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In his first month in office, President Biden signed an executive order, “Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad,” recommitting the federal government to climate action and environmental justice. In April 2023, an additional executive order, “Revitalizing Our Nation’s Commitment to Environmental Justice for All,” reinforced the administration’s commitment to a “whole-of-government approach to environmental justice.” The renewed commitment to environmental justice is gratifying for all who care about these issues — and the challenge of accomplishing whole-of-government implementation is real. Among numerous complicating aspects of this shift, one key challenge is state resistance — even outright hostility — to federal environmental justice priorities.

This summer, we marked the one-year anniversary of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the United States’ most significant climate change law. Many advocates for environmental justice, myself included, were disappointed by several features of the Act, including the greenlighting of certain fossil fuel infrastructure projects. Nevertheless, the law unlocked unprecedented streams of investment into clean energy via tax credits and direct spending mechanisms.

Energy justice mandates that renewable energy transitions center marginalized and historically overburdened households, including fenceline and extraction communities, that have faced heightened burdens from the prevalent fossil fuel-based energy system, and further have been mostly overlooked by the burgeoning renewable energy sector.

Member Scholar John Knox's article, Environmental Justice as Environmental Human Rights, recognizes the many accomplishments of U.S. environmental law while pointedly acknowledging its greatest shortcoming: the failure to address environmental racism. As a solution, the article proposes stronger linkages between environmental justice movements and international human rights law. As the article explains, international human rights law provides an important tool for understanding how environmental racism undermines U.S. environmental law.

A forthcoming article by John Knox and Nicole Tronolone brings international human rights law to bear on the issue of environmental justice. They argue that international human rights law provides a basis for treating some types of environmental inequities as human rights violations. In particular, they argue that the government has a duty to redress racial disparities in exposure to pollution and toxic chemicals. In their view, the government has conspicuously failed in this duty. In a recent article of my own, I tried to work through questions about how regulations could address economic and racial inequality.

According to conventional expectations, the idea of incorporating stories in rulemaking will seem radical, but it is conventional expectations that have led to the country’s failure to effectively promote environmental justice. International norms highlight this failure. There cannot be a “right to participate” if the best method of participating — storytelling — is devalued or ignored. Now is the time — past time, really — to build the procedures we need to listen to the environmental justice stories no one hears.

The quest for environmental justice is also a quest for environmental human rights. The fight is the same fight, and the lessons learned in one arena can help in the other.

Under the Federal Power Act, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has an obligation to maintain national grid reliability and to ensure “just and reasonable” rates for wholesale electricity sales and transmission. Notably, Congress has not granted FERC authority over the siting and permitting of most interstate transmission lines, as it has with interstate natural gas pipelines, leaving that authority over power lines primarily with the states. Even in the absence of congressional action, however, FERC has powerful tools using its existing statutory authority over rates and reliability to incentivize regulated transmission owners and grid planners to build the large-scale regional “macro-grid” the country needs.

President Biden had ambitious plans, with the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL), to rebuild America’s aging infrastructure and revitalize our economy by fighting climate change through creating green jobs, reducing our greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and championing environmental justice. In the scant few years since the passage of these monumental laws, changes are already taking root. For example, in Maryland, funding is flowing to various sectors of the state — private and public — for grid modernization, transportation planning, funding green banks, and cleaning polluted air, and all of it in the service of environmental justice.