Editors are a central scourge of mankind, imposing length limits guaranteed to hollow out a finely-crafted argument. And the renowned editors of RealClear Energy? A fortiori: they are merciless.
I kid, of course. But in my RCE column on Earth Day 2025, one of the issues that I left on the cutting room floor is that of “environmental justice,” an empty nostrum devoid of rigorous definition but supremely useful to the proponents of left-wing environmentalism in terms of acquiring funding from various foundations, from government, and from private donors either naïve or engaged in classic virtue signaling.
As I discussed in my earlier column, the central Earth Day policy proposal this year is a tripling of renewable power (primarily wind and solar) generation globally by 2030, an insane idea environmentally destructive, fantastically expensive, and guaranteed to yield economic growth and employment impacts massively adverse. The Earth Day proponents continue to assert that wind and solar power are “cheap,” an exercise in political propaganda that shunts aside both the need for massive subsidies to keep the wind and solar power industries afloat and the attendant actual effects on household budgets.
That the heavily-subsidized expansion of wind and solar power increases electricity costs is incontrovertible; it is no accident, as Pravda used to put it, that California has the highest power prices among the lower 48 states, almost double the average for the U.S. as a whole. Accordingly, let us ask the question that the Earth Day proponents avoid at all costs: Across U.S. income quintiles, whom would be harmed the most by such increases in the price of electricity?
The Bureau of Labor Statistics in its Consumer Expenditure Survey reports the following shares of before-tax household income spent on electricity for all households, the lowest income quintile, the second, third, and fourth quintiles, and the highest. The respective percentages: 2.3 percent, 3.7 percent, 3.2 percent, 2.7 percent, 2.2 percent, and 1.6 percent.
Translation: The expansion of renewable power is hugely expensive, it increases the price of electricity, the poor spend a higher percentage of their incomes on power, and so the overall effect would be highly regressive. So much for “environmental justice” as a purported concern of the environmental left.
It is useful to consider more rigorously what “environmental justice” actually means; it typically is defined (e.g., p. 33247) in terms of differing levels of environmental quality experienced by various groups, the poor and minority groups in particular.
That concept is much too narrow. The level of environmental quality experienced (or “consumed”) by a given individual or household is one component of “health” broadly defined. It is clear from the scholarly literature that “health” is a “normal” good, that is, one the consumption of which rises with income or wealth. This is true for individuals and for economies as a whole. Lower-income individuals and households, precisely because their incomes are lower, consume less environmental quality, lower-quality diets, lead less-healthful lifestyles, ad infinitum.
Therefore, it is unsurprising that lower-income individuals and households tend to be located in areas with lower environmental quality; that is what they can afford. This is a reality regardless of the impacts of differences in environmental quality on “health,” that is, mortality and morbidity. Even if a lower level of environmental quality is merely unpleasant, that is a factor relevant to the ways in which individuals and households allocate their limited resources.
Accordingly, the “environmental justice” issue is little more than the observation, or complaint, that the poor consume less environmental quality than others, that is, that they choose to allocate their resources in ways different from those exhibited by individuals and households wealthier.
And so the definition of “environmental justice” is elusive. There is the classic endowment problem — individuals enter life with very different endowments of human and financial capital — an obvious reality central to the “fairness” and “equity” question, but not a parameter clearly malleable by regulatory policy or, a fortiori, the exhortations from the Earth Day crowd. One central long-term policy initiative by government intended (in part) to deal with the endowment problem is public education, but the low relative quality of public schools in low-income and minority areas illustrates the difficulty of using public policies to change “justice” outcomes in specific directions, because public policies inexorably are politicized.
Efforts by government to effect changes in the distribution of income or wealth necessarily affect resource allocation in ways reducing aggregate productivity. Perhaps a given change in “distributional fairness” and “equity” is worth the attendant reduction in aggregate wealth; perhaps not. There is no “objective” measure of this tradeoff because we do not have an efficiency theory of — a rigorous way to evaluate — the relative virtues of different distributional outcome.
Have the Earth Day proponents thought about any of this carefully? The question answers itself.
Benjamin Zycher is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
This article was originally published by RealClearEnergy and made available via RealClearWire.
“Efforts by government to effect changes in the distribution of income or wealth necessarily affect resource allocation in ways reducing aggregate productivity.”
It’s actually worse than that. Even if government could redistribute income and wealth perfectly, or let’s say they could perfectly mimic the free market initially, the wheels of government are painfully slow. In the communist world, they have three or five year plans. Most Western governments plan annually, and have yearly budgets. Businesses and other private entities operate on a daily, weekly, or monthly time frame. They can respond quickly to exogenous events. Government could never plan out perfectly beyond tomorrow, even with a time machine…
One must also take into account the cost of government. 100% of funding to equalize wealth distribution will never happen. Bureaucracies employ people and they get paid. Not that it is bad to have a job and and income, but it means that always less than 100% of the funding arrives on target.
We will leave corruption and mismanagement and other costs for a different day.
If all income is distributed equally, I’m making coffee for a living.
If all income is distributed equally, I’m drinking your coffee for a living.
If all income is distributed equally, the coffee is living. Because nobody bothered to harvest it…
Missing from this discussion is the CREATION of wealth. Governments only consume wealth. It’s been historically proven that redistribution of wealth consumes even more wealth and has led to lower standards of living for all citizens. That’s because the so-called “redistribution” is performed by government bureaucrats that not only consume even more wealth, but they generally live lifestyles that are above average in the wealth they are consuming.
It again has been historically proven that the best way to improve the lifestyles of all citizens is to allow and foster the creation of new wealth. This has historically come only from Capitalistic free markets.
Add in price controls and subsidies, and planning becomes impossible. What was the real price of that? Or one has low prices and unavailable products.
“Most Western governments plan annually, and have yearly budgets.”
Do they?
Interesting poll
41% said “none of the above” when asked who would be most effective in governing the country. – Guido Fawkes
I’m currently voting in an Australian election. I concur with Mr Fawkes’ assessment, and support his policies.
I would maintain that environmental justice is a fig leaf whose creation was made necessary by incentives created to encourage reduction in fossil fuels 20 years ago. EV’ are subsidized directly by the government and indirectly by fees paid to manufacturers and road taxes not paid be EV drivers. Rooftop solar subsidizes homeowners via higher power prices to renters. EV buyers and homeowners with solar panels tend to be much better off than renters and people fossil fueled vehicles. And that’s not even counting the Hugh tax breaks given renewable energy investors. Much to no ones surprise, the environmental justice fig leaf has not fooled working class voters one bit.
I don’t remember who first made the comment, that if government were to seize everything and redistribute it so that everyone had exactly the same amount of money, within 20 years, those who are rich now, would be rich again, and those who are poor now, would be poor again.
This is because being rich or poor is not the result of random chance as the socialists want everyone to believe but is instead the result of hard work and personal choices. Those who work hard and make wise choices will always acquire wealth, and those who don’t work hard and make poor choices will always become poor.
Being born to a wealthy family will still give one a leg up, but it doesn’t last. History is replete with examples of descendants of wealthy families blowing through the family fortune in a matter of years.
There are also numerous examples of people who were born poor but managed to generate great wealth by the time they passed on.
The only people who have ever benefited, long term, from government action, are those who run the government. This is a truism that will never change.
“The only people who have ever benefited, long term, from government action, are those who run the government. This is a truism that will never change.” +43 :<)
The analysis is true for an ideal world populated with equal age humans.
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Could today’s 69 year old Bill Gates do what 1980’s 24year old Bill Gates did? He must be wiser, but the energy level can’t be there. If we’re going to claim that geniuses are immune to aging… how about Shaquille Onial whose NBA salary peaked over $17 million in 2000?
I know people who could not amass what they’ve inherited.
What you are describing is reverse environmental justice. The money flowing upstream.
Actually there is; it’s called FACTS.
Listen to Thomas Sowell’s thorough debunking of all the government “interventions” and how they cause essentially nothing but harm.
Any policy aimed at equal outcomes, as opposed to equal opportunities, inevitably leads to a descent into mediocrity. A modern society can not survive that.
In addition to always leading to mediocrity, such a policy always leads to tyranny. Because only an all powerful government has enough power to force such policies onto the entire population.
Per K. Harris campaign speech:
We all start from different places. Equity means we all end up at the same place.
(or words to that effect)
Success for every child.
No child left behind.
When will it go back to “No child held back.”
We have created generations of cynics.
The need to slap the emotionally charged word “justice” onto it is proof positive that what they are pushing is an ideology, not science.
I think I would phrase the comparisons between poor and wealthy a little differently. Everyone has to meet the basic needs of food, shelter, and safety, roughly in that order. Even the rabbits living under my porch. An individual or a community allocates their resources accordingly. Once those basic necessities are satisfied, if there are additional resources, other needs or wants will be met. People who struggle to meet the basics will not care enough to worry about anything beyond that, including “environmental quality”. Further, each community will have its own sense of importance for what is arguably aesthetics. I personally could not stand to live in New York with rats running down the sidewalks, but millions do live there, and in places that are supposedly nice.
When I consider this issue, I am more amazed at the prehistoric peoples who somehow had the excess resources to build things like Stonehenge and Callanish. They must have had an abundance of resources to embark on such huge and lengthy engineering projects, as well as deeming the projects to be really important.
Environmental justice means somebody who did not harm the people being rewarded is punished and someone who can show no direct harm is rewarded, This applies to almost anything that tacks the word “justice” onto another word. Two exceptions are poetic justice and street justice. I’m sure there are others.
Environmental justice, social justice, economic justice, and racial justice are just veneers hiding Marxism. The goal is the redistribution of wealth. Typically, activist groups (NGOs) benefit. It’s similar to class action lawsuits, where the plaintiffs get a few pennies and the lawyers get millions.