Securing Climate Justice Federally: A Political Economy Approach to Targeted Investments

How can the federal Justice40 policy framework tackle climate change and social inequalities at the same time and in the same places? We adopt a political economy approach. We situate environmental injustice in the context of long-standing racist patterns of public–private investments in the United States, especially in housing, through practices such as redlining, transportation, and industrial development. We argue that any policy approach aiming to eliminate environmental racism needs to take on public–private investment patterns at comparable scale. And building on our recent research into New York State’s own efforts to build on the lessons of California’s experience of targeted green investments, and our survey of reports on the Justice40, we make five broad recommendations to federal policymakers: (1) we argue that the Justice40 mandate should apply to a far broader range of public–private investments than currently planned (and thus allocate tens of billions of dollars annually); (2) we urge the federal government not to use the California model of a unilinear scale, and to adopt New York’s proposal to count all low-income individuals as eligible for disproportionate investments in green home improvements; (3) we recommend that the federal government (or state governments) take equity stakes in offshore wind, with revenues being reinvested based on the Justice40 formula; (4) we argue that the federal government must fund community groups’ governance capacity so that they can exert meaningful control over local investments; and (5) we call for embedding Justice40 in an overarching framework of green high-road economic development.