Webinar Recap: Achieving Social Justice through Better Regulations
Last week, my CPR colleagues and I were honored to be joined by dozens of fellow advocates and member of the press for a webinar that explored the recent CPR report, Regulation as Social Justice: A Crowdsourced Blueprint for Building a Progressive Regulatory System. Drawing on the ideas of more than 60 progressive advocates, this report provides a comprehensive, action-oriented agenda for building a progressive regulatory system. The webinar provided us with an opportunity to continue exploring these ideas, including the unique potential of the regulatory system as an institutional means for promoting a more just and equitable society.
Few organizations better illustrate this potential better than the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, so we were delighted to be joined at the top of the webinar by the organization's Founding Director, Anne Rolfes. Anne vividly described the work that the Louisiana Bucket Brigade is doing, empowering members of the vulnerable communities in Louisiana's infamous "Cancer Alley" to fight against the chemical plants and oil refineries that have long polluted their air, water, and land.
What stood out to me from Anne's presentation was the vital importance of effective regulatory enforcement to achieving social justice. Many of the organization's biggest successes have come …
Originally published on Environmental Law Prof Blog.
Last Thursday, the Government Accountability Office released a new study on federal agencies and environmental justice. The narrow purpose of the report is to assess the extent to which federal agencies are implementing Executive Order 12898, which was issued by President Clinton in 1994 and theoretically remains in force, along with subsequent agency commitments, some made in response to prior GAO studies.
For environmental justice advocates, much of the report will paint a depressing, if unsurprising, picture. In 2011, federal agencies participating in an environmental justice working group agreed to develop and periodically update environmental justice strategic plans, but some agencies have never developed plans, and others have stopped updating their plans. Ideally, those plans would include ambitious goals for progress and measurable indicators for evaluating progress toward (or past) those goals, but many agency plans include no such things …
Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland was different from most other lawmakers we see today. He embodied a moral authority that others try to project but that for him was unquestionably authentic. When he spoke of working on behalf of "the people," there was never a shred of a doubt that he meant just that.
Rep. Cummings is a vivid reminder that our democratic institutions work best when they are open to genuinely diverse perspectives. His personal experiences with adversity and injustice helped forge the views he brought to his work as representative of Maryland’s 7th District, which includes some of the most economically distressed areas in the country. These lived experiences no doubt led him to view his constitutional duty to "promote the general Welfare" differently from many of his colleagues and to take that duty much more seriously.
Rep. Cummings brought this unique perspective …
Last week's televised climate town hall saw several Democratic presidential candidates outline an impressive array of policies that, if implemented effectively, offer some measure of hope for averting the worst consequences of the climate crisis for us and future generations. The operative concept there – lurking in the background and too often taken for granted – is effective implementation. The fact of the matter is that meeting our country's greatest challenges – climate change, economic inequality, systemic racism, access to quality health care – will require effective implementation, and that in turn will require a more robust, modernized, and inclusive regulatory system than we currently have.
Conservatives have long vilified the U.S. system of regulatory safeguards, while establishment Democrats – when not trying to ignore it altogether – have at best accepted regulation only grudgingly and apologetically. As demonstrated at a June CPR conference, though, progressives are staking out a new, more …
Next Wednesday, June 5, CPR is hosting a first-of-its-kind conference on Regulation as Social Justice: Empowering People Through Public Protections, which will bring together a diverse group of several dozen advocates working to advance social justice to serve as a wellspring for the development of a progressive vision for the future of U.S. regulatory policy. Much of the day’s proceedings will be dedicated to an innovative form of small group discussion sessions that we refer to as “Idea Exchanges,” which will call on participants to share their experiences working with federal government program implementation and offer ideas on how agencies can do a better job of promoting social justice and addressing unmet community needs as part of their work.
To help prompt thinking ahead of the conference, we have produced a briefing memo that introduces the major issues that will be discussed throughout the day …
Originally published in The Regulatory Review as part of a series on social justice and the green economy. Reprinted with permission.
The reactions to our article, Inequality, Social Resilience, and the Green Economy, have a clear message: We, environmentalists, have our work cut out for us.
We wrote our article to start an overdue conversation about environmental policy and social and economic well-being, and we thank our commentators for joining us in starting this conservation. In response, we would note that, although protecting the environment and achieving justice has never been easy, the United States has made progress over time. We are persuaded, despite the caveats our commentators have identified, that the country can do so again.
Michael P. Vandenbergh warns of the political danger of tying the environmental agenda to social well-being in our current political state, and we agree with this warning for all of …
Originally published in The Regulatory Review as part of a series on social justice and the green economy. Reprinted with permission.
A recent study tells us that Hurricane Maria, which struck Puerto Rico in September 2017, may have caused as many as 4,600 deaths, far exceeding the initial official death toll of 64. In contrast, contemporaneous hurricanes in Texas and Florida appear to have caused far fewer deaths: 88 in Texas and 75 in Florida.
The differing outcomes bring home the importance of Sidney A. Shapiro and Robert R. M. Verchick’s recent article, which explores the way that underlying social vulnerability determines the impacts of major environmental transitions.
Just as a hurricane’s consequences differ dramatically depending on many socioeconomic factors—including infrastructure, access to medical care, and financial resources—the consequences of a shift to a green economy will differ based on the impacted …
Originally published in The Regulatory Review as part of a series on social justice and the green economy. Reprinted with permission.
Despite noisy political claims to the contrary, the weight of the evidence suggests that regulation has a small impact on the total number of jobs. Still, regulation is bound to have some effect on who has jobs, what kinds of jobs they have, and where those jobs can be found. How much should we care about that?
In a new article, Sidney A. Shapiro and Robert R. M. Verchick argue that environmentalists should devote far more attention to job loss. Their concern about job loss is well taken. Before responding to the issue, however, we need a better understanding of the extent of job loss due to regulation and a clearer map of the resulting types of harms.
To begin, we need to consider three kinds …
Originally published in The Regulatory Review as part of a series on social justice and the green economy. Reprinted with permission.
A green economy will generate thousands of new jobs — many more than will be lost to regulations on carbon pollution. But a green economy may also increase wealth inequality in some parts of the United States because people who lose jobs to carbon controls are not the same as those who will get them when the green economy blooms. For example, the kiln operator laid off from a cement plant in Virginia will probably not end up installing rooftop solar panels New Mexico. And based on the demographics of today's fossil fuel industry, job losses due to environmental regulations will likely affect whites, Hispanics, and African-Americans in significant numbers.
Nevertheless, when regulatory advocates have responded in the past to critics who thunder against "job-killing" regulation, they …
This is the first in a series of posts from CPR's new From Surviving to Thriving: Equity in Disaster Planning and Recovery report and provides a preview of the preface and executive summary. From September 6-26, CPR will post a new chapter from the report each weekday on CPRBlog. The full report, including a downloadable PDF, will also be available on CPR's website.
Preface: An Ounce of Prevention
The story is now familiar. An area of the United States is battered by a superstorm, hurricane, or other climate disaster, resulting in a calamity for the people who live and work there. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) offers emergency assistance, but since it is not enough to address the harms that occurred, Congress acts to provide hundreds of millions of dollars of additional assistance.
But imagine a counter-narrative, with a significantly better outcome. In that story, we …
