Climate Mitigation Plan contains critical actions, but fails to address social justice

We’re getting smoke signals about the urgency of climate change. Many of us thought the climate predictions for our corner of the country were bearable: We could live with drier, hotter summers and wetter winters.

Sure, we worry about our oysters as the ocean becomes more acidic, and we are preparing for some sea level rise. But our provincial sensibility didn’t take into account that when California burns, we inhale its catastrophe. And that’s just the beginning of the effects we will feel from outside our own blessed little bioregion. Disruptions to our food and wine supply may be next.

So the call for public comment on the draft Thurston Climate Mitigation Plan is timely. Over two years in the making, it’s based on five big ideas: Green our electrical grid, shift away from fossil fuels, live lighter, store carbon in plants and soil, and build local expertise to develop a green economy.

The plan inspires respect for its authors and participating community leaders. The Thurston Regional Planning Council (TRPC) was tapped by the cities of Olympia, Lacey and Tumwater and Thurston County to produce it. Both the draft plan and an online summary are now available on TRPC’s website.

The plan also inspires respect for the planning profession, which Alison Osterberg, the Project Manager and Senior Planner at TRPC, represents with distinction. Planners are the public’s paid visionaries, empowered to imagine a better future and map out a plan to get there. They corral competing interests in pursuit of the common good. And they are trained to be thorough and careful, and to think clearly. All of that is reflected in this draft plan.

But there is one major omission. The plan calls for “equitable distribution of costs and benefits.” It offers repeated calls to target programs to benefit disadvantaged groups. In the small print, a bullet point calls out the need to “further understand and address social equity issues related to climate change.” In our view, that’s the line that reveals its blind spot. “Further understanding social equity issues” should have been an integral part of the planning process from day one.

In the entire climate debate, and in the environmental movement generally, people of color and low-income people tend to be left out and left behind. Until achieving equity is raised to the same priority as addressing climate change, climate mitigation efforts – vital as they are – will tend to perpetuate rather than redress the systemic racism and income inequality that plague our nation. Black people and other people of color are over-represented among low-income people, and the plan appears to be blind to the racial implications of that.

If our local climate plan truly made equity an integral goal of climate mitigation initiatives, it might be the first in the country to do so. That would be a source of immense pride for our county and our communities, and a model others could emulate.

Fully including the needs of low-income people – including Blacks, immigrants, and other communities of color – would also call people in those communities into the conversation about climate change and environmental preservation. That itself would strengthen the momentum to mitigate climate change. And it would acknowledge that those communities own the future equally with everyone else.

To its credit, TRPC is taking the public’s comments on the draft plan seriously. Executive Director Marc Daily said, “If we get a lot of comments about equity, that would tell us a lot about whether this is a core value across our region.”

The public comment period on the draft plan is open until Oct. 16, and there are online open houses on Oct. 14 and on Oct. 16.

So here’s our public comment: We hope for a plan where racial justice and income inequality rate deeper thinking, and a major category — a chapter or at the very least a sub-chapter heading. A good start would be to pull all the scattered mentions of equity into a single place so we can see what they add up to, and what is missing. We know, for example, that energy efficiency measures that drive up the cost of housing have a disproportionate impact on low-income people. We don’t see a solution to that problem in the draft plan.

Leaving income inequality and racism out of the conversation about any major area of public policy is all it takes to keep things as they are: unequal, painful, stuck in a place that’s not sustainable. We’ve settled for that for far too long. Racial justice and income inequality need to be at the center of all our conversations about how we create a sustainable society.