At some point the kids just have to take responsibility for their own lives.
Folly meets Sense in a coffee shop; the allegorical dialogue ensues:
Folly: Wow! Really good news today. The President will sign an executive order to make all government agencies up their environmental game. America is finally turning to environmental justice with a new watchdog in town.
Sense: Up their environ…? Game? Oh! You mean make everything more expensive by adding layers of regulations to stacks of already existing regulations in the name of Mother Earth. Environmental justice…ssssthat one of those equity things? I think I recently heard some TV personality say that climate change was “racist.” That is, of course, possible only if skin color determines where climate change occurs. Is that one of the issues that this new watchdog will watch? Imagine what the cave commentators must have been saying at the beginning and then at the end of the Younger Dryas when temperatures first fell precipitously and then skyrocketed a millennium or so later.
Folly: Look, the new agency will coordinate other agencies’ environmental efforts. It should get them all on the same page. Anyway, Sense, people like you…Let me guess, Sense; you’re one of those redneck, gun-toting, flag-waving religious climate-change deniers in favor of or ignorant of plastics everywhere and pollutants destroying lives, especially the lives of nonwhites.
Sense: Whoa. People like me? Always best to start a debate with an ad hominem or an ad populum. Attack the person or persons, not the message. Go with emotion. I’ll reply with an ad populum: You Greenies, in your efforts to become the ultimate in helicopter mothers, you’ve fallen for a narrative that will continuously weaken the economic strengths of the country. You belong to the Make America Weaker Still, the MAWS. It’s the kind of helicopter parenting a runaway leftist government imposes on its “children.” ‘Fraid the kids will just mess things up without your constant oversight? Afraid of their independence? Envious that some have reaped the benefits of the minerals and chemicals you have so readily incorporated into your life?
Folly: No, but I am afraid of the potential damage to the environment. Ever hear of Love Canal? Ever hear of the burning waters of Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River? Ever hear about Donora in 1948 or the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico? Are you against environmental responsibility, environmental ethics, environmental safety? Look what the world was before the government imposed rules about clean air and clean water. Look at the pollution that entered the environment before the government forced businesses, industries, and farms into environmental compliance. Look at all the unnecessary premature deaths from cancer, maybe also the unnecessary cases of autism, and the unnecessary endangerment and extinction of species. When there are no governmental restrictions on exploitation, humans don’t impose restrictions on themselves. Exploiters have no regard for the future. Much of what we humans have done to degrade the environment is irreversible: Lost soils, diverted rivers, radioactive and chemical wastes that last for centuries, landscapes buried under billions of tons of garbage that will never be reused and that will continuously pollute ground water, clear cut forests, drained wetlands, and plastics everywhere. I could go on…Someone has to stand up against the innate shortsightedness of modern humans who think nothing about preserving a sustainable environment. And that also means that the government agencies must also be environmentally responsible. So, what’s wrong with the President signing an executive order to make government agencies more environmentally friendly in the context of justice? I see that his order will require agencies “to better understand and prevent the cumulative impacts of pollution on people’s health.” That’s a good thing, even for you. But it will definitely help nonwhites who disproportionately suffer from toxins in the environment.
Sense: Aren’t there already researchers in universities, medical schools, and government agencies who do that, who study individual and cumulative impacts? Anyway, the job is now overwhelming.
Folly: What job?
Sense: The job of curtailing chemical pollutants. Pretty much everyone has been exposed. Not that that’s not worth trying to change, but world production of industrial chemicals exceeds 250 billion tons of more than 100,000 chemicals every year. * You and I both have hundreds of chemicals in us that didn’t even exist before the twentieth century. Every government agency—because every government agent—has some of them or uses some of them. So, if the newly formed office is going to ask government agencies to coordinate and unify their environmental justice efforts—I want to get to that in a minute—does that mean each agency will control the inks it uses, the composition of the vehicles, the materials in the offices, the MacDonald’s wrappers that its agents use when they go into the field…?
Folly: But they don’t have… They aren’t chemists. They are IRS agents, FBI agents, EPA agents…The President doesn’t expect them to be chemists or DOE cleanup crews; he is mandating that all agencies act in ways that reduce environmental injustice among nonwhite populations. They suffer the most from…
Sense: Isn’t doing something the job of the legislative and judicial branches of government?
Folly: Not if special interest groups control them. Look at the influence of Big Pharma, big industry, and…well, every exploiter of land, sea, and poor people…
Sense: Any executive order that makes an agency will add simply add a layer of government to layers of government, making the government less efficient and giving unknown government workers hiding in the cubicles of power the ability to make through regulations de facto laws, bypassing Congress. Agencies will be able to impose more fines, more punishment, more restrictions, giving them more powers over the little people, the common citizens who will have to defend every action that has even the slightest hint of an environmental effect. And “environmental effect” and “environmental justice” will accrue changing and new definitions according to the agendas of highly paid government employees. It’s going to be a further infringement on freedom with probably very little actual impact on the environment except to make foreign entities richer and tilt the economy in an artificial direction that makes government pick winners and losers.
Folly: It’s always about money and profit for you, isn’t it? As long as profits keep adding up, you care little about the environment. Americans can’t control what others are doing to sicken the environment, but we can control our backyard environmental health. Sustainability is the goal, not the wealth of a few people at the expense of many people both now and in the future. Environmental justice is an ethical goal that makes all people more important than profit. It will enhance the lives of many nonwhites who suffer from environmental injustice.
Sense: No, I’m not just about profit, and no, I don’t reject responsibility for the environment. I object to the new executive order for a simple reason: Sixteen hundred Pennsylvania Avenue already has the Council on Environmental Quality under its wing. You know what that agency is supposed to do?
Folly: Not sure, but it sounds good.
Sense: Look it up. It’s run by an environmental lawyer who led The Climate 21 Project. That got the ball rolling on “environmental justice.” That got the ball rolling on…
Folly: Oh! Here we go. This is gonna be another one of your diatribes on climate alarmism.
Sense: No, again, although that’s not unrelated. But no, I object to the executive order because the Office of Environmental Justice created by the President will have its own coordinator called the Chief Environmental Justice Officer. That adds a layer of government to the already existing Council on Environmental Quality. Tell me that new agency doesn’t initiate the growth of a multi-layered agency that will need assistant officers, secretaries, desks, chairs, computers, printers, branch offices, cars and pickup trucks, and eventually, like FEMA, a branch of armed officers. Yes, mark these words. There will eventually be a branch of enforcement agents who will be armed; there will be monitoring and special powers. Environmental Quality Police will show up dressed like SWAT teams to arrest some poor farmer who builds a pond for his animals or a guitar manufacturer who stores his wood scraps on the back of his property and next to a slum landlord’s tenement house that is the real environmental problem for the poor.
Folly: You’re exaggerating. Armed…That won’t…
Sense: Really? What about Gibson Guitar? ** In what appears to be a blatant political hit in the name of protecting the environment, the feds sent an armed team to raid the guitar maker and then kept them in business limbo for a long time, but never charged the company with a crime for importing rosewood and ebony—legally. Nevertheless, the company had paid $300,000 to avoid court costs and had to give $50,000 to Fish and Wildlife, supposedly for planting trees—but who knows where that money went? By the way, most rosewood goes to China. What’s the EPA and the Justice Department going to do about that rosewood? Overreaching environmental agencies can ruin companies and lives, especially when they act politically. Gibson’s competitor uses the same wood for which Gibson was raided. Why not the other company? Wasn’t the environmental concern for rosewood and ebony the same? Well, Gibson’s CEO gave money to Republicans; the competitor’s CEO gave money to Democrats. Want to talk environmental injustice? Were you in a coma when Wyoming rancher Andy Johnson built a stock pond where his horses could drink and his three little girls could play? The EPA threatened him with a $75,000 per day fine. He had gotten a permit from the Wyoming State Engineer’s Office, but the EPA, in spite of the pond’s attracting wildlife, said it was a violation of the Clean Water Act. And the EPA required Johnson to prove his innocence.
Folly: But he probably dammed some stream and changed the environment.
Sense: Yeah, on his own property after getting permission from the state. You tell me that you are happy with the threat of a $75,000 per day fine. Seem reasonable to you?
What do you think is going to happen with this new sub-agency that Biden ordered up by executive fiat? There will be thousands of pages of new regulations and thousands of government employees who, like so many current government employees will be able to work from home, be incapable of responding in a timely way to citizen complaints about their imposing restrictions, and be a burden on taxpayers ad infinitum. You’ll see. And if one agency can’t impose a fine, this new agency will “coordinate” with other agencies. There’s a runaway effect already in place. Already there are various government employees and elected officials who want to eliminate gas stoves because they believe they are bad for the environment. What’s next, no cooking? I can envision that under this new sub-agency, restrictions will increase and freedoms will be lost without changing much to any environment. It reminds me of adding new layers of gun laws that mean nothing to criminals and pathological killers. But it also reminds me that the agenda of the current government is more focused on a one-degree rise in temperature as harmful but that is quiet on a flood of fentanyl that kills tens of thousands. Which is more an immediate concern, environmental justice for people labeled as “people of color” or death by fentanyl and other drugs that disproportionately affects nonwhites in rundown cities? Which is the pressing health issue? Why is there not an Office of Fentanyl Poisoning in the FDA, FBI, ICE, or ATF? Because there are already federal agents tasked with controlling the illegal drug trade. Redundancy will do nothing there. Redundancy will do nothing about environmental injustice except throw more money at it to assuage the conscience of the President and his influencers.
Folly: You’re simplifying. Protecting the environment is a complex task. It requires many watchdogs. And no, there won’t be thousands of new employees with some carrying guns as part of the new agency. This new office will be a coordinating office.
Sense: Yep. I’m simplifying, but I’m doing it from experience. So, you think a few new agents and a chief of the agency are going to coordinate the actions of 438 federal agencies already in existence. Coordinating environmental justice in those agencies is the goal, right? Name a government agency that has become purposefully smaller and has reduced its paper output. And as for all the governmental duplication of agencies, I guess that’s why the Environmental Protection Agency launched its own Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights last year. No reason not to take advantage of the Democrat-passed Inflation Reduction Act that added $60 billion tax dollars to the trillions Americans already owe. And all of these new and redefined agencies will spend those billions and more billions without a measurable effect, save costing Americans more money and reducing American national independence while increasing foreign national profit and foreign threats. So, what’s next after decreasing coal production, oil output, and drilling for natural gas in the name of environmental protection and justice, while the Chinese, Indians, and other nations that have their own self-interests at the center of policies? Russia and China will make themselves richer with far less regard for preserving the environment than this country, which has numerous laws and regulations to protect both environment and people. Will this new environmental justice chief issue regulations to quash the sale of all internal combustion engines to the feds? Will some branch office of the agency be required to use electric vehicles with 300-mile ranges to drive around tiny Texas or little Alaska to check on environmental justice? Or will there be more offices so the ranges of travel can be shorter?
Folly: No, no, no. Americans can lead the world in environmental protection and serve as a model of environmental justice.
Sense: What does that really mean? Does “justice” apply to animal rights? Will environmental justice mean the elimination of all hunting and fishing? Will it give beavers the right to block streams without permission from the Wyoming State Engineer? Will beavers be held accountable for blocking streams under the Clean Water Act the way Andy Johnson was?
Folly: Look, this new agency is merely going to coordinate the actions of the other agencies to make sure they are environmentally responsible and that they serve the needs of the environmentally abused minorities in this country.
Sense: So, all those internal memoranda already issued by every agency in the name of “the environment” and “environmental justice” will be coordinated into a single massive document that says …
Folly: That says that every agency needs to incorporate environmental justice into its proceedings.
Sense: Full circle: What, I’ll ask again, does the term “environmental justice” mean? Wait! Let me look it up on my phone. Here, here is the EPA’s explanation:
“The environmental justice movement was started by individuals, primarily people of color, who sought to address the inequity of environmental protection in their communities.” The website also has this statement from some Professor Robert Bullard: “whether by conscious design or institutional neglect, communities of color in urban ghettos, in rural 'poverty pockets', or on economically impoverished Native-American reservations face some of the worst environmental devastation in the nation."
Folly: See, there is a definition.
Sense: That’s a history, not a definition. That’s a description, not a definition. And both of those statements are more about economic and cultural phenomena than about the environment. So, the President signed into existence an environmental justice agency. But look here, the EPA has announced it already has $100 million to give away for “environmental justice grants.” Look at this and tell me that the new office won’t be a redundancy:
“The new Environmental Justice Thriving Communities Grantmaking (EJ TCGM) Program is a competition to select multiple Grantmakers around the nation to reduce barriers to the application process communities face and increase the efficiency of the awards process for environmental justice grants. Grantmakers will design competitive application and submission processes, award environmental justice subgrants, implement a tracking and reporting system, provide resources and support to communities, all in collaboration with EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights.”
Tell me that the new agency isn’t a redundancy. One hundred million bucks are already available for “environmental justice.” The academics are probably chomping at the bit right now. Grants mean free travel, free hotels, free meals, and extra cash, not to mention the prestige that writing grant-funded reports brings to the universities. Does that mean that poor professors on six-figure salaries get “justice.” The nonprofits will also “profit” from those same perks as they work with local communities to right all those wrongs committed exclusively by bad-intentioned caucasians.
Folly: But they will be able to improve their environments.
Sense: And you, too, can help. Want a job in environmental justice? Here’s an EPA tweet I see on my phone, but it was for a March hiring: “If you have a passion for #environmentaljustice and want to start making a difference, apply now to be an Environmental Protection Specialist.” So, the EPA already has a program with a bunch of money devoted to “environmental justice.” Yet, the President has deigned to create another environmental justice agency. I find that typical of a government destined to spend its tax resources on the latest cultural ideologies and neologisms, the ideologies and new phrases that have permeated the minds in American government agencies and the brains of top elected officials. I can’t wait to read the hundreds of reports that the hundred million bucks will generate. I can’t wait to see the results of environmental justice warriors who will coordinate the efforts of 438 federal agencies and their more than two million employees, who, by the way make average salary of about $90,000 per year and have enough money to live in houses and condos outside poverty-stricken neighborhoods beset by pollution.
Folly: But they take care of a huge complex government.
Sense: I’ll say it again: 438 agencies. No, now make that 439 agencies with the addition of the new environmental justice agency. I wonder how much the environmental justice chief will make, his secretary will make, his assistants will make—all supposedly to coordinate what individual agencies have already required their agents to do. Helicopter parenting—it’s the nature of the American government whose children are unbridled agents. And the irony is that in the name of “justice” there will be enforced injustices, in the name of protecting one group, there will be enforced restrictions on another group, and in the name of saving the environment or restoring the environment, there will be wholesale economic limitations on free trade and entrepreneurism. In the name of environmental justice, jobs associated with fossil fuels will go the way of the Dodo. And when jobs go away, people lose interest in caring for their local environment. Tell me that the degradation of the human environment hasn’t been at least partially the product of people who live in those environments as much as the industries that polluted. Have there been bad actors among industrialists? Have they left landscapes forever changed? Of course. Among mining companies? Heck, remember the Romanian cyanide spill? Bad actors are everywhere. Careless actors, too. And all the bad environmental accidents of the last forty years have occurred under the rules and regulations of agencies at home and at abroad. This new agency will do little more than make other agencies look for tradeoffs that on the surface will enhance one group, but underneath will disadvantage another group. This new agency will make the President feel good and moral and noble.
Folly: We need watchdogs.
Sense: I agree, but do we need watchdogs for watchdogs? Because that’s how I see this new sub-agency. Does the President not trust that the agencies now in effect will handle their interactions with the environment and with citizens justly? Don’t they all have internal documents outlining and even specifically declaring their environmental actions?
Folly: Your pessimism is what leads to environmental injustice. You’re probably a racist.
Sense: Contrary to your belief, I’m not. I want a reasonably clean environment for everyone. I can back efforts to make life safer for everyone. I don’t see the need to distinguish among Americans according to race or any other social or cultural designation. If environmental justice isn’t for all, then it’s not justice. It’s agenda. It’s payback. It’s reparations. It might even be vengeance. And certainly, it’s costly. Think of that 100 million bucks again. Check back with me in a couple of years to report on what the expenditure accomplished for nonwhites, who seem to be the only people to which the term environmental justice applies.
Folly: Look at the disproportionate number of nonwhite poor people who live with toxic materials not found in white communities of rich people. That’s racism.
Sense: Except that in countries and counties dominated by nonwhites, the same distinction would be made between rich and poor nonwhites. Economy and lifestyle are intertwined. Economy and environmental conditions are also intertwined. Now it becomes a matter of the chicken and the egg. Do nonwhites live in toxic environments because they are nonwhites? Which came first, skin color or environmental degradation? Did the two contemporaneously evolve or develop? Have not poor whites lived in toxic communities because they are poor. Which is primary, the poverty or the race? Does the inequity in environmental safety come from race or economy? You know there’s a good argument for you side of the issue in the Doctrine of Double Effect, an argument you should be making. Peter S. Wenz wrote that such a doctrine occurs when production that people think is blameworthy “becomes blameless when it is incidental to, although predictably conjoined with, the production of another effect whose production is morally justified.”***
Folly: I’ll look into that.
Sense: And while you’re at it, look at the results of the Superfund, government handouts that discourage self-determination, education, and pride in neighborhood communities. Yes, apparently, poor people live in closer proximity to pollutants than rich people in disproportionate numbers. But that isn’t about race as the cause; it’s about poverty and lack of opportunity or even the lack of desire to be opportunistic.
Folly: But society forces nonwhites into…
Sense: Sorry, I think lack of employment outweighs your racist card in the game of life. There’s a term, however, that you might think of and that is LULU, or Locally Undesirable Land Use. Communities have evolved around centers of industrial production. When that production ceases, many remain in the communities where they once accepted the pollutants as a way of life. A second or third generation then suffers from a lack of jobs and declining businesses that grew in the area. Look at the steel mills in Pittsburgh’s surrounding towns. They became “brownfields” when the steel industry died out. The towns where once tens of thousands of gainfully employed people lived then fell into disrepair. Sure, some of the people moved; some simply stayed to live in the vicinity of brownfields. Population changes occurred. The failed industrial giants can be blamed to some extent for the pollution, but the workers accepted the pollution because at the time it was linked to their jobs. The Clean Air act changed some of that a little, especially after the Donora event made people aware that air pollution could be lessened by adding scrubbers to stacks and by shutting down industry during inversions that trapped the pollutants in the Monongahela Valley. But the community never took the course of action to clean their environments while their environments were being altered. Then, once the communities began to decline, another generation of people, a group taking advantage of the lower costs of housing, became the occupants. So, yes, poor people, not necessarily nonwhite people, are disproportionately situated where the environment was polluted.
Folly: So, that’s why the President created a new office, to give those people environmental justice…
Sense: As I said, get back to me in a few years to tell me how his new agency has improved the lives of the poor, the poor of any race, religion, or ethnicity. Just one more comment to remind you. Every agency has already made some sort of internal environmental policy. I have no doubt that the new chief of environmental justice will probably ask all 438 agencies to submit their revised environmental policies. So, instead of having agents actually working to improve the environment, there will agents working to improve their paperwork, paperwork that will mean chopping down trees that seem so precious to the environmental activists who motivated the President to create the new agency.
*The World Counts website: https://www.theworldcounts.com/challenges/toxic-exposures/polluted-bodies/chemicals-in-the-human-body
**Investor’s Business Daily website: https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/gibson-guitar-raid-like-tea-party-intimidation/
***Wenz, Peter S. “Just Garbage: the Problem of Environmental Racism.” Originally in Faces of Environmental Racism by Laura Westra and Peter S. Wentz (Lanham, Maryland. Roman and Littlefield, 1955) and found in Environmental Ethics, Ed. by Pojman, Louis, and Paul Pojman, Thomson/Wadsworth. 2001 and 2008. p. 667.
Folly meets Sense in a coffee shop; the allegorical dialogue ensues:
Folly: Wow! Really good news today. The President will sign an executive order to make all government agencies up their environmental game. America is finally turning to environmental justice with a new watchdog in town.
Sense: Up their environ…? Game? Oh! You mean make everything more expensive by adding layers of regulations to stacks of already existing regulations in the name of Mother Earth. Environmental justice…ssssthat one of those equity things? I think I recently heard some TV personality say that climate change was “racist.” That is, of course, possible only if skin color determines where climate change occurs. Is that one of the issues that this new watchdog will watch? Imagine what the cave commentators must have been saying at the beginning and then at the end of the Younger Dryas when temperatures first fell precipitously and then skyrocketed a millennium or so later.
Folly: Look, the new agency will coordinate other agencies’ environmental efforts. It should get them all on the same page. Anyway, Sense, people like you…Let me guess, Sense; you’re one of those redneck, gun-toting, flag-waving religious climate-change deniers in favor of or ignorant of plastics everywhere and pollutants destroying lives, especially the lives of nonwhites.
Sense: Whoa. People like me? Always best to start a debate with an ad hominem or an ad populum. Attack the person or persons, not the message. Go with emotion. I’ll reply with an ad populum: You Greenies, in your efforts to become the ultimate in helicopter mothers, you’ve fallen for a narrative that will continuously weaken the economic strengths of the country. You belong to the Make America Weaker Still, the MAWS. It’s the kind of helicopter parenting a runaway leftist government imposes on its “children.” ‘Fraid the kids will just mess things up without your constant oversight? Afraid of their independence? Envious that some have reaped the benefits of the minerals and chemicals you have so readily incorporated into your life?
Folly: No, but I am afraid of the potential damage to the environment. Ever hear of Love Canal? Ever hear of the burning waters of Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River? Ever hear about Donora in 1948 or the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico? Are you against environmental responsibility, environmental ethics, environmental safety? Look what the world was before the government imposed rules about clean air and clean water. Look at the pollution that entered the environment before the government forced businesses, industries, and farms into environmental compliance. Look at all the unnecessary premature deaths from cancer, maybe also the unnecessary cases of autism, and the unnecessary endangerment and extinction of species. When there are no governmental restrictions on exploitation, humans don’t impose restrictions on themselves. Exploiters have no regard for the future. Much of what we humans have done to degrade the environment is irreversible: Lost soils, diverted rivers, radioactive and chemical wastes that last for centuries, landscapes buried under billions of tons of garbage that will never be reused and that will continuously pollute ground water, clear cut forests, drained wetlands, and plastics everywhere. I could go on…Someone has to stand up against the innate shortsightedness of modern humans who think nothing about preserving a sustainable environment. And that also means that the government agencies must also be environmentally responsible. So, what’s wrong with the President signing an executive order to make government agencies more environmentally friendly in the context of justice? I see that his order will require agencies “to better understand and prevent the cumulative impacts of pollution on people’s health.” That’s a good thing, even for you. But it will definitely help nonwhites who disproportionately suffer from toxins in the environment.
Sense: Aren’t there already researchers in universities, medical schools, and government agencies who do that, who study individual and cumulative impacts? Anyway, the job is now overwhelming.
Folly: What job?
Sense: The job of curtailing chemical pollutants. Pretty much everyone has been exposed. Not that that’s not worth trying to change, but world production of industrial chemicals exceeds 250 billion tons of more than 100,000 chemicals every year. * You and I both have hundreds of chemicals in us that didn’t even exist before the twentieth century. Every government agency—because every government agent—has some of them or uses some of them. So, if the newly formed office is going to ask government agencies to coordinate and unify their environmental justice efforts—I want to get to that in a minute—does that mean each agency will control the inks it uses, the composition of the vehicles, the materials in the offices, the MacDonald’s wrappers that its agents use when they go into the field…?
Folly: But they don’t have… They aren’t chemists. They are IRS agents, FBI agents, EPA agents…The President doesn’t expect them to be chemists or DOE cleanup crews; he is mandating that all agencies act in ways that reduce environmental injustice among nonwhite populations. They suffer the most from…
Sense: Isn’t doing something the job of the legislative and judicial branches of government?
Folly: Not if special interest groups control them. Look at the influence of Big Pharma, big industry, and…well, every exploiter of land, sea, and poor people…
Sense: Any executive order that makes an agency will add simply add a layer of government to layers of government, making the government less efficient and giving unknown government workers hiding in the cubicles of power the ability to make through regulations de facto laws, bypassing Congress. Agencies will be able to impose more fines, more punishment, more restrictions, giving them more powers over the little people, the common citizens who will have to defend every action that has even the slightest hint of an environmental effect. And “environmental effect” and “environmental justice” will accrue changing and new definitions according to the agendas of highly paid government employees. It’s going to be a further infringement on freedom with probably very little actual impact on the environment except to make foreign entities richer and tilt the economy in an artificial direction that makes government pick winners and losers.
Folly: It’s always about money and profit for you, isn’t it? As long as profits keep adding up, you care little about the environment. Americans can’t control what others are doing to sicken the environment, but we can control our backyard environmental health. Sustainability is the goal, not the wealth of a few people at the expense of many people both now and in the future. Environmental justice is an ethical goal that makes all people more important than profit. It will enhance the lives of many nonwhites who suffer from environmental injustice.
Sense: No, I’m not just about profit, and no, I don’t reject responsibility for the environment. I object to the new executive order for a simple reason: Sixteen hundred Pennsylvania Avenue already has the Council on Environmental Quality under its wing. You know what that agency is supposed to do?
Folly: Not sure, but it sounds good.
Sense: Look it up. It’s run by an environmental lawyer who led The Climate 21 Project. That got the ball rolling on “environmental justice.” That got the ball rolling on…
Folly: Oh! Here we go. This is gonna be another one of your diatribes on climate alarmism.
Sense: No, again, although that’s not unrelated. But no, I object to the executive order because the Office of Environmental Justice created by the President will have its own coordinator called the Chief Environmental Justice Officer. That adds a layer of government to the already existing Council on Environmental Quality. Tell me that new agency doesn’t initiate the growth of a multi-layered agency that will need assistant officers, secretaries, desks, chairs, computers, printers, branch offices, cars and pickup trucks, and eventually, like FEMA, a branch of armed officers. Yes, mark these words. There will eventually be a branch of enforcement agents who will be armed; there will be monitoring and special powers. Environmental Quality Police will show up dressed like SWAT teams to arrest some poor farmer who builds a pond for his animals or a guitar manufacturer who stores his wood scraps on the back of his property and next to a slum landlord’s tenement house that is the real environmental problem for the poor.
Folly: You’re exaggerating. Armed…That won’t…
Sense: Really? What about Gibson Guitar? ** In what appears to be a blatant political hit in the name of protecting the environment, the feds sent an armed team to raid the guitar maker and then kept them in business limbo for a long time, but never charged the company with a crime for importing rosewood and ebony—legally. Nevertheless, the company had paid $300,000 to avoid court costs and had to give $50,000 to Fish and Wildlife, supposedly for planting trees—but who knows where that money went? By the way, most rosewood goes to China. What’s the EPA and the Justice Department going to do about that rosewood? Overreaching environmental agencies can ruin companies and lives, especially when they act politically. Gibson’s competitor uses the same wood for which Gibson was raided. Why not the other company? Wasn’t the environmental concern for rosewood and ebony the same? Well, Gibson’s CEO gave money to Republicans; the competitor’s CEO gave money to Democrats. Want to talk environmental injustice? Were you in a coma when Wyoming rancher Andy Johnson built a stock pond where his horses could drink and his three little girls could play? The EPA threatened him with a $75,000 per day fine. He had gotten a permit from the Wyoming State Engineer’s Office, but the EPA, in spite of the pond’s attracting wildlife, said it was a violation of the Clean Water Act. And the EPA required Johnson to prove his innocence.
Folly: But he probably dammed some stream and changed the environment.
Sense: Yeah, on his own property after getting permission from the state. You tell me that you are happy with the threat of a $75,000 per day fine. Seem reasonable to you?
What do you think is going to happen with this new sub-agency that Biden ordered up by executive fiat? There will be thousands of pages of new regulations and thousands of government employees who, like so many current government employees will be able to work from home, be incapable of responding in a timely way to citizen complaints about their imposing restrictions, and be a burden on taxpayers ad infinitum. You’ll see. And if one agency can’t impose a fine, this new agency will “coordinate” with other agencies. There’s a runaway effect already in place. Already there are various government employees and elected officials who want to eliminate gas stoves because they believe they are bad for the environment. What’s next, no cooking? I can envision that under this new sub-agency, restrictions will increase and freedoms will be lost without changing much to any environment. It reminds me of adding new layers of gun laws that mean nothing to criminals and pathological killers. But it also reminds me that the agenda of the current government is more focused on a one-degree rise in temperature as harmful but that is quiet on a flood of fentanyl that kills tens of thousands. Which is more an immediate concern, environmental justice for people labeled as “people of color” or death by fentanyl and other drugs that disproportionately affects nonwhites in rundown cities? Which is the pressing health issue? Why is there not an Office of Fentanyl Poisoning in the FDA, FBI, ICE, or ATF? Because there are already federal agents tasked with controlling the illegal drug trade. Redundancy will do nothing there. Redundancy will do nothing about environmental injustice except throw more money at it to assuage the conscience of the President and his influencers.
Folly: You’re simplifying. Protecting the environment is a complex task. It requires many watchdogs. And no, there won’t be thousands of new employees with some carrying guns as part of the new agency. This new office will be a coordinating office.
Sense: Yep. I’m simplifying, but I’m doing it from experience. So, you think a few new agents and a chief of the agency are going to coordinate the actions of 438 federal agencies already in existence. Coordinating environmental justice in those agencies is the goal, right? Name a government agency that has become purposefully smaller and has reduced its paper output. And as for all the governmental duplication of agencies, I guess that’s why the Environmental Protection Agency launched its own Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights last year. No reason not to take advantage of the Democrat-passed Inflation Reduction Act that added $60 billion tax dollars to the trillions Americans already owe. And all of these new and redefined agencies will spend those billions and more billions without a measurable effect, save costing Americans more money and reducing American national independence while increasing foreign national profit and foreign threats. So, what’s next after decreasing coal production, oil output, and drilling for natural gas in the name of environmental protection and justice, while the Chinese, Indians, and other nations that have their own self-interests at the center of policies? Russia and China will make themselves richer with far less regard for preserving the environment than this country, which has numerous laws and regulations to protect both environment and people. Will this new environmental justice chief issue regulations to quash the sale of all internal combustion engines to the feds? Will some branch office of the agency be required to use electric vehicles with 300-mile ranges to drive around tiny Texas or little Alaska to check on environmental justice? Or will there be more offices so the ranges of travel can be shorter?
Folly: No, no, no. Americans can lead the world in environmental protection and serve as a model of environmental justice.
Sense: What does that really mean? Does “justice” apply to animal rights? Will environmental justice mean the elimination of all hunting and fishing? Will it give beavers the right to block streams without permission from the Wyoming State Engineer? Will beavers be held accountable for blocking streams under the Clean Water Act the way Andy Johnson was?
Folly: Look, this new agency is merely going to coordinate the actions of the other agencies to make sure they are environmentally responsible and that they serve the needs of the environmentally abused minorities in this country.
Sense: So, all those internal memoranda already issued by every agency in the name of “the environment” and “environmental justice” will be coordinated into a single massive document that says …
Folly: That says that every agency needs to incorporate environmental justice into its proceedings.
Sense: Full circle: What, I’ll ask again, does the term “environmental justice” mean? Wait! Let me look it up on my phone. Here, here is the EPA’s explanation:
“The environmental justice movement was started by individuals, primarily people of color, who sought to address the inequity of environmental protection in their communities.” The website also has this statement from some Professor Robert Bullard: “whether by conscious design or institutional neglect, communities of color in urban ghettos, in rural 'poverty pockets', or on economically impoverished Native-American reservations face some of the worst environmental devastation in the nation."
Folly: See, there is a definition.
Sense: That’s a history, not a definition. That’s a description, not a definition. And both of those statements are more about economic and cultural phenomena than about the environment. So, the President signed into existence an environmental justice agency. But look here, the EPA has announced it already has $100 million to give away for “environmental justice grants.” Look at this and tell me that the new office won’t be a redundancy:
“The new Environmental Justice Thriving Communities Grantmaking (EJ TCGM) Program is a competition to select multiple Grantmakers around the nation to reduce barriers to the application process communities face and increase the efficiency of the awards process for environmental justice grants. Grantmakers will design competitive application and submission processes, award environmental justice subgrants, implement a tracking and reporting system, provide resources and support to communities, all in collaboration with EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights.”
Tell me that the new agency isn’t a redundancy. One hundred million bucks are already available for “environmental justice.” The academics are probably chomping at the bit right now. Grants mean free travel, free hotels, free meals, and extra cash, not to mention the prestige that writing grant-funded reports brings to the universities. Does that mean that poor professors on six-figure salaries get “justice.” The nonprofits will also “profit” from those same perks as they work with local communities to right all those wrongs committed exclusively by bad-intentioned caucasians.
Folly: But they will be able to improve their environments.
Sense: And you, too, can help. Want a job in environmental justice? Here’s an EPA tweet I see on my phone, but it was for a March hiring: “If you have a passion for #environmentaljustice and want to start making a difference, apply now to be an Environmental Protection Specialist.” So, the EPA already has a program with a bunch of money devoted to “environmental justice.” Yet, the President has deigned to create another environmental justice agency. I find that typical of a government destined to spend its tax resources on the latest cultural ideologies and neologisms, the ideologies and new phrases that have permeated the minds in American government agencies and the brains of top elected officials. I can’t wait to read the hundreds of reports that the hundred million bucks will generate. I can’t wait to see the results of environmental justice warriors who will coordinate the efforts of 438 federal agencies and their more than two million employees, who, by the way make average salary of about $90,000 per year and have enough money to live in houses and condos outside poverty-stricken neighborhoods beset by pollution.
Folly: But they take care of a huge complex government.
Sense: I’ll say it again: 438 agencies. No, now make that 439 agencies with the addition of the new environmental justice agency. I wonder how much the environmental justice chief will make, his secretary will make, his assistants will make—all supposedly to coordinate what individual agencies have already required their agents to do. Helicopter parenting—it’s the nature of the American government whose children are unbridled agents. And the irony is that in the name of “justice” there will be enforced injustices, in the name of protecting one group, there will be enforced restrictions on another group, and in the name of saving the environment or restoring the environment, there will be wholesale economic limitations on free trade and entrepreneurism. In the name of environmental justice, jobs associated with fossil fuels will go the way of the Dodo. And when jobs go away, people lose interest in caring for their local environment. Tell me that the degradation of the human environment hasn’t been at least partially the product of people who live in those environments as much as the industries that polluted. Have there been bad actors among industrialists? Have they left landscapes forever changed? Of course. Among mining companies? Heck, remember the Romanian cyanide spill? Bad actors are everywhere. Careless actors, too. And all the bad environmental accidents of the last forty years have occurred under the rules and regulations of agencies at home and at abroad. This new agency will do little more than make other agencies look for tradeoffs that on the surface will enhance one group, but underneath will disadvantage another group. This new agency will make the President feel good and moral and noble.
Folly: We need watchdogs.
Sense: I agree, but do we need watchdogs for watchdogs? Because that’s how I see this new sub-agency. Does the President not trust that the agencies now in effect will handle their interactions with the environment and with citizens justly? Don’t they all have internal documents outlining and even specifically declaring their environmental actions?
Folly: Your pessimism is what leads to environmental injustice. You’re probably a racist.
Sense: Contrary to your belief, I’m not. I want a reasonably clean environment for everyone. I can back efforts to make life safer for everyone. I don’t see the need to distinguish among Americans according to race or any other social or cultural designation. If environmental justice isn’t for all, then it’s not justice. It’s agenda. It’s payback. It’s reparations. It might even be vengeance. And certainly, it’s costly. Think of that 100 million bucks again. Check back with me in a couple of years to report on what the expenditure accomplished for nonwhites, who seem to be the only people to which the term environmental justice applies.
Folly: Look at the disproportionate number of nonwhite poor people who live with toxic materials not found in white communities of rich people. That’s racism.
Sense: Except that in countries and counties dominated by nonwhites, the same distinction would be made between rich and poor nonwhites. Economy and lifestyle are intertwined. Economy and environmental conditions are also intertwined. Now it becomes a matter of the chicken and the egg. Do nonwhites live in toxic environments because they are nonwhites? Which came first, skin color or environmental degradation? Did the two contemporaneously evolve or develop? Have not poor whites lived in toxic communities because they are poor. Which is primary, the poverty or the race? Does the inequity in environmental safety come from race or economy? You know there’s a good argument for you side of the issue in the Doctrine of Double Effect, an argument you should be making. Peter S. Wenz wrote that such a doctrine occurs when production that people think is blameworthy “becomes blameless when it is incidental to, although predictably conjoined with, the production of another effect whose production is morally justified.”***
Folly: I’ll look into that.
Sense: And while you’re at it, look at the results of the Superfund, government handouts that discourage self-determination, education, and pride in neighborhood communities. Yes, apparently, poor people live in closer proximity to pollutants than rich people in disproportionate numbers. But that isn’t about race as the cause; it’s about poverty and lack of opportunity or even the lack of desire to be opportunistic.
Folly: But society forces nonwhites into…
Sense: Sorry, I think lack of employment outweighs your racist card in the game of life. There’s a term, however, that you might think of and that is LULU, or Locally Undesirable Land Use. Communities have evolved around centers of industrial production. When that production ceases, many remain in the communities where they once accepted the pollutants as a way of life. A second or third generation then suffers from a lack of jobs and declining businesses that grew in the area. Look at the steel mills in Pittsburgh’s surrounding towns. They became “brownfields” when the steel industry died out. The towns where once tens of thousands of gainfully employed people lived then fell into disrepair. Sure, some of the people moved; some simply stayed to live in the vicinity of brownfields. Population changes occurred. The failed industrial giants can be blamed to some extent for the pollution, but the workers accepted the pollution because at the time it was linked to their jobs. The Clean Air act changed some of that a little, especially after the Donora event made people aware that air pollution could be lessened by adding scrubbers to stacks and by shutting down industry during inversions that trapped the pollutants in the Monongahela Valley. But the community never took the course of action to clean their environments while their environments were being altered. Then, once the communities began to decline, another generation of people, a group taking advantage of the lower costs of housing, became the occupants. So, yes, poor people, not necessarily nonwhite people, are disproportionately situated where the environment was polluted.
Folly: So, that’s why the President created a new office, to give those people environmental justice…
Sense: As I said, get back to me in a few years to tell me how his new agency has improved the lives of the poor, the poor of any race, religion, or ethnicity. Just one more comment to remind you. Every agency has already made some sort of internal environmental policy. I have no doubt that the new chief of environmental justice will probably ask all 438 agencies to submit their revised environmental policies. So, instead of having agents actually working to improve the environment, there will agents working to improve their paperwork, paperwork that will mean chopping down trees that seem so precious to the environmental activists who motivated the President to create the new agency.
*The World Counts website: https://www.theworldcounts.com/challenges/toxic-exposures/polluted-bodies/chemicals-in-the-human-body
**Investor’s Business Daily website: https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/gibson-guitar-raid-like-tea-party-intimidation/
***Wenz, Peter S. “Just Garbage: the Problem of Environmental Racism.” Originally in Faces of Environmental Racism by Laura Westra and Peter S. Wentz (Lanham, Maryland. Roman and Littlefield, 1955) and found in Environmental Ethics, Ed. by Pojman, Louis, and Paul Pojman, Thomson/Wadsworth. 2001 and 2008. p. 667.
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