The Need for Environmental Justice Never Ends Because Externalities Persist

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The Trump administration has been explicit in its intent to rollback environmental regulations aimed at controlling key sources of pollution. These include efforts to reverse current policy initiatives to combat climate change and protect the integrity of the national air and watersheds. The purported rationale, in sum, is that current policy initiatives to protect the environment are over burdensome and retard economic growth. This age-old argument is wholly focused on one side of the equation, the costs of regulation. However, in reality, these regulations also provide substantial benefits that, by all legitimate estimates, far outweigh the purported costs. At the heart of this cost–benefit analysis that underpins environmental regulations is the fundamental reason government becomes involved in environmental regulation in the first place: externalities. And when viewed objectively, we see that externalities disproportionately impact communities that are already marginalized. In fact, the marginalization of these communities is often directly associated with externalities. The purpose of this article is to discuss the current posture of the Trump administration toward environmental deregulation within the context of externalities. The goal is to remind us that most environmental problems emanate from externalities; that externalities do not cease simply by removing regulatory obstacles to their existence; and that externalities disproportionately impact marginalized communities.