TAP alum Brentin Mock, writing in The Root, spends a few paragraphs dealing with last week's confrontation between Sen. Barbara Boxer and National Black Chamber of Congress CEO Harry Alford over climate change legislation before moving on to more important issues -- like the fact that black groups focused on environmental justice simply don't have a seat at the policy-making table:
In May, Kari Fulton of the Environmental Justice and Climate Change Initiative, a coalition that's been addressing climate change since 2000, was disinvited from speaking at a press conference on the EPA carbon dioxide endangerment findings. According to Fulton, the Sierra Club pulled the plug on her – after initially inviting her – after deciding that the EJCC’s position on how cap and trade policy affects African Americans wasn’t in alignment with the other mainstream environmental groups speaking at the press conference, among whom was the National Wildlife Federation.
When environmental justice groups are silenced, D.C. policy makers are left with groups like NBCC claiming to speak for African Americans. Like the NBCC, the EJCC knows something about black people. Unlike the NBCC, though, they actually have climate change experts.
It's sort of mind-boggling, given their impact on poor and minority communities, the degree to which environmental-justice issues have been ignored and groups that focus on such issues have been politically marginalized, even as groups taking thousands from Exxon Mobil use race in their defense.
In the meantime, it turns out that a study conducted in the Bronx and upper Manhattan suggests exposure to air pollution during pregnancy adversely affects the IQ of the child. So it's not like dealing with this is urgent or anything. We should just keep arguing about who really speaks for black people on climate change: the NAACP, whose centennial celebration was sponsored by Exxon, the Congressional Black Caucus, which got $25,000 from Exxon, or the NBCC, which has gotten $275,000 from Exxon since 1998. I won't even throw CORE in there because this is a serious post, and I'm not trying to make anyone laugh.
To be fair, Mock points out that the money hasn't translated into influence with the NAACP or the CBC the way it has for the NBCC or the hacktacular CORE; the NAACP supported the American Clean Energy and Securities Act and most of the CBC voted for it. But since groups with expertise on the issue are being kept out of the loop, Exxon is still getting their money's worth.
-- A. Serwer
