On October 23, Senator Cory Booker, one of the members of Congress most capable of harnessing bipartisan cooperation, introduced the Environmental Justice Act of 2017, which was devoid of one Republican sponsor. If passed, the bill would force the federal government to strengthen legal protections for communities of color and low-income people. However, as Charles Pierce wrote in Esquire.com, while this bill is necessary, it “doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in the Salton Sea of ever making it to the floor, let alone getting a vote.” SkoposLabs gives the bill a 4 percent chance of enactment. Representative John Lewis has been trying to pass an environmental justice law since 1992, but to no avail. To understand why Booker won’t give up on legislation that has such a lengthy record of failure, it’s important to understand something about the history of environmental justice federal policy.
It was this week 25 years ago when the head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Bill Reilly, a Republican, heeded the advice of a task force he assembled on environmental pollution in communities of color and announced that he was opening the Office of Environmental Equity. This was under a Republican president, George H. W. Bush, back when Republicans were into this kind of thing. Bush didn’t give the office any money to work with, though. It was a gesture to show that that the federal government took seriously the environmental grievances of activists from these communities.
This racial equity experiment later became the Office of Environmental Justice, and President Bill Clinton expanded its resources and its mission: In 1994, Clinton signed Executive Order 12898, which stated that every federal department and agency, not just the EPA, must consider the potential harmful impacts of proposed projects on disadvantaged communities in their decision-making processes. This helped open up pathways for environmental justice advocates to sue to stop permits and sitings of polluting entities such as waste incinerators, toxic landfills, and smelting plants.
[For more on this story by BRENTIN MOCK, go to https://www.citylab.com/equity...ntal-justice/545534/]
Photo: Senator Cory Booker introduced the Environmental Justice Act of 2017 to strengthen protections for communities of color. Julio Cortez/AP
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