Exactly a year before Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, the revered civil rights activist did something uncharacteristic. In a speech in New York City, he passionately denounced the Vietnam War and U.S. foreign policy. The man who championed voting rights for African-Americans and rallied the nation’s conscience to fight poverty and racial segregation had taken on a new cause.
Ocasio-Cortez continued:"We talk about cost. We’re going to pay for this whether we pass a Green New Deal or not. Because as towns and cities go underwater, as wildfires ravage our communities, we are going to pay. And we're either going to decide if we’re going to pay to react, or if we're going to pay to be proactive."
“In the past, relative elites controlled the narrative and really gave a false impression in terms of who was concerned about this and was actually impacted by it,” said Jacqueline Patterson, senior director of the NAACP’s Environmental and Climate Justice Program. “For some communities, it really is a life and death situation for all of us, but some communities more than others.
The caucus will approach environmental issues with specific attention to race and class. “Oftentimes, black and brown communities are the ones that suffer the biggest consequences of pollution and a lack of enforcement on environmental issues,” said Duckworth in an interview with Yahoo News. But within the past decade, leading civil rights organizations have taken up climate justice in their host of priorities. The NAACP Environmental and Climate Justice Program began in 2009 “because we saw a connection between issues like pollution and sea levels rising and the effect those are having on the health and wellbeing of African-American communities and lower-income communities.”
Shepherd added: “We don't act until there's a tragedy. There are still many black and poor populations and communities in Houston that still haven't recovered. There still are communities in New Orleans that still haven't recovered from Katrina in 2005.” “It's a catalytic investment essentially that transitions a polluted community into one that in the future will be more sustainable, healthier and will address community-identified needs,” he continued. “It requires a co-governance structure between government and community, so community input and participation in this process is really elevated. They're not just aware of what's happening.
Climate change isn’t controversial. The climate is changing.
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