Environmental justice and the politics of energy on the US–Mexico border

Abstract

This paper is part of an emerging effort to explore environmental justice in the forms in which it is appearing in Latin America, both as a discourse of popular mobilisation and as a set of principles for analysis and interpretation. It explores the promise and limits of environmental justice on the US–Mexico border, drawing its lessons from a study of trans-border energy politics. In the wake of the California energy regulatory crisis, energy companies set their sights on northern Baja California as an ideal production platform to meet US energy demand through the construction of new power plants and receiving terminals for liquefied natural gas. This paper explores the emergence of environmental justice as a banner of community resistance to Baja's energy boom, as well as its utility as an analytical framework that highlights underlying issues of distributional inequity and procedural injustice.