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What do you think of when you hear the words climate change?
Chances are you might think of sad nature somewhere far away,
but climate change also affects humans in every corner of the world,
including the corner where you live and where I live.
It impacts the people and places we see every day,
and it will impact some of us more than others.
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The 2017 Atlantic hurricane season
was one of the most active seasons in history,
with 17 named storms and 10 hurricanes.
Six of those hurricanes had winds of more than 110 miles per hour,
and while it's hard to know if any single weather event
is due to climate change,
we do know that it will make conditions more extreme.
We're seeing what that future could look like
in Cape Town, South Africa.
There, a drought has stressed local reservoirs,
leading to water rationing
as the city prepares for the day when the taps run dry.
And when you take a community that's already facing these disparities
and add in extreme weather caused by climate change,
it can make it even harder for those communities to recover.
Not every community experiences these climate changes
in the same way.
Some communities have more resources, better infrastructure
or more political capital than other communities.
There's a concept to deal with these inequalities.
It's called environmental justice.
And the idea is pretty simple.
Communities shouldn't be forced to suffer
disproportionate environmental effects,
or deal with more pollution than others because they belong to a certain race,
national origin or income bracket.
People in wealthy communities often think these concerns are far away.
But even in a place like the US, where we tend to think
we're ahead of the curve on protecting all people,
the execution has been spotty.
We can still find lots of environmental disparities right in our back yard.
As Miami cleaned up after Hurricane Maria,
officials dumped debris next to a community
with lots of low-income residents and people of color.
Definitely close enough to see and smell it.
And in Houston, residents who couldn't afford
or weren't physically able to evacuate before hurricane Harvey,
had no choice but to stay behind as the city flooded.
Puerto Rico has faced budget shortages
and a lack of infrastructure for decades.
And after a spate of hurricanes,
residents there had trouble finding clean drinking water,
and large portions of the island remained without electricity for months.
It's more than extreme individual events.
In many places, days that were already hot, are getting even hotter,
and there are more of them.
This heat can be especially deadly in homes without air-conditioning.
For example,the heat index inside public housing in Harlem
stays dangerously elevated overnight,
even when it cools off outside.
And as climate change brings the average temperature up,
systemic inequalities like this will become more obvious.
It's not that the United States hasn't tried to fix
these problems before.
The fight for environmental justice in the US
traces its roots to 1982 in Warren County, North Carolina,
when residents mounted mass demonstrations
against a plan to put contaminated soil in a nearby landfill.
The US Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA,
found that similar landfills in Southern states
were all located in black or low-income neighborhoods.
Several years later, a report found this was a pattern around the country.
Hazardous waste facilities
were more likely to be located in minority communities.
The proof was undeniable,
so in 1992, President George HW Bush
founded the Office of Environmental Justice inside the EPA.
Two years later, Bill Clinton signed
an executive order that told federal
agencies to consider environmental
justice in all policies, and effectively
included environmental protections
under civil rights law. It sounds like things
were going pretty well, right?
Well, environmental justice policies stalled
when George W Bush shifted the focus
of the Office of Environmental Justice
from protecting low-income and minority
communities to protecting all people.
That sounds good, but in practice
it meant those efforts no longer focused
on protecting the people who needed it most.
At the same time many environmental
civil rights claims were delayed for years
or downright rejected.
After Barack Obama's election,
his administration recommitted
to environmental justice.
Democrats controlled the House, the Senate,
and White House for two years, but guess
how many bills they filed to strengthen
environmental justice protections? Zero.
Today, EPA funding itself is under threat,
so these vulnerable communities remain
at risk. It's easy to assume that climate change
will affect us all equally,
but the truth is that communities
all around us including the one you're in,
may be forced to bear an unequal brunt
of our changing world. If we want
to change this, we have to recognize
those disparities and engage with those communities.
That way, as we find solutions,
everyone has a seat at the table.
Thanks for watching Hot Mess.
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