Last week, Kai Wright questioned whether environmental justice was "enough" for black Americans, or should their green concerns be more rooted in jobs and economic sustainability:

When policymakers systematically clump bus depots and waste treatment plants in black neighborhoods, driving up childhood asthma rates, it's a civil rights concern. When slumlords refuse to strip lead paint, they're preying upon poor families. Black people have been trained, in recent decades, to get these connections.

But that largely defensive, health-based environmentalism is no longer enough—if it ever was.

In following with the Supreme Court decision Massachusetts v. EPA handed down in April of 2007, the Environmental Protection Agency has proposed that greenhouse gases are air pollutants, under the Clean Air Act, that instigate climate change and thus endanger health and public welfare. Under this finding, the EPA is poised to regulate carbon-dioxide emissions from new cars at the very least, and likely power plants as well. Regulations are more likely to come from legislative action, but either way regulations would take months, if not years to implement.

Notable in the statement released from the EPA today is an environmental-justice emphasis: