Advocates: Senate bill means environmental health, also harm

Billions of dollars in climate and environment investments could flow to communities in the United States that have been plagued by pollution and climate threats for decades, if the proposed Inflation Reduction Act becomes law. The bill, announced by Sens. Chuck Schumer and Joe Manchin last month, could also jumpstart a transition to clean energy in regions still dominated by fossil fuels.

But there are also provisions in the bill that are supportive of fossil fuel expansion. And some who live and work where climate and environmental injustices are the norm worry that those parts of the bill force their communities to accept further harm from pollution, in order to protect their health from climate change

“Environmental justice communities once again appear to be placed in a precarious position of having to accept risky carbon capture and sequestration technologies, more pollution, and unfair health ‘trade-offs’ in order to get environmental and climate benefits,” Robert Bullard, a professor of urban planning and environmental policy at Texas Southern University in Houston, told the Associated Press after reading the bill. Bullard is also a member of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council.

Still, experts say the climate and environmental justice provisions proposed in this bill, along with other federal investments in pollution reduction and climate damage avoidance, are historic and could mean a generational shift in environmental health for some regions of the U.S.

“Over the last two years, there’s probably more money being invested in these communities than over the last 20 years,” Sacoby Wilson, associate professor at the University of Maryland School of Public Health, said.

The regions that could most benefit from the approximately $45 billion...