Pirate's Cove

They’re fighting it, you know. On behalf of People Of Color. Because these uber-white Warmists are like most of the rest of their Progressive brethren: racists at heart. They have a low opinion of POC, especially black people, who they think cannot survive without the helpful hand of government and white leftists

Why the Larger Climate Movement Is Finally Embracing the Fight Against Environmental Racism

The 2019 fire at the Philadelphia Energy Solutions refinery started with a simple failure: one leaky elbow pipe in a 1,400-acre facility covered with pipes, tanks and industrial towers. Within a few hours last June, enough gaseous propane had seeped into the air to ignite the facility into a fiery hellscape with an explosion hurling human-size pieces of industrial equipment into the air and shaking the ground miles away. Workers rapidly shut down the facility, which had for decades converted crude oil into usable products.

The workers escaped with only a few minor injuries, but the facility had already spent decades killing its neighbors in South Philadelphia. The refinery–the largest on the East Coast, dating back to the early days of the oil industry in the 19th century–was single-handedly responsible for more than half of the city’s cancer-causing air toxics, according to a report from the city. And it contributed to the 125 premature deaths that the American Thoracic Society and New York University say result from air pollution in Philadelphia each year. The South Philadelphia area surrounding the facility, where 60% of residents are Black, has some of the highest asthma-hospitalization rates in the city, where asthma numbers top those in all but a few U.S. cities. The explosion “was kind of a wake-up call for the rest of the city,” says Derek S. Green, an at-large city-council member in Philadelphia. “If you’re living there every day, the pollution is something that you were constantly dealing with.”

Eight months later and five miles away, a group of Black voters from across Philadelphia filed into a bland conference room of a downtown office building for a focus group on climate change organized by Third Way, a center-left Washington, D.C., policy think tank. The warming planet ranked low on the attendees’ list of priorities, at least at first, but the conversation turned passionate when it came to the pollution in their own backyard.

“You come out and it’s hard to breathe on most days,” said one attendee. Another noted that in Southwest Philadelphia, “all the African Americans grew up with asthma.” The Energy Solutions refinery drew near universal condemnation. “All y’all did was put out the fire,” said another attendee, pointing to the government response. “You didn’t do nothing for those thousand houses who have to breathe in this air. It’s messed up.”

One has to wonder why Democrats have kept black people in the crummy areas of their cities, close to places like the refinery. Aren’t these the areas where White Democrats build public housing projects?

These dynamics are nothing new. For decades, environmental-justice advocates in the U.S. have worked to bring attention to the heightened environmental risks faced by communities of color: higher levels of lead exposure, higher risks of facing catastrophic flooding, and poorer air quality, to name just a few. But progress has been slow on the national stage as the most powerful groups fighting for environmental rules, not to mention government leaders, have largely ignored them.

Today, that conversation is changing. With partisanship at record levels and Republicans still skeptical of climate rules, environmental activists have realized they need a big coalition to pass legislation, and that means getting the enthusiastic backing of people of color. To do that, they are not only talking about the environmental hazards faced by people of color but also putting their concerns at the core of their campaigns.

So, they’ve taken something that’s real, environmental issues affecting neighborhoods, and meshed it with the climate crisis scam? Oh, right, it gives them an extra chance at patronizing POC, and blacks in particular. It also is a way of position the notion that these people are owed fixes, owed reparations, owed money.

COVID-19, which is killing Black Americans at twice the rate of their white counterparts in large part because of environmental issues like pollution-caused asthma and heart disease, has only advanced the urgency for climate backers.

Strange that this is happening in Democratic Party run cities, eh? Something this long, long, long Time Magazine article fails to mention. Let’s skip to the end

This understanding has come slowly, but the increased attention to systemic racism and the urgency of climate change has made for a unique opportunity: address centuries of racism while saving the world from a global warming catastrophe. Indeed, tackling the two together may be a political necessity.

Now ask people if they’re willing to have lots of their own money taken along with lots of their freedom, liberty, and choice, and see how that goes. And ask why there are so many problems in Democratic run cities. And ask why they aren’t addressing actual pollution, rather than dragging in the idiocy of ‘climate change’.

Read: The Uber-White Climate Movement Is Embracing Environmental Racism Or Something »