Climate change and the environment are finally salient election issues now. That presents opportunities and challenges for people of color.
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Take climate change: think about Hurricane Katrina. Was overwhelmingly black people who were killed; those who did survive were displaced.
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Black Louisiana residents aren't the ones who emitted most carbon—not historically, and not in their lifetimes. But they felt its effects.
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Over and over again, people who emitted the least carbon, and contributed the least to climate change, are the ones who die from it.
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Whether its floods in India or mosquito-spread viruses thriving from global warming in Brazil, it's poor poc who pay with their lives.
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When we talk about the unequal effects of climate change (the global one for the sake of these tweets), we use the term climate justice.
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Climate justice already assumes that climate change is not being doled out equally or fairly. And it seeks to find solutions for that.
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But we need to remember the whole local environmental part of all of this, too. Because that's just as unequal and unfair.
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Fact: in the US, white people breathe better air. Poor white people still more likely to breathe better air than middle-class black people.
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Poor people and poc tend to live closer to the oil industry and its tentacles: oil pumps, oil refineries, oil storage tanks. You name it.
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The oil industry draws out a slow violence against poor communities and neighborhoods of color. The price is sickness and death.
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Heard of the VW diesel scandal? Scandalous. The company was straight cheating emissions tests in order to get ahead. But it don't end there.
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It was rich white folks driving those VW cars through freeways that cut through black and latinx neighborhoods. Our lungs paid the price.
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Go to San Bernardino. The county consistently ranks the worst air quality in the US in first, second, third, fourth, and fifth place.
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Who lives in San Bernardino? Black and latinx people—many of whom were displaced by white people moving to LA. Environmental gentrification.
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So many places in San Bernardino accommodate customers with... enough room for oxygen tanks. Because everyone has asthma.
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I'd make a bet that you could land me in any city or town in the US and where poor and poc people live is where the pollution is. Always.
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Some cities segregated people into places like Mexicantown, which happened to be where the landfill was. Name changed, but landfill didn't.
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When we talk about unequal effects on the environment (the local one for the sake of these tweets), we use the term environmental justice.
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When we talk about the unequal local environmental effects on people of color, we use the term environmental racism.
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Environmental justice and environmental racism already assumes that local pollution in the air/water/soil, is not being doled out equally.
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As someone who thinks about environmental racism constantly and everything else on this thread generally, I've been watching the election.
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Because there's a lot of talk about climate change, Flint, carbon emissions, and more... But it sometimes lacks proper context.
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I'm about to go out on a limb here; almost scared to do so. There's this thing called "carbon tax," which a lot of environmentalists like.
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The carbon tax basically puts a price on carbon emissions, with the idea that poor people get a kickback on the tax money. I'm not a fan.
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If we know that people of color, regardless of income, breathe worse air, why kickback carbon tax money to poor people? Doesn't make sense.
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Even if we *were* to kick carbon tax money to people directly affected by local industries, what's that gonna do? Buy extra asthma inhalers?
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As a person of color who lives pretty damn close to two freeways and the oil extraction industry, I don't want money. I want clean air.
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Ultimately, I doubt monetary incentives are going to "clean up" the oil industry. It's a dirty, rotten industry that kills people.
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The oil industry is the reason we have a climate crisis to begin with. And it's devastated local environments for poor people and poc.
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I'm not a fan of the carbon tax because, for me, it's not about creating a new market. It's about regulation, and making big oil disappear.
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