At the end of his very first week in office, President Joe Biden signed an executive order titled Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad, the first step in many the administration has taken in its effort, as the order says, to “deliver environmental justice.”
What began in the early days of Biden’s presidency has taken many steps, large and small, since then, including massive spending bills like the Inflation Reduction Act and smaller but still significant efforts, like staffing up the Environmental Protection Agency’s environmental justice offices, which formerly had just one employee dedicated to all of the Deep South (there are now around 30, thanks to IRA funding).
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But claims that the administration has made like, “No President has invested more in environmental justice than President Biden,” or that it is leveraging “all available legal tools to secure protections for communities that have been overburdened by pollution and environmental injustices” are now getting cold water poured on them by Biden’s own EPA.
Speaking at a webinar for the American Law Institute last week, Matthew Tejada, the EPA’s deputy assistant administrator for environmental justice, said that it’s “going to take some time” for the agency to, as Bloomberg Law reported, “draft a clear definition and set of guidelines that define cumulative impacts in communities for permitting.”
It’s even slow for the agency to respond to complaints and other queries from residents, EPA staff explained at the same event.
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“Things don’t happen as quickly as they would like. They don’t happen as quickly as I would like, oftentimes. We have not, in the past, explained things well,” said Cheryl Seager, director of enforcement and compliance assurance division EPA Region 6, which covers the Deep South, including areas like Louisiana’s Cancer Alley.
These rather small admissions come after two major legal failures related to environmental justice. First, in June, the EPA scrapped its investigation into the cluster of refineries and other petrochemical plants in Cancer Alley. This could have led to an overhauled permitting process that would account for race.
And then, just last week, a Louisiana judge threw out a lawsuit filed by activists in Saint James Parish, Louisiana, (part of Cancer Alley) that alleged that a 2014 land-use plan discriminates against Black residents by allowing permits for new polluting facilities in predominantly Black communities but not in white parts of the parish.
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The suit was dismissed not on the basis of those allegations, but because there is only a one-year statute of limitations for such cases in Louisiana. As Bloomberg Law reported, the failure of private litigation has left some people “skeptical about whether the EPA and federal law can deliver the results communities want.”
The Biden Administration will likely continue to talk a lot about environmental justice, considering that it’s very much a cornerstone of its climate messaging. But between the investigative and legal failures, and the new messaging from the EPA, it appears the administration is doing some serious managing of expectations after years of promising to deliver big on climate justice.
