified the Energy Transition Act, mandating that 80 percent of the state’s power be generated by renewable energy sources by 2040 and calling for zero-carbon electricity by 2045. This law also creates a $40 million Just Transition fund for workers displaced due to the planned closure of a coal-fired power plant.
And New York’s landmark Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, also passed in 2019, has been heralded as the most aggressive climate legislation in the nation. Last October, it was cited as the primary reason the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation denied permits for two fossil fuel power plants. It also served to inspire Biden’s Justice40 Initiative.
But while the Biden Administration continues to quibble over the semantics of “benefits” vs. “investments” and recently announced a “race-neutral” approach to addressing environmental racism, state officials in New York have committed to making direct investments to meet the 40 percent target of Just Transition funding to disadvantaged communities and pledged that race data will be given heavier consideration than some other population characteristics.
This juxtaposition further vindicates brown’s synopsis. We need to replicate and scale up state and local grassroots-led initiatives that have the capacity to eventually direct federal policy.
While the federal government spins its wheels, grassroots environmental justice organizations and coalitions, including NY Renews and the United Frontline Table, have been exercising brown’s paradigm through translocal, bottom-up organizing approaches to climate policy, creating models that can be replicated and shared across geographies.
It’s already paying off.
In 2020, New Jersey became the first state in the nation to require mandatory permit denials for any proposed action that would negatively impact “overburdened communities.” This measure was informed by New York’s law, which stipulates that “in considering and issuing permits, licenses, and other administrative approvals and decisions . . . all state agencies . . . shall not disproportionately burden disadvantaged communities.”
It also calls for upholding the tenets of translocal organizing, which has been defined as “autonomous and place-based organizing that is tied together across communities with a unifying vision, shared values, aligned strategies, and common frames.”
The saying “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes,” attributed, most likely erroneously, to Mark Twain, offers a profound lesson for the climate community. We must get past the myopic idea that effective climate policy will be realized via federal, top-down approaches that are, primarily, if not solely, accessible to “experts,” political consultants, and the philanthro-capitalist donor class.
In fact, throughout U.S. history, everything that’s resulted in transformative outcomes with respect to laws and governance—from the prohibition of chattel slavery to women’s suffrage, to marriage equality, and cannabis decriminalization—has emerged at the state or local level before becoming the law of the land.
The climate community, specifically “Big Green” and their funder acolytes, would do well to learn from history rather than rhyme the bad aspects of it that have resulted in failed federal strategies, like the ignominious American Clean Energy and Security Act (a.k.a. the Waxman-Markey Bill), which resulted in outcomes inimical to the climate justice community and environmental polity writ large.
Even proponents of a federal Green New Deal, which remains elusive, must begin writing a new chapter that’s informed by the rhymes of history. Embarking on a local, bottom-up journey to the apotheosis of climate policy may very well be our only choice, until the federal government untangles itself from its current interregnum.
And who knows how long that will take?