[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:17] Speaker B: Welcome to Uptown Chats, a podcast where we share stories about environmental justice by and for everyday people. I'm your co host, Jaron.
[00:00:26] Speaker C: And I'm your other co host, Lonnie.
[00:00:27] Speaker B: And today we're continuing the conversation from our previous episode where we spoke with Byron Ramos Gudiel, Executive Director of Center for Earth, Energy and Democracy, otherwise known as seed, and Manuel Salgado, who is the Federal Research Manager for WE act's Federal Policy Office.
[00:00:48] Speaker C: During the first part of our conversation with Byron and Manny, we heard about the recent rollbacks at the federal level of regulations established by the Environmental Protection Agency, including the endangerment finding. If you have not listened to that episode, I encourage you go back and do so before you dive into this one.
[00:01:04] Speaker B: Yeah, we'll make sure to include a link in the show notes for you to check that out. But today we'll pick up where we left off and hear more from Byron and Manny about what the consequences of these rollbacks are for everyday people and what SEED and WE act are doing in response to these rollbacks. But before we get too far ahead of ourselves, Lonnie, can you share WEAC's mission?
[00:01:24] Speaker C: Absolutely. We ACT's mission is to build healthy communities by ensuring that people of color and low income residents participate meaningfully in the creation of sound and fair environmental health and protection policies and practices.
[00:01:36] Speaker B: Thank you.
So, as a quick recap from our previous conversation, under the Trump administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, otherwise known as epa, is trying to abandon its responsibility to protect us from climate change. The EPA is required by law to protect us from air pollution that endangers public health and welfare, including greenhouse gases that are driving climate change.
[00:02:02] Speaker C: By repealing the endangerment finding and greenhouse gas standards for vehicles, the Trump administration is making climate denialism the official government policy and undercutting EPA's ability to act or to do anything about it.
As we experience even worsening extreme weather and climate disasters. This decision will harm our health and our communities and our economy.
[00:02:22] Speaker B: Yeah. I think it's also worth noting that the EPA's repeal of the endangerment finding has no basis in the law, in science or reality. The law is settled. EPA's authority to regulate greenhouse gases was already confirmed by the Supreme Court nearly two decades ago and has consistently been affirmed by the courts since then. And the science is clear. The endangerment finding is based on decades of scientific consensus.
So, as we're aware here, at least, climate change is real. It's driven primarily by human caused emissions, and it is harming both our health and the economy today.
So the reality is everywhere, it's all around us, massive floods, droughts, wildfires, hurricanes, you name it, harming our health, our communities and our economy.
And those will only get worse if the government undercuts its own authority to act.
[00:03:24] Speaker C: Exactly. One of the major developments that has happened recently related to EPA rollbacks that Manny mentioned during our previous episode is that we act joined a group of nonprofits and environmental councils from across the country to sue the Trump administration for unlawfully repealing the endangerment finding. When the Trump administration's EPA repealed the endangered finding, it tried to abandon its responsibility to protect us from the climate crisis. And we're not going to let that happen.
[00:03:48] Speaker B: Exactly. So with that said, I think we can go ahead and jump into our conversation, or I guess jump back into our conversation with Byron and Manny to hear more about what these rollbacks mean for everyday people, especially those in environmental justice communities, and how our organizations are fighting back.
[00:04:06] Speaker C: Let's get into it.
[00:04:15] Speaker B: I appreciate you both shedding some more light on what this means for cities, for states, for advocates, for all of us who are doing this work and what that means now for us, like you said, having to do more with less. Just to kind of continue along this thread that I mentioned earlier of trying to continue to zoom down again with something so big, like all, you know, federal rollbacks, trying to like really relate it back to everyday people, continue to take that next kind of step further down. And you all alluded to a lot of the consequences of these rollbacks already, but kind of zooming in a little bit more on what, what are the consequences of these, these rollbacks for everyday people. I want to dive into what it means for energy costs, for health, for some of those other dimensions and how this is actually showing up for people. So, yeah, do you both want to kind of share a little bit more about what, what that looks like and trying to relate this back to people who might be listening and how they might be already seeing some of these impacts in their day to day lives.
[00:05:13] Speaker A: You know the immediate easy answer. Well, first let me say that the climate impact, climate impacts don't just impact the atmosphere. Right. Or it absolutely impacts us in a way that we feel in a very real way through wildfires, through the intensity of storms, the frequency of storms, the inability for us to actually like be able to prepare ourselves, of course. And even if we are in a crisis, an environmental crisis, what's the role of government? Now that's a huge question.
Who actually comes in and supports These communities. So if they survive, whether it be a wildfire or any other ways in which climate is impacting the atmosphere and then therefore impacting us. But, but even, even beyond that, you know, I do think that a really good example is the rollbacks of the incentives for clean energy.
The idea really around the issue of affordability is that clean energy is more affordable.
And so the more clean energy we have online, the lower our bills. Right? And so with those incentives gone, you've already seen this, that the affordability of heat during winter is like off the charts in some communities. In some communities, actually, it's just as much as you pay in rent over the winter. And so it really has a, the impact that it's going to continue to have on local economies. And rates of affordability is going to be enormous. You know, our overall reliance on fossil fuels we see has led us to war and now, you know, rising gas prices. And so I think that particularly in low income communities, communities of color, you know, communities that are already breathing dirtiest air, the repeal of these safeguards, like the indigenous finding, will make things much, much, much worse, much worse health wise. And these are communities that have least access to health care. And when they do have access to health care now, the price of health care is doubling in some cases. And of course community health has an impact on local economies. And so there's just going to be this domino effect of rollbacks of these kinds that of course we want to focus on the impact that these rollbacks have on the environment, but we are part of the environment.
And so it's going to have an impact on our health, of course, and our local communities. And therefore it's going to make it significantly more challenging for low income communities and families. So for basic things like healthcare and heat and cold weather, and also the uncertainty of like the government's role in helping these communities become more resilient, more hardened, and also more prepared. And when the inevitable happens, our ability to survive those crises.
[00:08:38] Speaker D: I love, Byron, that you're bringing up things like healthcare into this because I think that something that regular people who aren't knee deep in environmental data and environmental advocacy may not understand is that there isn't an aspect of your everyday life that goes untouched by climate change. And what I mean by that is that there's not an aspect of your everyday life that is made less expensive by climate change. And in fact, quite the opposite right there.
There are a lot of ways that we can demonstrate how climate change is making everyday life more expensive across the board. Right and so that's true healthcare, like Byron mentioned, right? Whether that's because the healthcare system on days where we see extreme heat is taxed and, you know, overburdened and put to an extreme, or whether that's because, you know, the same facilities that are emitting CO2 in the atmosphere are also emitting particulate matter and NOx, which, you know, causes huge numbers of cases of childhood and adult asthma, which also puts, you know, a health care additional burden on our health care system, or whether it's because of the increased blood pressure and cancer rates that communities across the country feel from these very same pollution sources, even just in the healthcare area. Those are already multiple ways. And that's not an exhaustive list. Those are just the top ones that I can think of. And where climate change and our inability to rein in climate pollution actually makes healthcare more expensive. But you also look at it in housing prices, right? Try to get homeowners insurance in Texas or Florida or California right now. Right. And if you are able to get an insurance policy, it's way more expensive because those areas are dealing with higher incidents. You might say, I don't own a home that doesn't, that doesn't affect me. But it does because whoever owns the home that you live in is charging you higher rent to be able to cover their increased costs to insure that, that home. And so that touches everyone's cost of living, right? When we talk about increased electricity prices, it's not just how much the energy costs to generate. It's also the fact that climate change disasters constantly impact the energy grid, whether it's through limiting the fuel. When we have a hurricane come through the Gulf and we're not able to process as much natural gas or oil, that increases prices. But also when those same climate disasters destroy infrastructure, right? Just, just a couple or just last year we saw a storm called the Retro that came through Houston with hurricane force winds and tore down a large amount of transmission infrastructure to where residents there were, you know, had had power outages that lasted weeks, if not months.
And you know, that's just one example of how we're having to shoulder those costs nationwide, you know, by climate disasters. And then we're also dealing with increased utility costs because the current administration refuses to deploy the cheapest energy, which also happens to be the quickest energy that we can get online and the safest for communities, which is clean, renewable energy like solar and wind.
[00:11:55] Speaker A: Right.
[00:11:56] Speaker D: And so when we have those projects being stopped for no reason other than political opposition, that that increases our Costs as well. And so those are just like a small number of the ways in which that we're all paying more because we refuse to address climate change. And I do feel that if people have like a little bit more of understanding, if you got your monthly bills and it broke it down, if you went to the grocery store and said you paid this much more for your avocados this week, or this much more for other fruits and vegetables or this much more for your beef because of the climate impact of those industries or disasters on those industries, then we would probably be a little bit more thoughtful about how we spend our money and how climate change is impacting our wallets.
But I think that's a really interesting question to ask and it's really important one to ask because I don't think that a lot of people have a real solid grasp on just how much their daily lives are affected by the increase in costs due to climate change.
[00:12:51] Speaker A: Yeah. And just to go to a previous point that you made, Manny, earlier on, about what's driving this administration to do so much deregulation on environmental protections, the administration really is running a wealth transfer in reverse.
It's taking money in the form of higher energy bills, more medical costs, more missed work, more emergency room visits out of pockets of the most economically vulnerable people in this country and handing it to fossil fuel corporations as really protected profit. Every regulation they stripped is a subsidy to polluters paid for by our community's health and our community's finances.
That's not deregulation. That's economic violence with a legal signature on it. To be real, like, you know, they boasted, you know, something like 30 plus deregulations last year and they were like, celebrated the largest deregulation in, like, our history. Right. This administration did. And so it really, like, it isn't just about deregulation, energy protections. It is the, it is the impact that it's going to have on communities that we all work with that have already overburdened and historically marginalized from, like, from prosperity.
And so the ability for these communities to build prosperity in the ways that we have envisioned it, we had imagined it just really in some places goes away, man.
[00:14:28] Speaker C: I think this is a moment where I would say say it again louder for the people in the back. But you don't have to do that. You can just rewind and hear it again. One thing that we often hear when we talk to elected officials and politicians is this idea that, hey, my people don't care about that. Right? They're not worried about the environment and what's going on. That's not what's going on. They care about the affordability, their health care, this is getting more expensive and things affordability. They talk about that in such a way that, that they think that climate has nothing to do or does not impact. So I really love hearing that. We're really kind of rooting some of this messaging and changing that narrative to say no, these rollbacks that you think that are insignificant are not part of the political conversation, are having extreme impacts and they're a part of a larger whole where folks are feeling it financially, affordability issues, displacement issues, not having electricity for a certain amount of time and how devastating that can be and what that does for income and just your psychological and social well being. So a lot of these things, I think it's really just important that we keep putting that message out there in that narrative that these things are important and they're all connected. It's very intersectional.
So with all that being said, you know, I appreciate the work that SEED and you know, obviously we ACT has been doing around this and kind of starting here with this, getting this message out and talking about what's actually happening and educating folks on what's going on. Do you guys both want to kind of go into a little bit more detail like what SEED and what REACT is doing in response to these rollbacks?
[00:16:07] Speaker D: I can start us off here and then I can let Byron get the final wording.
So just this week we announced that REACT has joined a lawsuit with a lot of other organizations.
So we're suing the EPA on the endangerment finding because we feel that, you know, the endangerment finding, the science on that is really clear and we know that it's inexcusable for, for the government to move in a direction that is counter to the stated mission of the EPA and what the science says.
So I think that, you know, first and foremost that's, I wear that as a badge of honor. I'm glad that, you know, that's something that, that we've chosen to do and, and I think that that be an avenue of pushback that's vitally important. Important in this, in this time. I think outside of that, you know, we've done a lot exploring one of the things that you just brought up and the fact that, you know, whether or not people are connecting the stories of these rollbacks to how it affects our everyday lives. And so we're actively engaged in, you know, measuring the public opinion on that with various polling partners. We've done a lot of work in that. And what we found is that people are actually really in support of addressing climate change even before you make the case on how it affects them on. On these individual levers. And then when we've also looked at specifically Poland within frontline communities to. To, you know, gauge how worried they are about certain issues, they're incredibly worried about some of the impacts of these issues, such as power loss that we just talked about. I mean, that's one of the things that people and specifically EJ communities have. Have a heightened worry over that a lot of other communities don't share.
And that's because we understand that when the power goes out because of storms, we're the first ones to lose it and we're the last ones to get reconnected. Right. We see. We've seen that lots of times with hurricanes along the Gulf coast in EJ communities. We've seen that, you know, in snowstorms. We've seen that all over the country. And so that's. That's an area where we're trying to connect those dots for the communities so that they can advocate for that, but also, you know, educate politicians on that fact so that we can, you know, have legislation that appropriately addresses some of these issues and provides relief to the. Communicates the communities that we advocate for. And then largely through our coalition work, you know, in. In conjunction with SEED on some of our coalitions and also coalitions that we had, like the Clean Air for the Long Haul and the Environmental Justice Leadership Forum, we're in constantly, you know, pushing back and providing public comments, engaging in advocacy campaigns to, you know, fight these rollbacks. It's a very difficult time. We don't have many friendly years within the administration. And it's clear that the administration has goals that are not aligned with embar environmental justice. But we're still pushing back because we don't believe that. That this current administration is forever. We don't believe that the current, you know, environment is forever. And when it changes and we get a. A administration that is, you know, willing to fight for communities and address environmental justice issues, we want to make sure that we're in a position to take advantage of that and to start, you know, getting back these protections that we lost and then strengthening them even further so that communities can get some of the relief that they really deserve.
[00:19:18] Speaker A: Yeah, I love that, Manny. Thank you. I would say. Yeah, I won't repeat a lot of what Manny said because that's sort of what I wanted to talk a little bit about. But I will say that the thing that I would want listeners to leave with here is that we are living through what we are living through right now isn't just a policy disagreement. I know that we often talk about these things from a place of policy.
It is a stress test for whether this country actually believes that black, brown, indigenous and low income communities deserve to live in a clean and healthy and safe environment. Not just to survive, but just live through it right and with clean air, with affordable energy, with a government that sees them. And in so many ways, beyond the endangered finding and other environmental rollbacks, the environment of our communities are being degraded by this administration.
The endangered finding in particular wasn't something that was given to communities. It wasn't something that was given to us. It was one. It took over a decade of organizing, litigation and scientific testimony from communities who had been telling the government for generations that pollution was killing us. And now this administration has looked at all of that, at science, at court rulings, the lived experience of many people, people, millions of people really, and decided that corporate profit matters more. And the other thing that I'm hoping that listeners can get from this is that you know this issue, it's also about the ability for low income communities or communities, working class communities, to afford a safe and healthy living for themselves and for their families. It isn't just about the environment. It is about real tangible things.
What you can afford in terms of food, in terms of gas, in terms of where to live. It is going to have ripple effects throughout our communities and of course low income communities, EJ communities are going on the front line of those changes.
And so one of the things that I want to highlight from the things that we are doing and certainly in collaboration with, with we ACT and other partners, is build some narrative infrastructure so that the stories that we tell about the success that we're having on the ground, but also the impact that these rollbacks are having are getting woven into a permanent narrative engine really that tells the story of these communities and the impacts of these rollbacks at the federal level, at the community level. The thing that also we didn't talk a lot about is what the states can do, right? At the state level.
There certainly is an opportunity for us to build more power and to continue to force our state lawmakers to do the right thing and really to stand up to the administration.
We've seen that in a lot of different fights, but certainly that can happen around the mitigation of pollution in communities. And so at the Midwest, in the Midwest, we're trying to put together what we're calling for right now, a climate hub to try to get folks to really understand the work that is working, understand what is not and why it's not working, so that we can come out with a good shared analysis, but also a shared strategy for the Midwest. Midwest right now is one of the primary battlegrounds around the development of data farms and data plants.
And so because of the Great Lakes and the fresh water availability there. So we're trying to figure out how to build more capacity around a shared strategy that is based on lived experience and lived work organizing work that our partners have been doing in the Midwest and nationally. Of course, we continue to work on trying to bring EJ and national organizations together around some shared, shared agenda and building some alignment that can then also of course be leveraged at a time where we, you know, we will have an opportunity to pass more climate policy that's rooted in justice. And so we're continuing to really look beyond this administration at the same while at the same time really trying to highlight the impacts that this administration is having, particularly low income communities, communities of color, indigenous communities.
[00:23:50] Speaker B: Thanks for listening. If you like this episode, make sure to rate and review the show on whatever platform you listen on. If you have thoughts about the show or suggestions for topics you want us to discuss, we encourage you to reach out to
[email protected] I also want to
[00:24:06] Speaker C: remind listeners about our Uptown Chats hotline where listeners can call in with questions they have about a climate and environmental justice. So if you got a question, call 877-Uptown 6 that's 877-878-6966.
[00:24:21] Speaker B: Give us a call and check out React on Facebook at react4ej. That's W E A C T F O R E j on Instagram, bluesky and YouTube act4ej. That's wj w a c t number 4ej and check out our website weact.org for more information about environmental justice.
Until next time.
[00:24:45] Speaker C: Bye.
[00:24:46] Speaker A: Tsunam.
