I read the article—about the latest UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report—with rising dread, and then clicked and scrolled my way into a wormhole of terrifying environmental news. The story is simple and devastating. Climate change caused by manmade pollution is changing our world in ways that are making it less habitable for human and animal life as we know it. Cold spells have decreased, and record heat waves have increased; droughts and wildfires have become more frequent. Sheets of ice are rapidly melting around the globe, pushing up sea levels that were already rising because heat makes ocean water molecules expand. The impact on human life is already happening, with increases in casualties from climate-exacerbated weather events, malnutrition, and infectious diseases as well as declines in mental health. Those who say we can’t sacrifice economic growth for environmental protection are failing to account for the economic costs of climate change that are already upon us: an estimated $240 billion a year in the United States currently, due to increased extreme weather. That figure represents nearly half the average annual growth of the U.S. economy from 2009 to 2019. Some scientists also say that we are in a new era of mass extinction, having lost half the animal population over the past forty years due to “habitat destruction, overhunting, toxic pollution, invasion by alien species and climate change.” The news gets worse the more you read.
But the same spiral down into despair is the one you can take out of it: humans are creating these catastrophic problems for ourselves, and humans can turn things around. Solutions are at the ready that would slow global warming and avoid the worst impacts that scientists are portending. Business and government could help make the ways we travel, live, and work more energy efficient, while switching our reliance from polluting fossil fuels to cleaner renewable energy sources like solar and wind power. Twenty years ago, these new technologies were prohibitively expensive; now they’re often cheaper than higher-pollution fuels, even without adding the true externalized costs of fossil fuels to their sticker price, as we could and should. It’s possible for our food and farming systems to use fewer toxic chemicals, exploit fewer animals, and consume less water and land. In the transformation of whole industries, we could create millions more higher-paying jobs and target economic opportunities to the communities and people who have suffered the most under our unequal, polluting economic status quo. And the United States, the country that invented the solar cell, could lead the way.
But we are not. When I finally put my phone down hours later, my son in the deepest, most peaceful part of his sleep and me wondering if I could even close my eyes again before dawn, I thought, “When the entire weight of science the world over is sending us an alarm, why is my country refusing to rise?”
is, in many ways, the problem. We are the biggest carbon polluter in history, but we have one of the strongest and most politically powerful factions opposed to taking action to prevent catastrophic climate change. In our peer countries, the conservative political parties draw contrast with the center and left by advocating for corporate climate solutions over government programs and regulations. Only in the United States does our conservative party, with very few exceptions, flat-out deny that there’s a problem. The opposition of the American conservative political movement is the primary reason the United States has not taken stronger legislative action to reduce greenhouse gases; our inaction is one of the main reasons the world has continued to warm. In short, the loss of human and animal life and habitats that we are already experiencing is in no small part due to the American conservative political faction. And that political faction is almost entirely white.
On a cloudy Thursday morning in June 2019, Oregon State Senate president Peter Courtney walked into the Capitol Building intending to call the day’s session to order. Courtney is a tall, white-haired Democrat, a somber public servant who’s served the longest of any of the state’s legislators. On the agenda that day was a long-negotiated bill to institute a statewide cap-and-trade emissions program to combat climate change. But when Senator Courtney looked around the two-story chamber, many of the Art Deco wooden desks that had been there since 1938 were empty. Only his Democratic colleagues were present. The entire Republican delegation had refused to come to work in order to deny the Democratic majority a voting quorum to even consider the climate change bill. As the governor and remaining legislators scrambled to find out what had happened, it became clear that the Republican senators had gone into hiding to avoid the Oregon government for which they worked. In a speech Senator Courtney delivered to a mostly empty chamber, his voice faltered multiple times. He called it “the saddest day of my legislative life.”
Courtney asked Oregon’s governor, Kate Brown, to send the state’s sheriffs to find the runaway lawmakers and bring them back to their duties. Then a Republican state senator, Brian Boquist, suggested that if that happened, he would kill the police. “Send bachelors and come heavily armed,” he said on camera. “I’m not going to be a political prisoner in the state of Oregon.” (I tried to imagine a Black lawmaker making this statement and still walking free or holding his job, as Boquist has, but my mind just couldn’t compute it.) Right-wing militias threatened the Capitol building in support of the runaway legislators. The Democrats tabled the bill.
The next year, Democrats offered major concessions to the rural industries represented by the Republican lawmakers, even though logging is the state’s biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions. Then the Oregon Republicans walked out again. It’s hard to understand this brinkmanship if you assume that their goal is a bill that better reflects their rural constituents’ interests. But it’s not: Senate Republican leader Herman Baertschiger Jr. simply disbelieves the scientific consensus that humans are responsible for climate change. The cost to the people of Oregon of his defending this unfounded and minority opinion was immense. Of the 258 bills introduced in the legislative session, only three were passed due to the Republican walkout.
The willingness to have their state make basically no improvements in policies for their citizens for an entire year reminded me, yet again, of the drained public pool. The only-if-it-suits-us commitment to government and democracy—from people who are paid to govern, no less—reminded me of the people (always all white) on the other side of Demos’s voting rights lawsuits. I’d come to understand voter suppression and gutted public goods as contests for power that had everything to do with race, but the Oregon GOP’s act of political warfare didn’t seem to be about race; it was about stopping the majority from following scientific recommendations to save the planet for everyone. I couldn’t easily connect the dots.
The biggest national environmental organizations (nicknamed the Big Greens) don’t readily make the connection, either. Their narrative about their opposition has been about corruption and greed. They point to the millions of dollars spent by fossil fuel companies to turn skeptical scientists into sources for “both sides” reporting. They name-check the well-funded conservative think tanks able to produce a purported expert to sow doubt in every congressional hearing on the climate. They catalogue the campaign contributions and post-career lobbyist jobs that convince politicians to fall in line. And their story of how corruption has pushed us backward in environmental protection over the past generation, even as the stakes have gotten higher, is undeniably true.
Yet there’s more to the story. I began to take notice of something that nobody in the Big Greens seemed to be talking about: the key players waging war against environmental protection were reliably white men, from the industry executives to the politicians to the media commentators. I also grew curious about why white Americans are more prone to following the political leadership of these antiscience crusaders in the Republican party, regardless of the catastrophic risks of their being wrong. That’s where there’s very little conventional wisdom in the green movement. I asked my friend May Boeve, a cofounder of one of the newer big climate groups, 350.org, whether she saw climate change denial as an identity issue. “Honestly, I don’t know that anybody in the Big Greens does. We see that it’s become a partisan issue, for sure—and we are very aware that communities of color are being hit first and worst by climate impacts. But generally speaking, our field sees race impacting climate as a disparities issue, not a racial politics issue.”
May’s organization was cofounded by a white climate expert named Bill McKibben and a group of white Middlebury College students from Vermont in 2009, with the aim of mobilizing hundreds of countries into mass action for climate solutions. It operates in 180 countries, training mostly young people for demonstrations that have included anti–Keystone Pipeline rallies, the People’s Climate March in 2014, and the Global Climate Strike in 2019. The global, multicultural scope of 350.org’s work, combined with its years of partnership with Indigenous climate activists, has spurred its leadership to deepen their racial justice analysis. So, as I set out to determine what was going on with the connection between racism and opposition to climate action, I promised to share with May what I was learning.
It turns out that white people in America are much less likely than people of color to rank environmental problems as a pressing concern. Public opinion surveys show that Black and Latinx people are more supportive of national and international climate change solutions than white people are. In fact, if it were up to only white people, we might not act at all. According to the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, fewer than 25 percent of white people said they were willing to join a campaign to convince government to act on climate change. The majority of white Americans fell into the categories the researchers called “Cautious,” “Disengaged,” “Doubtful,” or “Dismissive,” meaning they don’t know enough, don’t care, or are outright opposed to taking action. By contrast, 70 percent of Latinx and 57 percent of Black people are either “Alarmed” or “Concerned.” Like so many issues in public life, race appears to significantly shape your worldview about climate change.
When I shared this and other research about race and climate viewpoints with May on a phone call, she was reflective. “Maybe it’s because, despite the prominence of so many leaders of color, white environmentalists play such an outsize role in the Big Green leadership. This”—how resistant white Americans are to taking action—“remains a blind spot for the mainstream environmental movement,” she told me.
“In some ways, it makes sense,” I replied. “The same power structures that advantage white people in the world are advantaging white people in the advocacy field, and the cost of that is that the field is not seeing where the biggest untapped base is for organizing.”
“It’s interesting,” May said, “because 350 is a global organization, so I do spend a lot of time thinking about how culture shapes different people’s worldviews and what will move them to action…It’s different in Bangladesh versus Hong Kong versus Egypt versus the U.S., or the many communities within each of those places. But, of course, the most powerful worldview we need to contend with is white supremacy. Of course it is,” she said, then added with a little laugh, “and the patriarchy.” Indeed, the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication found that of the six categories of American opinion about climate change, the “Dismissive” were more likely to be white, male, and have higher incomes.
But why? My first instinct is always to follow the money and power: Are powerful interests using race to sell climate denialism to white people? Polling shows that the racial divide on support for climate change action sharpened as Barack Obama made it a priority during his administration, negotiating the international Paris Climate Accord, instituting higher fuel economy standards on automobiles, and launching a Clean Power Plan for states to switch to renewable energy. Looking at the decline in white support for climate action under Obama, political science professor Salil D. Benegal hypothesized that part of it was due to racial priming from conservative political elites, who “made explicit associations to Obama with frequent use of frames and imagery highlighting a black president harming jobs in predominantly white areas.” Indeed, the fossil fuel billionaire Koch brothers and their network covertly supported the spread of the Tea Party movement, which actively opposed measures to address climate change. By the 2016 election, the coal miner had become a symbol of white masculinity under attack from big government.
Professor Benegal then analyzed the opinion data and found that, even when one controlled for partisanship, racial resentment (“a general orientation toward Blacks characterized by a feeling that Blacks do not try hard enough and receive too many favors”) was highly correlated with climate change denialism. “Asking respondents if they agree that climate change is largely due to human activity, we see…a 57% probability that a white Republican disagrees that climate change is anthropogenic [caused by humans] at the lowest level of racial resentment, increasing to 84% at the highest level of racial resentment.” So, it’s not just a symptom of increased partisan polarization; even within the Republican Party, racism increases the likelihood of opposing climate action.
In an influential 2011 study cheekily named “Cool Dudes,” the researchers Aaron M. McCright and Riley E. Dunlap examined public opinion data from the period of 2000 to 2010 and found that conservative white men were much more likely to be climate change deniers. The researchers attributed it not to any biological difference, of course, but rather, to the story that white men receive from elite white males in the political media with whom they identify, and the story they tend to believe about themselves, which they described as “identity-protection cognition” and a “system-justification” worldview that is resistant to change. McCright and Dunlap wrote, “Conservative white males are likely to favor protection of the current industrial capitalist order which has historically served them well.”
I thought about the many, many moments in my career when politically moderate or conservative white men, whether in Congress or in the editorial pages, had weighed in against action on some social good—environmental protection, raising revenue for public investment, consumer financial regulation—by claiming that it would be “bad for the economy.” Our side always had to then jump through hoops to make elaborate statistical models proving that it wouldn’t be costly or that it would create jobs and stimulate overall economic growth. But what dawned on me, when I read the research showing that conservative white men tended to justify a system that had served them well, was that “the economy” being defended was not the textbook definition I’d learned: the sum total of our population’s consumption, goods, and services. That definition of the economy is one that could go on quite well and even flourish without white men being such lopsided beneficiaries. “The economy” that they were referring to was their economy, the economic condition of people like them, seen through the lens of a zero-sum system of hierarchy that taught them to fear any hint of redistribution. Value-neutral admonitions about protecting “the economy” allowed them to protect their own status while resting easy knowing that they were not at all racist, because it wasn’t about race—it was about, well, “the economy.”
In 2016, a Finnish sociologist named Kirsti M. Jylhä published findings that built on McCright and Dunlap’s “Cool Dudes” study, adding to their “system justification” worldview her finding that a “social dominance orientation” was predictive of climate change denial. After reading her work, I went to visit her at New York University, where she was visiting on a year-long fellowship. She is a tall woman with pale skin and almost white-blonde hair, originally from Finland and now living in Sweden. I joined her in her dimly lit and sparsely decorated cube of an office, and we delved right into her methodology. She was quick to clarify that social dominance orientation isn’t about people who have a dominant personality; rather, it’s people who express beliefs about the way things ought to be that are “learned in society through socialization.
“It’s more about accepting that there are differences between groups,” she said. “That some groups are better and some groups are worse. So, people who score high in social dominance orientation…tend to see the world as a competitive triangle, where it’s natural and inevitable that hierarchies exist. And so, society shouldn’t do anything to reduce [those hierarchies], because there’s probably something in these groups who have a lower position that has caused their lower position.”
I responded, “I think most liberals in the United States think that the reason Republicans deny the existence of climate change or are opposed to acting is because they are financially invested in the status quo. Either they’re politicians who are paid by fossil fuel lobbies, or they work in resource-extractive industries….Or they are opposed to government intervention, and they don’t trust the government. So how,” I asked, “is social dominance correlated to climate change?”
Jylhä responded: “There is some sort of unconscious risk calculation going on there, kind of like…Should we really do all these changes? Are the risks so high?…Social dominance orientation comes into play here. Based on this risk allocation, they think that, ‘Hmm, it sounds quite horrible, but I don’t think that I will be the one who would suffer if it’s true.’…Future generations will suffer. Animals will suffer. And people in, for example, developing countries and in islands and so on, are already suffering because of climate change.” But if white American men who buy the zero-sum story don’t see themselves as suffering, their bias will be toward retaining a status quo that rewards them, even if it leads to suffering for others.
Jylhä told me about unpublished findings she and her U.S. colleagues were beginning to see, findings yielding an even further fine-tuned articulation of the dominance worldview, something they were calling “exclusionary preferences.” (I wasn’t sold on the euphemistic name.) She explained: “It’s also about wanting to [resist] change [in] the society and wanting to maintain societal structures where, for example, discrimination is accepted and where the [native-born]…groups and men have the power positions that they [are] used to hav[ing].”
In the middle of our interview, the fire alarm went off, and the entire building was evacuated. We couldn’t help but note the irony. Thrust from the stillness of her office, to a chaotic Manhattan sidewalk full of people, our conversation took a more personal turn. “When I came here, immediately from the first day,” Professor Jylhä admitted thinking, “ ‘Wow. I am white.’ ”
I smiled. She continued, faltering as we so often do when getting personal about race, “People [were] not treating me in weird ways. It’s not like, how people respond[ed] to me….Maybe it even comes from…the diversity.”
“Yeah,” I offered, “you’re not used to seeing this many people who are not white in one place all the time…?”
“Yeah. And also, the class differences are more. Because we don’t have these types of class—I mean, we do also have class inequality in Sweden. But people who are poor, they are guaranteed to have their own apartments. They have food. And they have treatment if they have mental health issues, physical health issues. It’s not like people are left, just thrown out from the system.”
Hearing her describe Sweden’s more humane society helped me connect the dots on how living in a society like ours could shape your perception of your own climate change risks. “That comes back to your social dominance orientation, right?” I asked. “If you’re in a society where you’ve already let someone go without shelter, then what does it matter if they drown? If it’s okay for people to suffer, then it’s okay for people to suffer. And if your wealth has protected you from that suffering, then your wealth can probably protect you from another kind of suffering.”
Our conversation moved to the other climate-relevant worldviews that other researchers had identified, including racial resentment and system justification. When she mentioned the Benegal racial resentment study, I said, “That is very American.”
She said, “Yeah, yeah,” but I wasn’t sure that someone who grew up with a functioning social democracy in a pretty racially homogenous country would necessarily understand the nuances of American racism and its relationship to government action. So, I explained.
“Racial resentment goes through government for us. For most of our history, the government was the racist. But many white people now believe, consciously or unconsciously, that the government has taken the other side and is now changing the ‘proper’ racial order through social spending, civil rights laws, and affirmative action. This makes the government untrustworthy. And so, racial resentment by whites and distrust of government are very highly correlated. And then distrust of government and not wanting government to do anything about climate change…” I made a hand gesture to show that one could naturally follow the other. She took her notepad out of the purse she’d grabbed as we evacuated her office and took notes. We talked for a little while longer and then wished each other well.
On my rush-hour subway ride home, I was packed in tight with a cross-section of New York City: faces in every human hue; multiple languages within earshot; a kid I’d seen hop the turnstile for lack of the $2.75 fare holding the same pole as a woman in $800 shoes. Was Kirsti Jylhä on a train like this for the first time when she thought, “Wow, I’m white?” Or was she on a subway platform watching everyone give a wide berth to an unhoused man asleep on a bench?
“When I came here, [it became] not theoretical,” she had told me that afternoon. “You know, there is a difference of knowing and understand[ing]. So, I think I have come to understanding.”
It was sad for me to hear that a short time in my country had brought this idealistic Nordic academic a deeper understanding of the social dominance theory she’d been writing about: what it looks like when a group of people demonstrate little empathy for the suffering of others. But of course, it did. The Nordic countries’ social-democratic policies—generous subsidies for housing, education, and retirement and, newly relevant to me, 480 days of parental leave in Sweden—are almost unimaginable in today’s America, because the dominant American political culture would say that people lacking those privileges are responsible for their situations. You can’t find a starker contrast between two versions of society that are both wealthy democracies. But the Nordic model of democracy rests on a mostly homogenous “demos”; unlike the United States, Finland didn’t have mass slavery and genocide to cut their empathic cord at the country’s birth. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had intended to get the United States closer to the Nordic model in his third term, announcing an “Economic Bill of Rights” proposal, with the right to a job, housing, and medical care “regardless of station, race or creed,” in his second-to-last State of the Union address. But just as southern Democrats in Congress had weakened the New Deal in 1938 and would go on to kill national healthcare in 1948, they would have sabotaged FDR’s Second Bill of Rights as well. Racism has a cost for everyone. And with the environment and climate change, many white people’s skeptical worldview, combined with their outsize political power, has life-or-death consequences for us all.
Perhaps it makes sense, if you’ve spent a lifetime seeing yourself as the winner of a zero-sum competition for status, that you would have learned along the way to accept inequality as normal; that you’d come to attribute society’s wins and losses solely to the players’ skill and merit. You might also learn that if there are problems, you and yours are likely to be spared the costs. The thing is, that’s just not the case with the environment and climate change. We live under the same sky. Scorching triple-digit days, devastating wildfires, and drought restrictions on drinking water have become the new normal for California’s working-class barrios and gated communities alike. Wall Street was flooded by Superstorm Sandy; most of the 13 million people with imperiled seafront housing on the coasts belong to the upper classes. The cash crops at the base of the American agribusiness economy are threatened by more frequent droughts. The majority of white Americans are skeptical or opposed to tackling climate change, but the majority of white Americans will suffer nonetheless from an increasingly inhospitable planet.
It all seemed to come back to the zero-sum story: climate change opposition is sold by an organized, self-interested white elite to a broader base of white constituents already racially primed to distrust government action. The claims are racially innocent—we won’t risk the economy for this dubious idea—but those using them are willing to take immense risks that might fall on precisely the historically exploited: people of color and the land, air, animals, and water. Like the zero-sum story, it’s all an illusion—white men aren’t truly safe from climate risk, and we can have a different but sustainable economy with a better quality of life for more people. But how powerful the zero-sum paradigm must be to knock out science and even a healthy sense of self-preservation. And how dangerous for us all.
we live under the same sky is to reject the dominant U.S. approach to environmental risk, which has been to shunt off the pollution by-products of industry to what’s known as “sacrifice zones.” For nearly fifty years, grassroots activists living in these sacrifice zones—Richmond, California; Ocala, Florida; South Bronx, New York; Youngstown, Ohio, and many more—have been proving how racism shapes environmental policy. Collecting soil samples and keeping diaries of hospital visits, mapping the distance between incinerators and neighborhoods of color, they have built a damning record of environmental racism—and a movement for environmental justice.
Dr. Robert Bullard is a sociologist considered by many to be the father of that movement. It happened almost by accident: in 1978, a pioneering lawyer named Linda McKeever Bullard was preparing to file what would be the first lawsuit to use civil rights law to challenge the placement of pollutants in the Black communities of Houston. She turned to Dr. Bullard, her husband, to conduct the research. “There was no environmental justice movement…no studies that dealt with race and environment, or environmental racism,” he told me. “And so, we designed a study and collected the data, laid out the research protocol. And what we found was one hundred percent of all the city-owned landfills were located in Black neighborhoods….Six out of eight of the city-owned incinerators were in Black neighborhoods. And three out of four of the private-owned landfills were in Black neighborhoods. From the thirties up ’til 1978, eighty-two percent of all the garbage, waste, was dumped in predominantly Black neighborhoods, even though Blacks only made up twenty-five percent of the population.” During the same period, he pointed out, “all of the city council members were white.”
The theory behind the lawsuit, he said, was “that the city of Houston was practicing a form of discrimination in placing landfills in…Black communities. Even though everybody in Houston produced garbage, everybody didn’t have to live near the garbage, the landfills, incinerators, and the waste facilities.” While the lawsuit failed to stop the incinerator from being built in a Black community, the damning data and the effective research protocols helped build a foundation for the environmental justice movement.
The birth of the “EJ” movement in the public consciousness was in 1982, when the state of North Carolina’s decision to dump contaminated soil in the small Black town of Warren was met with civil disobedience that resulted in five hundred arrests. One of those arrested was a leader of the United Church of Christ’s Commission for Racial Justice, Dr. Benjamin Chavis Jr., who would go on to publish the first nationwide study on environmental racism five years later. The church’s groundbreaking “Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States” report found that race was the most important predictor of proximity to hazardous waste facilities in America and that three out of five Black and Latinx Americans lived in communities with toxic sites. Forty years later, government data still show that Black people are 1.5 times more likely to breathe polluted air and drink unsafe water than the overall population.
travel to the San Francisco Bay Area city of Richmond, California, where a thriving cross-racial environmental justice movement has been taking on the city’s rampant industrial pollution. Richmond is a sacrifice zone in the shadow of one of the country’s largest oil refineries, with thirteen times as many air quality violations as the Bay Area’s average over a decade. Miya Yoshitani, head of the Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN), reminded me that any story about sacrifice zones must start with an explanation of the decisions that created clusters of people of color to target in the first place. “These places are government creations to begin with, that are created by racist policy….And people always want to say, ‘People of color, they’re poor, and so therefore they live in the less desirable places.’ Well, you know…those less desirable places were the only places that they could legally own homes….They’re not accidental….Those are intentional.”
As Richard Rothstein documents in his book The Color of Law, Richmond is one of the quintessential stories of government-created American segregation. It was an epicenter of American manufacturing during World War II, and so, the government quickly created twenty-four thousand units of low-rent public housing—some exclusively for white workers and some for everybody else. Once the rental units reached capacity, the government contracted with a private developer to create a nearby suburban development, called Rollingwood, of higher-quality, permanent housing that white workers could lease or purchase. The Federal Housing Authority guaranteed the developer’s financing on the condition that none of the seven hundred new homes be sold to anyone “not wholly of the Caucasian race.” Barred by law from living in most of the rapidly developing county, Black workers and their families were forced into an area known as North Richmond. North Richmond was an unincorporated area—meaning, not an official town at all, with no government services whatsoever: no roads, streetlights, water, or sewage. The African American wartime workers had to fend entirely for themselves while their white co-workers had all their housing needs met by government subsidy, policy, and planning.
The lines of opportunity and place that a racist government policy drew in the mid-1940s remain in Richmond to this day. In a county rimmed with suburbs that excluded Black families, the city became predominantly Black during the war. The manufacturing and chemical processing plants that created jobs and opportunity in the war era have either closed or become far less labor-intensive, so that Richmond is left with the worst of both worlds: few middle-class jobs and lots of toxic pollution, including abandoned waste. Richmond residents “live within a ring of five major oil refineries, three chemical companies, eight Superfund sites, dozens of other toxic waste sites, highways, two rail yards, ports and marine terminals where tankers dock”—some 350 toxic sites in all. The polluter that’s most synonymous with Richmond, however, is the one-hundred-plus-year-old Chevron refinery, also the dominant player in Richmond politics.
Today, North Richmond is 97 percent Black, Latino, or Asian and, amazingly, still unincorporated. Displacement and poverty have often created tensions across these communities, but activists have helped their neighbors see a common threat to unite them: the polluters in everyone’s backyard. Since forging a multiracial coalition to take control of their city council and take on Chevron, Richmond community groups have won for their residents probably the most important Solidarity Dividend there is: the chance for better health.
To learn more about Richmond, Miya suggested I go for a drive with Torm Nompraseurt, the longest-serving staff member of APEN and one of the first Laotian refugees to the United States. (He arrived in 1975.) I met Torm on a Sunday afternoon at the local museum, where an exhibit about Richmond’s Laotian community was opening. Wearing a black traditional Laotian suit with red trim, Torm greeted me in Lao-accented English, all soft consonants riding on a melodic cadence. He generously introduced me to other community activists of every racial and ethnic background, and he had a hard time making his exit from a gathering where everybody seemed to know his name.
Torm finally said his last goodbyes and led me into his well-used red car for a drive around his neighborhood on the “fence line” abutting the massive Chevron refinery. As we drove, I saw few people out: the day was bright but windy and cold, and besides, from what I could see, there was little to attract them on the street. A chronically disinvested city, Richmond has no full-service grocery store within walking distance. I don’t recall even seeing a corner deli during our nearly hour-long drive around the fence-line neighborhood. What you see most, however, is industry: salvage lots, tankers, freight cars, a massive garbage dump, and factories…so many factories, making pesticides and other chemicals, with none bigger than the nearly three-thousand-acre sprawling complex where Chevron refines about 250,000 barrels of crude oil a day.
We pulled up near an elementary school. In 1996, Richmond’s African American community (spearheaded by Henry Clark, the veteran organizer of the West County Toxics Coalition), won a long battle to close a Chevron incinerator just behind the schoolyard. Even though Chevron has gotten rid of the unnerving sight of incinerator smokestacks jutting up behind a playground structure, the school is still just about a mile from the refinery. Its nearest neighbors are an oil distributor and a chemicals testing lab. Richmond children are hospitalized for asthma at almost twice the rate of those in neighboring areas. (The school is one of the worst-performing in the state, and research increasingly demonstrates a significant link between air quality and student performance.)
Richmond has disproportionately high rates of heart disease and cancer; the plant’s closest neighbors are in the ninety-ninth percentile for asthma rates. The city has the double whammy of fixed and mobile pollution—it not only has an inordinate number of toxic industrial sites, but it’s surrounded on all sides by highways. I asked Torm about his own health. “I am coughing all the time. You know, the Laotians, especially the young kids or the elders, have a lot of asthma and coughing and respiratory issues and so on and so forth….[I]n the Laotian community, we have a member, someone who just passed this morning because she had cancer….Most of the time when our members die, often eighty percent, ninety percent, the doctors say, ‘Well, because of cancer.’ ”
Torm turned his car on to one of the freeways so that he could drive the length of the Chevron facility, which is awe-inspiring in its breadth and glittering detail. The fence surrounding Chevron is six miles long. The plant complex looks like a science-fiction city unto itself, with structures of every different shape interlaced with pipes and tubes, all accented with flickering lights and plumes of smoke. There are some thirty-odd massive round holding tanks that dot the hillside behind it, each painted a burnt umber in a beautification effort to blend them into the surroundings. (That paint job is an unfortunately apt metaphor for corporate social responsibility efforts that are only cosmetic; the darker color wound up making the tanks absorb more heat, leading to more toxic evaporation.) The Chevron plant spews over a thousand pounds of chemicals into the air on a good day. Then there are the bad days.
“On August sixth, 2012, when the siren came on…,” Torm told me, “I know that’s not testing, because [they test on] Wednesday. And so, I know right away in my heart…this is real. And of course, I closed my door and the window and everything and do the shelter-in-place protocol. You put a towel on [the] bottom of the door, to make sure that the air doesn’t come in your house, and close all the doors and windows.
“It’s about a quarter mile from Chevron to my apartment at that time. And then I saw a couple [of] people who ran outside. They were Laotian, who live in the same apartment complex. They ran outside and kind of looked at the smoke. And I opened the door and yelled at them and said, “You cannot go out. Get in your house, and close the door and window and put a towel in your door right away, right now!” And then they said, “What?” I said, “It’s a Chevron fire. It’s chemical. Go in your house!”
The 2012 Chevron fire was caused by a leak from a degraded pipe that Chevron knew for years was at risk of corrosion. Internal recommendations to inspect and replace the pipes because of a common type of sulfur degradation went unheeded for nearly a decade. What began as a drip in the afternoon ended with a fire that sent plumes of chemical smoke into the community’s air, in clouds visible for miles. The chemicals that Chevron cast to the wind that day reached not just Torm and his neighbors in the fence-line community, nearest to the refinery, but three neighboring towns. Medical providers and hospitals reported seeing fifteen thousand people sickened by the fumes in the coming days.
Torm exited the freeway and turned up a steep hill to get a better view of the refinery. As Torm’s old car revved up the slope, it seemed the house values were climbing as well. “These houses seem like they’re more expensive, maybe,” I ventured as we passed a pink house with a Mercedes in the driveway.
“Yes. This is called Point Richmond. [This is] the rich community in Richmond.”
on the southwest edge of the city, a neighborhood up a hill that slopes down into a nature preserve along the harbor. With the median price of houses at $816,000 in 2020, the area is a segregated cluster of mostly white homeowners. Sitting in Torm’s car, however, looking at the way the refinery towers could be seen over the million-dollar rooflines, I couldn’t help but wonder: Aren’t these white people breathing the same air? I asked him about it.
“Well, you know, it’s a very interesting question you ask. Because the wind pattern—it always blows toward North Richmond,” the unincorporated area that’s almost all people of color. “And so, the people who live in Point Richmond—somehow they feel like the wind is doing them a favor, never flows down to their community,” Torm said, and I chuckled at the image of a wind with favors to give.
“[But] one of the years that…a Chevron accident happened…somehow the wind happened to blow down to their side. And I remember, oh my God, they’re screaming and yelling. And then we told them, ‘See? Now you know what we mean.’ ”
Richmond has three community air quality monitors around the city, each one in a neighborhood occupying one rung of the city’s stratification. One is in wealthy Point Richmond, another in the still-unincorporated area of North Richmond, and the third in Atchison Village, an affordable housing complex built during the war exclusively for white workers that’s now a cooperative, home to mostly white seniors and Latinx families. I dug into the data, expecting to see that Point Richmond was largely spared the toxicity that permeated the other areas of the city, but that wasn’t the case. In terms of the number of toxins recorded in the air and the number of days with toxins present, there wasn’t much difference between the three neighborhoods. While the saturation levels may have varied as the wind blew—the data didn’t show—the white part of Richmond was indeed still living under the same sky.
A 2012 study showed that this dynamic was borne out nationwide. Called “Is Environmental Justice Good for White Folks? Industrial Air Toxics and Exposure in Urban America,” the study compared pollution levels by neighborhood in cities and found that the sacrifice zones had more spillover than one might expect. I reached out to one of the study’s authors, Professor Michael Ash at the University of Massachusetts, to talk about what the researchers had discovered. “We wanted in particular to focus on places that had very unequal exposure,” he explained to me. In places where it was “easier, for reasons of the power structure, to displace environmental bads onto vulnerable communities [we wanted to know] are those [the] places that tend to rack up a higher environmental bill across the board?”
He went on: “Not shockingly, places that are unequal are much worse for the socially vulnerable party, but they also turn out to be worse for at least some members of the socially less vulnerable classes.”
Environmental racism, in other words, was bad for better-off white people, too. I asked Professor Ash how it worked. While the study proved correlation, not causation, he believed it was a question of power. He described the elite mindset: “Don’t worry, this pollution can be displaced onto the Other, onto the wrong side of the environmental tracks. So…put on blinders, don’t pay too much attention to the gross amount of pollution that is being produced.”
It made sense. If a set of decision makers believes that an environmental burden can be shouldered by someone else to whom they don’t feel connected or accountable, they won’t think it’s worthwhile to minimize the burden by, for example, forcing industry to put controls on pollution. But that results in a system that creates more pollution than would exist if decision makers cared about everyone equally—and we’re talking about air, water, and soil, where it’s pretty hard to cordon off toxins completely to the so-called sacrifice zone. It’s elites’ blindness to the costs they pay that keeps pollution higher for everyone. Professor Ash let exasperation creep into his voice when he said, “We have the idea that this environmental bad can be displaced on to a socially excluded community, that primes the pump for doing more of it. And then you end up with uncontrollable amounts that are bad absolutely for everyone.”
What’s most frustrating to Professor Ash is that the other side of the ledger—the cost of preventing pollution and saving lives—is usually so small. “The non-tradeoffs are what is shocking here. I mean, we are just—for chump change, we are exposing people to these terrible toxins….It just wouldn’t be that expensive to give everybody a clean and healthy environment.”
2000s, Richmond activists representing different causes and ethnic communities joined together to make a plan to take on Chevron—but they had a lot of mistrust and division to overcome. Chevron had polluted the politics of the city, both by controlling the city council and by cultivating relationships with local groups in ways that activists called cynical and racially divisive. Torm and Miya said that Chevron lobbyists had learned how to pit community groups against each other for small funding grants and scholarships, which Torm likened to Chevron’s “throw[ing] candy on the floor to get a kid fighting.”
He told me, “If you want to talk about this one, you have to look at the root of it. If you think about imperialism, capitalism, conquering and dividing people around the world…most of the white folks who control corporations still think those methods are still useful, and it still can work.”
Through hard work and relationship building, the Richmond Progressive Alliance was born. “And that’s when we launched a…strategy to recruit and support a [city council] candidate who would not take corporate money,” Torm told me with triumph in his voice. “Chevron was dominant because they used a lot of money to buy the community leaders to work for their candidates. But then we launched the campaign to tell people that unless we change the city council decision making, we cannot fight. We can be screaming and yelling [in community meetings] until four in the morning, and the city council still votes the way Chevron wants them to.”
The coalition proposed and vetted candidates, endorsed, knocked on doors, and convinced some of the most overlooked neighborhoods in Richmond to turn out for a progressive slate for the city council. “We were able to kick out the ‘Chevron Five’ and get a progressive majority into city council,” Miya recalls. The coalition’s most remarkable achievement was the election of Green Party mayor Gayle McLaughlin, a white woman, who became a thorn in Chevron’s side. Permits and programs that for decades sailed through approval suddenly met with more inquiry, investigations, hearings, and even lawsuits. When the company sought to create a one-billion-plus-dollar plant expansion for processing the heavier, higher-sulfur crude oil that gas companies increasingly rely on, the coalition sued and won because Chevron hadn’t provided enough information about the pollution impact. “It put the refinery into a major panic,” recalled Miya. The pressure forced an environmental impact assessment and changes to the plan that would reduce emissions and guarantee certain benefits to the community.
Torm drove me past a stunning sixty-acre field of solar panels outside the refinery gates. Called MCE Solar One, it’s part of the community benefits agreement the coalition won and one of the more visible signs of the new day in Richmond. The public owns and generates the low-cost solar energy for residents, which lowers their utility bills and pollution. The solar array was built with 50 percent local labor in partnership with a training program that prepared hundreds of Richmond residents for clean-energy jobs.
“It’s not just one solar project,” Miya told me. “These local models of Just Transition have started to really grow.” Just Transition is a concept first formulated by unions to protect jobs in industries facing environmental regulations in the late 1990s, but environmental justice advocates have adopted it as a way to express the idea that the shift away from a fossil fuel economy doesn’t have to mean massive job losses. In fact, a Just Transition must create good jobs and build community wealth for the low-income communities and people of color who have disproportionately suffered under the current polluting economy.
The Richmond coalition has started to create the green shoots of a Just Transition in a town that was built by racist policies and that has long been poisoned by corporate indifference. The coalition helped pass “a statewide policy that creates incentives for multifamily affordable housing to get solar on buildings that really help lower costs for low-income tenants,” Miya said, excitement in her voice as she listed the ways that power had shifted in Richmond. “The local government even supported a fund that helped us start local-owned cooperatives.” She described a community complex in development that would be a “climate resiliency hub,” with solar power and a microgrid whose profits from electricity generation local youth would direct to investments in the community. “There’s just so many exciting things and ideas that are emerging out of Richmond right now.”
When Miya described the progress in Richmond and the community’s vision for remaking their economy, it seemed like such a win-win to me. Save the planet, create new jobs, build community wealth—what’s not to love? But that’s not how the climate change opposition sees it. For them, it is a zero-sum competition between the environment and the economy as it is. Or perhaps, as the sociologists argue, it’s deeper than that: a zero sum between the winners of the hierarchy today and those who are just fighting for air.
is the type of multiracial coalition that has begun to loosen Chevron’s grip on Richmond is starting to assemble across the nation, putting within sight a Solidarity Dividend for people and the planet. Momentum has been growing at the grass roots. A historic assembly of people from an array of Indigenous communities, putting aside tribal differences and led by Native youth, camped at Standing Rock to protest the Dakota Access Pipeline and build power for Indigenous-led environmental protection. Environmental justice groups led by people of color forced conversations with the Big Greens and their funders about who gets the resources and sets the strategy for the movement. Young people staged record-breaking strikes and protests for climate action across the world. While cast into the wilderness of governing power during the Trump administration, the leaders who are the most committed to saving the planet finally got together to hash out their differences and discover places of mutual interest: labor unions and conservationists, Big Greens and grassroots environmental justice groups, and Native-led groups and youth activists.
This delicate emerging consensus received a jolt of energy when the Green New Deal framework was launched into the political stratosphere. The Green New Deal framework itself represents a multiracial alliance, coauthored by a young Black woman policy wonk, Rhiana Gunn-Wright; sponsored in Congress by a septuagenarian white liberal named Ed Markey and a thirty-year-old Puerto Rican from the Bronx named Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; and forced into the political conversation by a young Indian American woman named Varshini Prakash, whose Sunrise Movement staged a sit-in in soon-to-be House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office. At the time of this writing, there is more energy and alignment in the climate field than there has been in decades, in large part because movement leaders have been forced to see to the damage posed by white supremacy, inside and outside their ranks.
Siloed and often at cross purposes, these groups weren’t powerful enough to take on the strategic deployment of white identity politics backed by fossil fuel billions that slowed President Obama’s progress and allowed Donald Trump to take power vowing to reverse it. Now they’re linking arms around a shared vision of a sustainable, just transition from fossil fuels that guarantees economic security for all those who are suffering—whether they’re asthmatic schoolkids of color or, yes, coal miners. That vision is popular with 59 percent of the population. Multiracial coalitions in cities and states have won versions of the Green New Deal in California, New Mexico, New York, and Washington.
May Boeve came to visit me at home in the fall of 2019, bringing a beautiful knit blanket for my son—and for me: good news about how the climate movement was changing from the inside. As we sat on my couch drinking tea, I felt that she was as optimistic as I’d ever seen her. “It was naive, looking back on it now,” May said with her brow furrowed, “but we didn’t realize how much racism was holding us back from building the kind of coalition we needed to win. We’re trying to make sure that the whole field never makes that mistake again.”