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This post is the sixth in a series about human rights and environmental, climate, and energy justice. The series builds on a forthcoming article, Environmental Justice as Environmental Human Rights, by Member Scholar John H. Knox and co-author Nicole Tronolone.
This summer, we marked the one-year anniversary of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the United States’ most significant climate change law. Many advocates for environmental justice, myself included, were disappointed by several features of the Act, including the greenlighting of certain fossil fuel infrastructure projects. Nevertheless, the law unlocked unprecedented streams of investment into clean energy via tax credits and direct spending mechanisms.
In this post, I process these components of the Act from an environmental justice perspective, one year in. How have they opened new spaces for progress toward environmental justice, and what new challenges do they present? I contend that the Act represents not just a slew of new initiatives, but a new theory of environmental justice that bears closer scrutiny as it moves from paper to practice.
Environmental News Bits 