By Derrick Z. Jackson
Forget the cliché that Republicans are climate deniers. They are more accurately the party of environmental gerrymandering. It is parallel to the GOP’s bald-faced efforts to amass disproportionate power in many states by diluting Black representation. The party is trying to deny environmental justice and the economic benefits of a green economy to communities of color as predominantly White GOP congressional districts run off with the investments.
This fall, the GOP majority in the House passed a bill that would cut billions of dollars from climate and energy efficiency programs launched during the Biden administration. For now, the bill is symbolic, with Democrats controlling the Senate and the White House. Should that change in the 2024 elections, this bill is a blueprint for a nightmare in Black, Latinx and Indigenous communities living with disproportionate pollution and disease from the burning of fossil fuels.
That is because the bill blatantly targets communities of color. It denies funding for the Department of Energy’s Equity Action Plan or to carry out President Biden’s executive order to advance racial equity throughout all federal agencies. It bans funding under the White House’s Justice40 Initiative to direct 40 percent of the benefits of clean energy programs, pollution cleanups and green jobs to underserved and over-polluted communities.
The legislation also blocks funding to the Energy Department to increase diversity in its science workforce and reject funding of a new national laboratory to study the impact of climate change on diverse communities. In case you need any more clues of how racially twisted the legislation is, it also bans any funding to “carry out any program, project, or activity that promotes or advances Critical Race Theory or any concept associated with Critical Race Theory.”
In other words, the GOP wants to deny and erase the history of systemic racism that disproportionately put communities of color in the nation’s cesspools of pollution.
There is a method to this madness. Behind the crafted caricature of climate denial and its financial support from the oil and gas industry, the GOP is clearing the playing field of competitors, most notably the beleaguered communities that deserve a first shot at the green economy, so it can deliver green jobs to its own constituents.
According to a recent report by the nonpartisan business group E2 (Environmental Entrepreneurs), the Inflation Reduction Act has resulted in the announcement of about 250 renewable energy, electric vehicle and battery storage projects and manufacturing facilities. The projects, according to the report, offer the potential of 303,000 construction jobs, 100,000 permanent jobs and $110 billion in new worker wages.
So far, those investments add up to $100 billion. As I pointed out in a more general piece last month for the Union of Concerned Scientists, nearly $75 billion of those investments, or three quarters, are in states either won in 2020 by former President Donald Trump or where state legislatures are solidly controlled by Republicans. Leading the way are Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina. Other red states with major levels of clean energy and electric vehicle investment include Louisiana, Alabama, Indiana, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, and West Virginia. This likely is in no small way a result of conservative legislatures making many of those states attractive for manufacturing with lower minimum wages and anti-union labor laws.
This is despite the Inflation Reduction Act not getting a single Republican vote, amid classic GOP rhetoric decrying the IRA as wasteful socialist and communist spending. The Republicans have played the hypocrisy card for years on renewables. As they blunt or block an all-out fight against climate change and full creation of green jobs on Capitol Hill, 86 percent of onshore wind farms are in GOP districts, in an industry that now has 120,000 jobs.
A 2022 report by the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst estimated the Inflation Reduction Act could lead to the creation of 9 million jobs over the next decade. The GOP sees this loud and clear. For all the lofty pledges by Democrats to delivery many of these jobs to environmental justice communities, the Republicans have so far successfully gerrymandered the green economy into a stunningly White congressional map.