Press Releases
2024
ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE GROUPS PROVIDE KEY FEEDBACK ON EPA GREENHOUSE GAS GUIDELINES FOR EXISTING GAS PLANTS
For Immediate Release
NATIONAL (May 31, 2024) – This week, environmental justice groups submitted comments in response to the EPA’s non-regulatory docket on Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Existing Gas Turbines at Power Plants. The feedback represents a collaborative effort across these organizations that supported an important reevaluation of the initial EPA proposal after sharing collective concerns. Their feedback focuses on ensuring the EPA adequately addresses the cumulative impacts of pollution on environmental justice communities as the Agency works on reducing climate pollution from existing gas plants. The Tishman Environment and Design Center at The New School, Center for the Urban Environment of the John S. Watson Institute for Urban Policy and Research at Kean University, the New Jersey Environmental Justice Alliance, the Center for Earth, Energy, and Democracy (CEED), WE ACT for Environmental Justice, and the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice, along with the 23 co-signed environmental justice (EJ) organizations and alliances and 15 co-signed allied organizations and coalitions shared these comments, providing input and highlighting key priorities. Their feedback underscores that the EPA must eliminate pollution from the power sector that disproportionately and negatively impacts frontline and fenceline communities.
2024-26 EJ Disrupt Design Press Advisory
After a rigorous process, the EJ Disrupt Design Fellowship welcomes the 2024-2026 EJ Fellows- 18 groundbreaking EJ leaders divided into five groups, ready to redefine the future.
Fellows will be building upon the groundbreaking achievements of the inaugural cohort, which mobilized $4 million in philanthropic support for grassroots initiatives and empowered 350 organizations in the practice of EJ Design. Following the fruitful outcome of the very first Centering Justice Symposium, birthing the Centering Justice Manifesto, these dedicated leaders will help create practical and effective solutions as part of a network that will serve as a valuable resource for the Movement.
EJ Community Members Say: EPA Rules Must Incorporate Cumulative Impacts Analysis and Discontinue Reliance on CCS
Washington D.C. – On April 25, the EPA announced a suite of four standards on toxic air pollution, water pollution, land contamination, and GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions from fossil fuel burning power plants. Key among these is the final rule for existing coal-fired and new natural gas-fired power plants. We recognize the important steps the EPA has taken in removing hydrogen co-firing from consideration as a BSER (Best System of Emissions Reduction) and understand the importance in a delayed ruling on reducing GHG emissions from existing natural gas plants in order to consider the best approach and to address environmental justice concerns. In order to best address the risks of climate change and local air pollution as well as protect frontline Environmental Justice communities, the EPA should incorporate a cumulative impacts and MER (mandatory emissions reduction) approach. We would also call upon the EPA to continue to strengthen its rules and ensure that future rules do not include hydrogen co-firing or CCS/CCUS as a BSER. We urge the EPA to discontinue its reliance on and promotion of CCS as a technological solution to climate change mitigation. CCS is an unproven and high-risk approach to reducing GHG emissions, and fails to address co-pollutant emissions from power plants in a meaningful and holistic way.
GRIST, MOTHER JONES AND THE NEW SCHOOL TO HOST APRIL 23 PUBLIC DISCUSSION ABOUT ENSURING ‘GREEN’ INFRASTRUCTURE BENEFITS COMMUNITIES OF COLOR
NEW YORK, April 2, 2024 – In light of the federal government’s enormous investment in clean energy during the last three years, the public is invited to a discussion on Tues. April 23 at 7:30 pm about how to ensure ‘green’ infrastructure and jobs benefit communities of color. The event, titled “U.S. Climate Leadership: Equity and Justice in the Green Transition,” will be held at The New School’s Tishman Auditorium, 63 Fifth Avenue, in New York, and is produced by the nonprofit news organizations Grist and Mother Jones, as well as the Tishman Environment and Design Center at The New School.
Environmental Justice Leaders Respond to U.S. EPA Plan to Reconsider emissions from existing gas plants in supplemental rulemaking
NATIONAL (March 1, 2024) - Today, leaders within the environmental justice movement responded to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency plan to tackle emissions from existing gas plants in a supplemental rulemaking to the “ New Source Performance Standards for Greenhouse Gas Emissions from New, Modified, and Reconstructed Fossil Fuel- Fired Electric Generating Units (EGU); Emissions Guidelines for Greenhouse Gas Emissions From Existing Fossil Fuel-Fired Electric Generating Units."
"We are pleased to learn that EPA Administrator Michael Regan and the White House are responding to our individual and collective concerns about the treatment of existing gas plants in the current iteration of its carbon rule proposal. Our organizations have repeatedly sounded an alarm about the lack of environmental justice analysis and cumulative impacts considerations in the proposal, and we see this reconsideration as an important step for allowing a more thoughtful and comprehensive plan for regulating this critical segment of the power sector.
We strongly believe that climate pollution mitigation and environmental justice for communities go hand in hand. Any rulemaking to address the existing gas sector can and must achieve significant reductions in greenhouse gasses while also improving local air quality and the public health of overburdened communities. In addition, a supplemental rulemaking for existing gas plants opens up the possibility of considering a diverse range of policy and practice options, from multiple sources within the Federal family, to improve pollution mitigation and environmental justice outcomes and to respond to the climate crisis.
Our request is that the EPA have a clear timeline and transparent process for proposing and implementing a supplemental rulemaking for existing gas plants as we are prepared to work collaboratively with the Agency on this new phase."
2023
Global Indigenous and Environmental Justice Movement Leaders are organizing for real climate solutions at the Making Waves: For Peace and Climate Justice Summit in the Mariana Islands
SINJANA, GUAM— from October 20 to 21, 2023, The Micronesia Climate Change Alliance and Our Common Wealth 670, in partnership with the Tishman Environment and Design Center at The New School, are gathering esteemed local and global Indigenous and Environmental Justice movement leaders at The Making Waves: For Peace and Climate Justice Summit in the Mariana Islands at Central Community Arts Hall in Sinjana. The participants will share proven community climate solutions and develop a Declaration of Peace and Unity for the Pacific region to be delivered to the United Nation’s COP 28 and 29. The Declaration will be used to inform high-level decision-makers with specific calls to action in the following areas:
Establishing a Peace and Prosperity Zone
Demanding Indigenous Sovereignty, Decolonization, and Cultural Healing
Environmental Health and Ecological Regeneration
Just Transition, Recovery, and Climate Justice
The Making Waves Summit is being held at a critical moment, as the Pacific region has been gravely affected by multiple climate disasters, including the powerful typhoon Mawar, said to be the strongest storm to blow across the Island of Guam in more than two decades in May of this year. While the island’s people are slowly recovering from the disaster’s devastation, including power shortages and limited access to water, the U.S. has increasingly militarized the region. Organizers of the Summit are alarmed and calling on leaders from Palau, the Federated States of Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, the Philippines, Hawaii, the South Pacific, and from across the United States to convene at the Summit and stand in global solidarity. EJ leaders from Puerto Rico and New Mexico know far too well the destructive past of the U.S. military’s actions and their environmental health impacts.
STATEMENT: EPA’s Proposed New Carbon Pollution Standards for Fossil Fuel-Fired Power Plants will fail to protect EJ communities
WASHINGTON (August 8, 2023) – The Tishman Environment and Design Center at The New School, the Center for the Urban Environment of the John S. Watson Institute for Urban Policy and Research at Kean University, the New Jersey Environmental Justice Alliance (NJEJA), and the Center for Earth, Energy and Democracy, along with 18 environmental justice and 9 allied organizations are submitting public comments today on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s proposed carbon pollution standards for coal and new natural gas fired power plants.
Environmental justice (EJ) communities are on the frontlines of the adverse impacts of climate change and are disproportionately exposed to a wide range of polluting industries, including fossil fuel infrastructure like coal plants, natural gas plants, and pipelines. The use of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) mechanisms and hydrogen co-firing in the power sector will further harm EJ communities that are already overburdened. The only real solution to climate change is the rapid and complete transition of the power sector away from all types of fossil fuels to energy efficiency and renewable energy in the form of wind and solar power. We call attention to critical EJ concerns related to the proposed rule that would hinder a reliable, just, and truly clean power section transition.