Climate Politics and Race in the Pacific Northwest

Rachel Slocum

doi:10.3390/socsci7100192

Abstract

The collective politics of climate justice makes the important claim that lowering emissions is not enough; society must also undertake radical transformation to address both the climate and inequality crises. Owing to its roots in the environmental justice movement, addressing systemic racism is central to climate justice praxis in the United States, which is a necessary intervention in typically technocratic climate politics. What emerges from US climate justice is a moral appeal to ‘relationship’ as politics, the procedural demand that communities of color (the ‘frontline’) lead the movement, and a distributive claim on carbon pricing revenue. However, this praxis precludes a critique of racial capitalism, the process that relies on structural racism to enhance accumulation, alienating, exploiting, and immiserating black, brown, and white, while carrying out ecocide. The lack of an analysis of how class and race produce the crises climate justice confronts prevents the movement from demanding that global north fossil fuel abolition occur in tandem with the reassertion of the public over the private and de-growth. Drawing on research conducted primarily in Oregon and Washington, I argue that race works to both create and limit the transformative possibilities of climate politics.

Highlights

In the past decade, alongside the response from environmental NGOs, state actors and multilateral organizations, a mobilization for climate justice1 has emerged in the US linking environmental justice and climate change (Speth and Thompson 2016; Tokar 2014a)
They do so based on a distributive politics that asks for policy measures that meet the needs of racialized black and brown people who, as ‘first and worst’ affected, stand on the ‘frontline’ of climate change
Oregon’s climate justice movement rose out of a growing awareness of climate change as it relates to environmental justice concerns, subsequent funding for climate justice positions, white antiracist practice, and national-level coalition building

Summary

Introduction

Alongside the response from environmental NGOs, state actors and multilateral organizations, a mobilization for climate justice has emerged in the US linking environmental justice and climate change (Speth and Thompson 2016; Tokar 2014a). Climate justice organizations pursue ecological modernization—the idea that contradictions between capitalism and nature can be resolved by techno-managerial interventions such as the polluter pays principle and green technological innovation (Hajer 1995; Nugent 2011) They do so based on a distributive politics that asks for policy measures that meet the needs of racialized black and brown people who, as ‘first and worst’ affected, stand on the ‘frontline’ of climate change. The means they choose is carbon pricing with the revenue returned not through a dividend to mitigate the regressive impact of the measure, but through investments aimed at creating jobs. Race works to create and limit the transformative possibilities of climate justice politics

Methodology

The Racial Politics of Climate Justice

Investing in the People We Are Becoming?

Findings

Conclusions