Do Standards + Investment = Justice?
Around mid-December reports emerged that the candidacy of former California Air Resources Board chair Mary Nichols to head the Biden EPA was dead, in part due to opposition from some of the organizations that are focused on environmental justice (EJ) issues. One basis to the objections, according to reports, was Nichols’ prominent role overseeing the implementation of California’s cap-and-trade program for greenhouse gasses (GHG). For several years, EJ activists have argued that California’s GHG cap-and-trade program has not done enough to reduce local pollutants in disadvantaged communities.
This episode is one of the recent examples of hostility from the left toward cap-and-trade, a powerful environmental regulatory tool that has been effective at lowering the cost of reducing pollutants from lead in gasoline to SO2 to NOx, and, in the case of California’s GHG cap-and-trade, has raised tens of billions of dollars.