When you think of climate change, racial equality isn’t a topic that would first come to mind. However, environmental racism is a very real and serious component when attempting to reduce the effects of climate change. Research has shown that environmental racism is evident in communities in even the most climate friendly places.

In 2013, a cap-and-trade program – similar to one Europe had in place since 2005 - was launched and soon became the cornerstone of California’s climate strategy. After Europe, it is the largest trading system in the world, giving companies flexibility on how they cut their greenhouse gas emissions. If they need to emit more CO2 or methane in a given period, they can just go buy pollution credits at an auction.

Activists and experts had warned that the program would turn many Black and Latino neighborhoods into dumping grounds, they were correct. PLOS, a journal that focuses on producing open access studies, published scientific studies about carbon trading that was done by prominent leaders in California. These studies have shown that pollution has gone up in mainly poor and non-white neighborhoods and started localizing in those areas during the first three years of the cap-and-trade program. While the cap-and-trade program does seem to reduce greenhouse emissions overall, air quality has significantly declined within neighborhoods near polluting factories and power plants.

Facilities that are regulated under the program, are disproportionately located in disadvantaged neighborhoods. According to Communities for a Better Environment, an environmental justice organization, “African Americans are most likely to live in cities with high rates of industrial pollution, and within any metro area both Latino and African American communities live with poor environmental quality. That puts them at higher risk for asthma, cardiovascular and respiratory disease, cancer, and birth defects. And those same communities tend to be stressed by poverty, unemployment, and inadequate access to health care or healthful food choices.” For a program that is supposed to be fighting climate change, it is hurting minority communities the most. Regulators must require that emissions in disadvantaged communities decline at the same rate as the overall cap.

California has implemented a variety of actions that work together to reduce the impact of climate change as complimentary policies. These actions include a low carbon fuel standard, renewables portfolio standard, an advanced cleans cars program, and a variety of land use and energy efficiency standards and incentives. Although these programs have been implemented, California relies heavily on the cap-and-trade program to reach yearly emission goals.

California Governor Gavin Newsom has made progress in the climate fight by issuing an executive order requiring sales of all new passenger vehicles to be zero emission by 2035. This step could be the most useful in reducing carbon emissions because the transportation sector is responsible for more than half of all California’s carbon pollution. Although the progress towards clean car technologies seems to be progressive, it is viewed as useless by climate activists because he continues to expand oil and gas drilling across the state of California.
The director of Greenpeace USA, Annie Leonard has put pressure on Newsom by urging California residents to demand more from his administration. She wrote, “Newsom failed to direct his administration to take swift action on public health protections for communities living near drilling — something he could have achieved by mandating a 2,500-foot buffer zone between cancer-causing oil and gas extraction sites and homes, schools, and hospitals. For Black, brown, Indigenous, and working-class communities living in the shadows of oil fields from Los Angeles to Kern County, these changes cannot come fast enough. The compounding COVID-19 crisis makes this threat all the more real and dangerous.” She continues to be an effective leader in the fight for climate justice by consistently demanding more from Governor Gavin Newsom.

California has made significant progress on the world stage in order to combat climate change, but the state should still be searching for greener alternatives instead of continuing to rely on the cap-and-trade system. Citizens must start holding the state accountable because it will continue to take advantage of lower income communities and countries while allowing for the worst polluters to continue to pollute.

The next two years of the Biden Administration will prove just how committed the United States will be to combat climate change. The White House released a press statement on April 22, 2021, with specific targets towards clean energy. Some of the strategies and promises he made to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 include:

·      100 percent carbon pollution-free electricity by 2035.
·      Cut emissions and energy costs for families by supporting efficiency upgrades and electrification in buildings.
·      Reduce carbon pollution from the transportation sector.
·      Reduce emissions from forests and agriculture and enhance carbon sinks.
·      Address carbon pollution from industrial processes.
·      Reduce non-CO2 greenhouse gases including methane, hydrofluorocarbons, and other potent short-lived climate pollutants.
·      Invest in innovation to improve and broaden the set of solutions as a critical complement to deploying the affordable, reliable, and resilient clean technologies and infrastructure available today. (White House, 2021)

Only time will tell if the United States can actually reach net-zero emissions by 2050. It will ultimately depend on the Biden-Harris Administration’s commitment and whether the next administration will stay committed to those targets as well which is unlikely to happen if a republican leader is elected president in 2024. Recently, the Supreme Court ruled that the EPA does not have the authority to regulate carbon emissions, unless Congress has previously authorized it. This ruling directly undermines the Biden Administration’s 2050 goal.

Communities in California aren’t the only ones seeing the damaging effect of cap-and-trade programs, developing countries are being affected as well. The Kyoto Protocol was first created for countries to limit and reduce greenhouse emissions to combat climate change which resulted in the signing of the Clean Development Mechanism. A 2011 study by Sovacool found that “CDM favored projects being done by nations that have already begun industrialization and second, the intellectual property rights for many high tech low-carbon approaches and technologies lie with Western technology firms, and investors have quickly exploited the “best” locations and most profitable projects.” CDM forces developing countries to be dependent on developed countries to access the technology that they need to reduce CO2, this program has led to gaps seen amongst the rich and poor and has shown that global and regional carbon markets have failed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

In the global south, South Africa is the 12th largest emitter of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the world and is responsible for nearly half carbon dioxide emissions in the entire African Continent. South Africa signed the Kyoto Protocol under the United Nations Framework Convention but does not have specific targets ascribed under it. The country has pledged to reduce emissions 42% by 2025 but it is subject to the provision of adequate financial, technological, and capacity-building support from developed countries.

South Africa’s Bill of Rights states that every citizen has the right to a safe and clean environment, but unfortunately this has not happened in post-apartheid South Africa. In the pre-election Reconstruction and Development document, environment was included as one of the ten basic needs. When the paper was published in September 1994 after the ANC came into power, that part of the document was omitted. Steyn stated, “The re-writing of the country's environmental laws did signal a great departure from the apartheid-era, but the (inherited) unwillingness to implement and properly enforce these laws, especially those related to industry remains endemic to governmental environmental management in the country. Only in the new South Africa this lack of enforcement is done in the name of poverty reduction while in the apartheid era it was driven by the need to survive economically in a hostile global environment.” Even though the ANC promised to include climate justice in the post-apartheid era, as soon as they came into power, they pushed it to the side and failed South Africans who have been affected by the degradation of their lands.

In Durban, climate injustice is evident in the community. The South Durban Community Environmental Alliance (SDCEA) is an environmental justice organization founded in 1995 that fights against toxic industries in Durban. The organization believes, “Everyone has the right to an environment that is not harmful to their health or wellbeing and is actively working to protect the environment for the benefit of present and future generations. SDCEA advocates for legislation and measures that prevent pollution and ecological degradation, promote conservation, and secure ecologically sustainable development and use of natural resources, all while promoting justifiable economic and social development.”

SDCEA was started in Durban because two of the country’s biggest oil refineries are located in South Durban. The refineries are the major source of air pollution and has resulted in high levels of asthma, cancer and’ leukemia in the population. SDCEA Air Quality Officer Bongani Mthembu wrote in 2019, “Industries do not fully comply with the laws and bylaws that govern them because both the laws and law enforcers are too lenient. The laws should be revisited and adjusted to display stricter controls on polluting levels, as well as appropriate fines for companies that pollute according to their pollution emission levels. My best suggestion is that the government needs to revisit the legislation and enforce industries in South Africa to comply with the legislation or suffer the consequences of non-compliance. In turn, this will improve people’s health, wellbeing, and the country as a whole.”

On March 18, 2022, a South African court issued a landmark judgment that the Mpumalanga province’s unsafe level of air pollution is in breach of residents’ constitutional right to an environment that is not harmful to their health and well-being, along with other constitutional rights. The court stated, “due to its concentration of industrial pollution sources, residents experience particularly poor and dangerous air quality.” It held that “poor air quality falls disproportionately on the shoulders of marginalized and vulnerable communities who bear the burden of disease caused by air pollution, including children, older people, and people with health conditions like asthma” and ordered the Minister of Environment to enact regulations to improve air quality within 12 months of the judgment. Now that South African judges officially recognized the failure of addressing air pollution, this will hopefully lead to progress to hold the corporations responsible and enact regulations to improve air quality.

It is imperative to the world that environmental injustice is included in the fight to combat climate issues. The past has proven that trying to prevent climate change by using carbon market systems doesn’t work as well as it was believed and promised to. Economically, it has proved to help countries lower greenhouse emissions, but it doesn’t take into account how detrimental it is to local populations and developing countries. These government run programs pretend to work towards climate justice but instead is still pacifying companies that destroy the environment the most. We must continue to stand up to government and companies and fight for clean energy for ourselves and for future generations.