If you were to believe reporting from The New York Times—which is an increasingly unwise idea—the Trump administration is diverting the attention of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from poor and minority communities that face “disproportionately high levels of pollution.” But if you scratch the surface even a bit, you find that what’s really being eliminated are “environmental justice” offices that infuse identitarian ideology into EPA enforcement efforts. Americans should welcome efforts to strip racial obsessions from the armory of regulators who already wield too much power.
Competing Takes on ‘Environmental Justice’
“The Trump administration intends to eliminate Environmental Protection Agency offices responsible for addressing the disproportionately high levels of pollution facing poor communities, according to a memo from Lee Zeldin, the agency administrator,” Lisa Friedman wrote for the Times. She added that the memo directed the reorganization and elimination of “offices of environmental justice at all 10 E.P.A. regional offices as well as the one in Washington.”
Contrast that with a press release from the EPA, which states “that EPA will immediately revise National Enforcement and Compliance Initiatives to ensure that enforcement does not discriminate based on race and socioeconomic status (as it has under environmental justice initiatives) or shut down energy production and that it focuses on the most pressing health and safety issues.”
Whatever you think of the Trump administration in general, EPA Administrator Zeldin is on the right side of this debate. As I wrote in 2022 when the Biden administration formally introduced “environmental justice” concerns to the EPA, the term refers to “a decades-old school of thought that seeks to graft identitarian politics onto environmental concerns. That allows practitioners to wield civil rights law in addition to traditional environmental laws against perceived malefactors. It also makes it possible to slam offenders as ‘bigots’ if their actions affect one community more than another.”
There’s no need to read between the lines to figure out what is meant by “environmental justice”—its advocates are quite clear about their meaning. In 2021, the Northeastern University School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs published A User’s Guide to Environmental Justice: Theory, Policy, & Practice by Ken Kimmell, Alaina Boyle, Yutong Si, and Marisa Sotolongo.
The Ideology’s History of Racial Obsessions
“The demand for ‘environmental justice’ (EJ) has gained substantial traction in the last few years, as well it should,” the authors wrote in their introduction. “A key pillar in EJ will be widespread, community-designed and community-supported investment in neighborhoods that have been economically and environmentally burdened by a long history of racist government and industry decisions.”
“The environmental justice movement has evolved in parallel with and in response to traditional environmentalism to focus on the unequal distribution of environmental harms among different people and communities,” the authors add in summarizing the history of the movement. “Research revealing the whiteness of the environmental community elevated concerns that social justice and racial justice were not prioritized in mainstream environmentalism.”
“Applying the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination based on race, color, or national origin…frontline communities and others began to use the term ‘environmental racism’ to focus on the unequal (social and spatial) distribution of environmental burdens,” they continue.
So, environmental justice is an ideology that infuses concerns about identity—especially race—into the preexisting ideology of environmentalism, which is empowered in the case of the EPA by government. Regulators then enforce environmental laws with an eye not just to pollution and other damage, real or potential, to the environment, but also with a strong focus on the racial identity of those affected.
That doesn’t sound like much equal protection of the law (whether or not the laws are good), because it’s not. What it does sound like is a patchwork of ideological considerations piggybacking on an already established environmental movement to gain access to political power. What results is more than a little incoherent, held together by a shared willingness to ignore its own contradictions.
“The problem the movement faces is crucial, and probably unavoidable,” Christopher H. Foreman Jr., then of the Brookings Institution, wrote in 1996 (he later expanded his concerns into a full-length book). “The movement has grown, and maintained internal harmony, through a blend of inclusiveness and ideological appeals that derails discussion of priorities and trade-offs.”
“The movement presumes that any person of color voicing any environmental-related anxiety or aspiration represents a genuine environmental justice problem,” he added. “Indeed, a broader redistributive and cultural agenda, as well as a profound discomfort with industrial capitalism generally, lurks just behind the concerns over unequal pollution impacts.”
That is, environmental justice combines identitarian concerns with hostility to the market system and a sort of absolutist environmentalism, held together by a refusal to consider gains and losses inherent in real-world policy choices. It’s not just an ideological Trojan horse intruding into a government bureaucracy; it’s a hot mess.
Ridding EPA of “Environmental Justice” Is Only the First Step
That’s not to say the EPA will be fine and dandy once “environmental justice” is excised from its regulatory apparatus. The EPA is still an out-of-control bureaucracy that gets in the way of cleaner cars that consumers might actually want to buy, focuses on carbon emissions with an almost theological fervor, and sometimes seems committed to turning the lights off on industrial civilization while denying it the resources needed to keep it going. The EPA itself was a problem long before it added racialized environmentalism to the woes it inflicts upon us. It needs to go.
“Today, as environmental concerns butt up against other values, state and local governments have generally shown themselves to be more innovative, and more respectful of private property rights, than their federal counterparts,” Jonathan H. Adler, a law professor at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law, pointed out in the December 2024 issue of Reason. He advocates abolishing the EPA and dispersing whatever of its responsibilities are retained to other federal agencies, states, and localities. He also recommends “removing existing regulatory barriers to the development and deployment of cleaner technologies and alternative energy sources.”
So, let’s celebrate the end of the “environmental justice” at the EPA. We’re better off denying that toxic ideology access to power. But the job won’t be completed until the EPA itself is gone.
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