AOC and Kamala Harris Introduce 'Climate Equity Act' That Links Climate Change to Racial Justice
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Kamala Harris introduced a new bill in Congress on Thursday meant to combat climate change.
How will this new legislation prevent the planet from heating up? By creating equal economic outcomes for all races.
In the same vein as the highly criticized “Green New Deal,” the “Climate Equity Act” forwards the philosophy of environmental and climate justice, an ideology that links the issue of the “climate crisis” to the liberal “social justice” agenda.
For a year, @AOC and I have worked with communities on landmark legislation to ensure that as we fight the climate crisis, we center that fight in justice and equity.
Today, we’re formally introducing the Climate Equity Act in Congress. https://t.co/vG86M8Kp6j
— Kamala Harris (@SenKamalaHarris) August 6, 2020
“For a year, @AOC and I have worked with communities on landmark legislation to ensure that as we fight the climate crisis, we center that fight in justice and equity,” Harris wrote in a Twitter post on Thursday.
“Today, we’re formally introducing the Climate Equity Act in Congress.”
Among other things, the bill calls for an Office of Climate and Environmental Justice Accountability to be created to ensure that all government legislation is furthering the goal of equity, or equal outcomes, among all minority communities.
“Climate justice” is a term used by social justice activists who wish to use climate change as a vessel or, to put it more accurately, a Trojan horse to introduce social justice ideas such as equity.
Proponents of “climate justice” urge governments to shift focus from real technological innovations like carbon capture (which Republicans like Rep. Dan Crenshaw of Texas support), instead pushing for the focus to be on creating legislation directly targeting gender, race and other immutable characteristics.
New Discourses, a website that opposes social justice ideologies, describes the dangers of “climate justice.”
“… [A] climate justice approach might argue that programs teaching intersectional feminism and critical race Theory are needed in developing countries, like in Africa, because better understanding how issues relevant to women and racism from a social-theoretical perspective will better inform and motivate us regarding the making of climate-relevant policy, especially with regard to preserving cultural identities and practices (in a pre-industrial setting—see also, cultural relativism),” the New Discourses article states.
“This, rather alarmingly, may also include teaching ideas from postcolonial Theory like that science is a white, Western cultural product and just another ‘way of knowing.'”
It isn’t just the strange, far-left theory of “climate justice” that makes this new legislation forwarded by Harris and AOC so troubling. It is also the push for “equity” rather than equal opportunity.
Canadian clinical psychologist and professor of psychology Jordan Peterson explained the dangers of hoping for both “equity” and diversity in an extensive essay on his website dissecting the relationship between the two philosophies.
“The emphasis on ‘diversity,’ for example, is in direct logical contradiction to the dogma of ‘equity.’ The two simply cannot co-exist. If people are in fact ‘diverse,’ for whatever reasons (and, according to the collectivists, primarily for reasons of race, ethnicity, sexuality and sex) then they bring distinctly and important different talents and abilities to the table, in precise proportion to their diversity,” Peterson wrote.
“The inevitable consequence of encouraging that diversity and giving it free play in the world will thus be an exacerbation of inequality, rather than its elimination. If equity were the goal, then diversity would have to be done away with.”
Peterson’s conclusions are obviously true. Different people are going to make different choices. That leads to an unequal number of outcomes unevenly distributed amongst different groups.
Ensuring that those groups all have equal opportunities to succeed is far different from ensuring that they all have an equal amount of success.
Take men and women for example. For quite some time, the left has been complaining about the “gender pay gap,” suggesting that women make only 82 cents on the dollar when compared with men.
However, the reason that “gap” exists is not because women are discriminated against in the workplace when compared with men, it is an effect of men and women making different choices.
The “gap” is found when comparing only the median earnings of full-time wage and salaried workers, ignoring important factors such as education, occupation, experience and hours worked.
When all of those variables are accounted for, the “gender pay gap” is all but gone.
Women make different choices from men. This same logic can be applied to the priorities of different racial, ethnic and cultural groups.
Charles Negy, a psychology professor at the University of Central Florida, spoke with The Western Journal back in June about how different ethnic communities face various problems unique to those communities.
“Everyone must worship with religious-like zealotry the ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ mantra or else be smeared as a ‘racist.’ Diversity may have merit, but the way it is enforced on everyone is divisive. We fight over everything both on and off campus in the broader society,” Negy told The Western Journal.
“Various groups are convinced they are perpetual victims of ‘white supremacy,’ and if their group, on average, does not achieve as much as other groups, the only explanation must be ‘white racism.’ As if members of these social groups have no agency of their own to make good life decisions (such as staying in school, trying to be the best student possible, avoiding crime, drugs, etc.).”
Equality and equity are two very different things.
True equality of opportunity within a diverse community means that there will always be some level of different outcomes among different groups.
Nevertheless, it seems that the left is determined to continue the never-ending war for equity and inclusion that is certainly doomed to fail.
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