Part and parcel of getting away from fossil fuels is ameliorating environmental injustice. Many studies show how Black and Latino people disproportionately live close to pollution from fossil fuel facilities, waste sites, and transportation exhaust. While White Americans are the disproportionate source of fossil fuel particulate emissions via their outsize consumption of goods and services, Black and brown people disproportionately breathe them in. Biden’s executive order acknowledges this dichotomy, calling for the federal government to identify areas where investment in reaching net-zero emissions advances “economic opportunity, worker empowerment, and environmental mitigation, especially in disadvantaged communities and communities of color.” Like Biden, House Democrats recently took action regarding climate-risk disclosures, passing a bill requiring public companies to report environmental, social, and governance metrics to shareholders. It barely passed by a 215-214 vote and is certain to face fierce opposition in a bitterly divided Senate. Nevertheless, the governance consulting world has noted momentum for such disclosures — as well as their relation to the health of poor and vulnerable communities. The ACA Group, a financial services company that advises on risk, said in May: “Dots continue to be connected between high-priority issues such as diversity, equity & inclusion, climate change, and social justice both in government policy and in the public consciousness. Investors would do well to remain current on these developments.” One thing we know for sure is that fossil fuel interests and their enablers, notably among them the Chamber, remain vigilant in their cynicism toward these developments, fighting back hard against disclosure at every turn. The Chamber, the American Petroleum Institute, and right-wing think tanks like the Koch Brothers’ Americans for Prosperity and the like-minded Heritage Foundation are either outright opposing or interrogating the legality of disclosure efforts in Congress, as well as Biden’s effort to increase the scrutiny of disclosures to the Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC. The Chamber opposed the House measure, complaining that stronger scrutiny on governance is a “misguided approach” that would “impose enormous compliance costs.” Americans for Prosperity attacked the prospect of new SEC regulations, calling it a “sweeping expansion of government power and mission creep.” Most of the groups also banded together in a joint letter last month to oppose efforts in Congress to provide tax incentives for renewable energy and energy efficiency. That is no shock since health care and social justice have always been of little concern for the fossil fuel industry. Between two-thirds and three-fourths of contributions to congressional candidates in the 2020 election cycle from ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, and Chevron went to Republican candidates, nearly all of whom oppose serious climate change mitigation. Elliot Negin, my colleague at the Union of Concerned Scientists, where I am a fellow, wrote a comprehensive review of how ExxonMobil has given $37 million to funded climate-denier groups the last two decades and, like Chevron, is a patron saint of the Chamber of Commerce, giving it millions of dollars to, among other things, renovate its Washington, D.C., offices.
A stark reminder of what that money nets ExxonMobil came with the release this month of a Greenpeace UK sting video. In it, an ExxonMobil lobbyist boasts about how the oil giant publicly supported a carbon tax in the U.S. under the assumption that it would never be passed by a sharply divided Congress. The lobbyist called the Biden administration’s goals to slash greenhouse gas emissions “insane.” What is truly insane, and utterly ignored by this corporate whining, is the downwind and downstream effects of their business operations on communities of color. For environmental justice activists, the drive for climate change risk disclosure is merely a placeholder for the real work that needs to be done. Dallas Goldtooth of the Indigenous Environmental Network and Erika Thi Patterson of the Action Center on Race and the Economy both responded to Biden’s executive order by labeling it simply a commendable and critical first step. They added that any drive for “net-zero” emissions must involve scuttling schemes that allow polluters to balance their emissions sheets with reductions in privileged, whiter communities while at-will boosting the transport and processing of fossil fuels in low-income frontline neighborhoods and communities of color. Goldtooth said he was worried that “net-zero” could end up as a policy of “minimizing risk, rather than stopping the actual expansion of fossil fuels.” He is right to be worried. A year ago, amid the protests that sprung up in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, Chevron CEO Mike Wirth declared, “I share the anger and pain felt by so many Americans at the recent killings of unarmed black men and women.” And after former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin’s April conviction in the murder of Floyd, the Chamber put out a statement saying: “The U.S. Chamber will continue to bring together the business community to advance sustainable solutions that address America’s disparities and close the economic divide. All the evidence is quite to the contrary. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce — and the fossil fuel industry that supports it — is all about minimizing the risk to itself while forcing the continued expansion of fossil fuels. They remain about the business of unsustainable solutions that will maintain the divide and the disparities as to who profits from fossil fuels and who is sickened by them.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The Chamber of Commerce says it cares about people of color. The receipts say otherwise. on Jul 23, 2021.