Arguments Against Climate Change Justice

Climate Change Justice
Should climate change justice be prioritized at a national and global level?
Introduction
What is Climate Change Justice?
When addressing climate change justice, the concept is directly linked to an individual's collective worldviews. Ethics and justice often time overlap into what the world decides is either wrong or right and how certain resources are divided up, which includes human rights and governance. Depending on the person, there may be a variety of outcomes that would be considered just or unjust. These differences of opinion lead to different methods of responding to problems and opportunities. In terms of climate change, justice can be divided into two categories, distributive and procedural. Distribution
deals more with how environmental advantages and disadvantages are distributed among people. For example, how the developed world is more responsible and benefit from the release of emissions into the environment, but countries in the Global South often times endure much of the disadvantages from those emissions. On the other hand, procedural is more in tune with who decides and makes administrative decisions concerning the environment. The two intertwine and address the importance of justice related to climate change as being "an ethical issue because it involves the distribution of a scarce resource and the capacity of the atmosphere to absorb our waste gasses without producing consequences that no one wants"(Singer 2006: 415)
Even defining climate change justice is something of a difference of opinion, but all have somewhat of the same narrative.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency defines it as "the fair treatment of people of all races, cultures, incomes, and educational levels with respect to the development and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies." (US EPA, undated) Climate change justice is an intersection between the environment and social justice issues. In Defining Climate Justice, Rebecca Hall defines it as "strategies implemented to combat the effects of climate change in a given environment."(Hall, 2013) Hall offers a theory of poor and marginalized groups being disproportionately affected by the burdens of environmental crises and how this is directly affected by participatory democracy. This is why climate change justice is heavily associated with social equity and
environmental racism. Race has been used as a factor in the prediction of the distribution of a heap of environmental effects including air pollution, contaminated fish consumption, the location of municipal landfills and incinerators, location of abandoned toxic waste dumps and lead poisoning in children. According to the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, for families earning less than $6,000 annually, 68% of the African American children had lead poisoning, while 36% of white children were exposed as well. In addition, in families with incomes over $15,000, 38% of African American children had lead poisoning and 12% of white children were exposed to lead poisoning. In many poor communities with limited job opportunities, people experience environmental job blackmail, where an individual may get a job at the expense of their own and their community's health. Climate change justice and environmental justice are indicative of much greater social issues and injustices like racism, which will be later addressed in this paper, but more importantly are due to a lack of representation in policy making bodies that have an affect on how the environment effects human-beings. In other words, the richer someone is the better off they are environmentally and "All socioeconomic groupings tend to resent the nearby siting of major facilities, but middle and upper socioeconomic strata possess better resources to effectuate their opposition." (Waste Management Board, 1984)
Climate Change Justice: National Level
Hurricane Katrina: New Orleans, Louisiana (2005) The 2005 category 3 hurricane, known as Hurricane Katrina actually missed the city of New Orleans, but due to the failure of critical levees, the city was left flooded and thousands of lives lost indirectly due to the storm. The injustice of this catastrophic failure by one of the biggest super powers in the world stands as a pivotal key climate justice movement date. The injustice lies in the fact that:
"By refusing to invest adequately in the public infrastructure needed to protect the most economically vulnerable and racially marginalized communities, the federal state and local governments left New Orleans open to massive devastation and long-term economic losses that affected every single neighborhood" (Perry et al., 2015)
The many injustices that were already present in New Orleans, including segregation, poverty, and substandard housing, were only heightened by the storm and magnified for the rest of the world to see. New Orleans's population prior to the hurricane was 67 percent black and 30 percent of the people lived in poverty. The effects of the hurricane left the poorest inhabitants at even more of a greater risk and vulnerable to climatic damages due to the nature of the storm. The lower ninth ward, a location where most of the inhabitants are black and lower income, was devastated by the outcomes of the Louisianan levees breaking allowing for the area to flood. (History.com, 2015)
Decisions that were put in place beforehand had an immense impact on Katrina victims.
A study done by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies stated: "A mind-numbing parade of zoning and land-use choices, highway and seaway budgets, and social and political desensitization helped to bring this nation to the flooded rooftops of the Lower Ninth Ward." (Valentine, 2015) Not to mention, pre and post-Katrina were also fueled by a lack of procedural justice, seeing as the community was neither involved in either stage. A scurry of rumors among Katrina victims, that the levees were intentionally broken in order to sacrifice those areas most affected by the storm for more economically advantageous locations in the city and poor media portrayals of African American only added to an overall feeling of unrest, anger, and disappointment in the U.S. response to the "natural
disaster". Countless amounts of stories of loved ones unaccounted for, scenes of lifeless bloated bodies floating in the water, and a city displaced rang from every news station. A key component of climate justice is the infringement on basic human rights. Immediately after the storm "tens of thousands of African-American men, women, and children were labeled ‘refugees' as if the disaster had occurred not on American soil but in a distant country."(Perry et al., 2015) This aspect alone was mind boggling, that a nation with so many resources to avoid situations like this had such a crisis. Even more astounding was the fact that a storm of this magnitude had affected this area once before, and the core reason to the levees being emplaced. Due to policy regulations and cutbacks, this protection was never fully completed and left for decades, for the right or wrong opportunity to take affect.