Hispanic Heritage Month Climate and Environmental Justice Series: Jenny Hernandez, GreenLatinos

Latino and Hispanic people have played a significant role in struggles for racial, economic, and climate justice. In observance of Hispanic Heritage Month, our Senior Policy Analyst for Climate Justice, Catalina Gonzalez, reached out to several Latino advocates and organizers working on the frontlines of climate justice campaigns. Today, we are sharing a response from Jenny Hernandez of GreenLatinos.

To recognize Hispanic Heritage Month this year, the Center for Progressive Reform asked Latino leaders in the environmental justice and climate movement to share personal reflections about their heritage and their work on a wide range of cross-cutting, intersectional issues that disproportionately affect Hispanic and Latino populations.

The Project 2025 report is 920 pages long, but only a few portions have gotten much public attention. The report’s significance is precisely that it goes beyond a few headline proposals to set a comprehensive agenda for a second Trump administration. There are dozens of significant proposals relating to energy and the environment. Although I can’t talk about all of them here, I want to flag a few of these sleeper provisions. They involve reduced protection for endangered species, eliminating energy efficiency rules, blocking new transmission lines, changing electricity regulation to favor fossil fuels, weakening air pollution rules, and encouraging sale of gas guzzlers.

The U.S. Supreme Court will test how flexible the EPA and states can be in regulating water pollution under the Clean Water Act when it hears oral argument in City and County of San Francisco v. Environmental Protection Agency on October 16. This case asks the court to decide whether federal regulators can issue permits that are effectively broad orders not to violate water quality standards, or instead may only specify the concentrations of individual pollutants that permit holders can release into water bodies.

Around the country, in blue states and red, policymakers are engaging in climate action planning, guided by a far-seeing Inflation Reduction Act funding program — the Carbon Pollution Reduction Grant (CPRG) program — which has devoted $250 million to state, metropolitan, and Tribal planning efforts. A new report from the Center for Progressive Reform, Environmental Justice in State Climate Planning: Learning from California, offers critical insights to help policymakers and advocates working on these plans translate climate goals into action and advance environmental justice.

T.S. Eliot was wrong. April is not the “cruellest month.” June is. In slightly over two weeks at the end of June 2024, the United States Supreme Court made mass murder easier, criminalized homelessness, partially decriminalized insurrection, ignored air pollution and climate change by curtailing agency actions, made it more difficult to fine securities and investment frauds, and deregulated political corruption while failing to affirmatively protect women with possibly fatal pregnancies. To this list, add the Court’s July 1, 2024, ruling effectively giving Donald Trump a pathway to an authoritarian presidency by delaying his criminal trials and then, as extralegal protection, effectively immunizing him from the worst of possible crimes. How did we get here? Rena Steinzor's new book, American Apocalypse, makes an important contribution to the literature examining the Right by bringing together several movements that have landed us where we are today.

A government that recognizes that it has an affirmative responsibility to address social and economic harms that threaten the stability of our democracy. An empowered and well-resourced administrative state that helps carry out this responsibility by, among other things, collaborating with affected members of the public, particularly members of structurally marginalized communities, while marshaling its own independent expertise. We believe that these are some of the core principles that should make up a progressive vision of an administrative state.

On September 17, the Center for Progressive Reform published a new policy brief, Rising to the Challenge: How State Public Utilities Commissions Can Use the Inflation Reduction Act to Advance Clean Energy. This brief examines the ability of public utilities commissions (PUCs) to incorporate Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) funding into their energy planning processes in order to expand the uptake of renewable energy resources at a lower cost to consumers.

The summer of 2024 will be remembered for many things, but here at the Center for Progressive Reform, what most struck us was that it was the year that the administrative state broke through into public consciousness. From the unexpected virality of, and backlash against, Project 2025 — a massive right-wing legal manifesto as aggressive as it was arcane — to the Supreme Court regulatory rulings that made headlines for weeks, this year’s political news drove home that the work we do to protect the environment, the workforce, and public health matters very much to we, the people when these things are under attack. In this context, we approach the task of inviting new members to join us in our work with seriousness, but also with much excitement. This spring, we reviewed nearly two dozen exceptional candidates from the fields of law and public policy. Today, we are pleased to announce that we have a cohort of three excellent scholars to add to our ranks.