At a Crossroads: Towards Justice, or Down the Insidious Path of False Solutions?
Blog Post by Ana Baptista and Jennifer Ventrella
After decades of climate inaction, the United States has reached a turning point with the passage of multiple federal laws that provide funding for clean energy. However, environmental and climate justice activists are wary, warning that these laws may further subsidize false solutions to addressing the climate crisis. Legislation like the recently passed Inflation Reduction Act is riddled with technological and market-based approaches that further exacerbate existing vulnerabilities in environmental justice communities. As Juan Jhong-Chung of the Michigan Environmental Justice Coalition and member of the Climate Justice Alliance stated in an August 2022 press release, “Climate investments should not be handcuffed to corporate subsidies for fossil fuel development and unproven technologies that will poison our communities for decades.”
While federal legislation is just beginning to reflect advances in false solutions, individual states have been serving as incubators for new, unjust, and untested approaches to addressing climate change for years. Now permeating the policy landscape at every level, false solutions have become the new environmental justice battleground, compounding ongoing fights against existing fossil fuel infrastructure and threatening to entrench existing inequities further.
The Tishman Center’s latest report draws on a review of policies and interviews with community leaders to explore how false solutions are present or emerging in the energy policies of three states, New Jersey, Delaware, and Minnesota. All three states have existing or proposed false solutions in policies and plans meant to drive renewable or clean energy goals, and Environmental Justice groups have challenged many of these initiatives.
False solutions refer to approaches to climate change mitigation that, in reality, perpetuate inequality, environmental racism, and the root causes of climate change. Environmental and climate justice advocates have classified several economy-wide and market-based climate mitigation approaches and specific fuels or energy sources as false solutions. Examples include mitigation policy goals framed as carbon neutrality and “net zero,” technological or engineering strategies including carbon capture and sequestration and geoengineering, and market mechanisms like carbon cap-and-trade and carbon offsetting mechanisms. One of the principal critiques of these market, technological, and fuel-based approaches is their carbon-centric approach to mitigation, with little consideration for the geographic distribution of the reductions or the differential impacts these policies might have on other fundamental issues, such as human rights, indigenous sovereignty, public health, and social justice. The fact that much of the current fossil fuel infrastructure is concentrated in EJ communities and that many of these approaches have no affirmative or explicit equity mandate leaves EJ communities at risk from disparate impacts. Fuel-based solutions like waste incineration or hydrogen in the power sector also produce toxic air pollution, particularly in low-income communities and communities of color already overburdened by environmental hazards. Technological approaches to climate mitigation, like carbon capture and sequestration, have also been criticized by climate advocates as a way to prolong the viability of the fossil fuel industry while continuing to harm EJ communities.
Our report found that while all three states have signaled a commitment to EJ policies, these commitments have yet to be embedded across climate and energy policies, projects, and plans. In all three states, climate mitigation policies continue to turn to market-based mechanisms like carbon cap-and-trade. In terms of false solution policies, plans, and projects, there has been a rising focus on liquefied natural gas (LNG) in New Jersey, “clean” hydrogen in New Jersey and Minnesota, and renewable natural gas (RNG), a refined form of biogas that has a higher relative methane content, in all three states. New carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects have also been proposed in Minnesota. These enable business-as-usual practices and do not reduce emissions in the most overburdened EJ communities.
In interviews with EJ activists, we found that these groups have fought against traditional fossil fuel and other highly polluting projects like the construction of new natural gas plants in New Jersey and Minnesota, the Line 3 crude oil pipeline in Minnesota, and poultry waste incineration in Delaware. However, they are increasingly turning their attention to emerging false solutions, such as hydrogen, which is being touted as an alternative to natural gas, and RNG, which is proposed as an alternative to incinerating poultry waste. There are also concerns that pipelines for carbon capture and sequestration will pose similar threats to oil pipelines. As states and firms seek to capitalize on significant federal funding in the Infrastructure and Jobs Act (IIJA) and Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) for carbon capture, biogas and RNG, and hydrogen, these false solutions are likely to receive more scrutiny from EJ groups in the coming years. The case studies of these three states highlight the ubiquity of false solutions and their potential to hinder progress toward more ambitious climate mitigation policies that center on equity, environmental justice, and a just transition.