For a long time, the face of the climate movement was white. But with growing public awareness of climate change came the recognition that its impacts are disproportionately experienced by Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color.
The problem, according to many Black climate advocates, is that awareness is not enough.
Tamara Toles O’Laughlin is one of the best-known advocates for what she calls the “Black climate agenda”: a movement that seeks to correct the failures of the climate movement to include Black people and that wants to see racial justice at the center of climate policy conversations.
A lifelong environmental activist, Toles O’Laughlin is the former director of the North American region of 350.org, an international environmental organization founded in 2007 that uses a grassroots approach to build support for ending fossil fuels.
The Black climate agenda is about more than just representation. It’s about equity and righting the wrongs that have been done in the past to make a just future possible. In her vision, the agenda should include policies like climate reparations that address the disproportionate impact climate change has had on Black communities, as well as Indigenous people and other communities of color.
There are some initial signs that the righting of wrongs is already starting to happen, at least in the US.
Through the American Rescue Plan, the Biden-Harris administration allocated $5 billion to help Black farmers who have long suffered from racially discriminatory agricultural policies. Biden’s American Jobs Plan, meanwhile, aims to address “longstanding and persistent racial injustice,” including by allocating 40 percent of the benefits from investments in climate and clean energy infrastructure to “disadvantaged communities.”
But while many Black climate advocates agree that these sorts of measures are a big step in the right direction, they are also historically conscious of the need to keep up the pressure.
“I’m excited about implementation and deployment and about taking steps to make sure that all this fantastic language becomes fantastic programming, incredible regulation, enforcement, accountability, and transparency [from] the Biden-Harris administration as it ages,” O’Laughlin told me.
I spoke with O’Laughlin to find about more about the Black climate agenda, what its goals are, and how it plans to go about achieving them.
Our discussion, edited for length and clarity, is below.
Jariel Arvin
What exactly is the Black climate agenda?
Tamara Toles O’Laughlin
Like all movements, the Black climate agenda isn’t just one thing. I’m not the only person working on it, nor am I the only person who will help to perfect it. The Black climate agenda is everything that we must do at this moment to make sure that there are Black people in the future and that we’re not just surviving, we are thriving.
The individual elements are coming together and lots of communities are coming to the same conclusion: The world of climate and environment has not included the lives, expertise, or experiences of Black people. And given that that is the case, it is up to us to work to support our lives, our sanctity, and the safety and future of the next generation.
We are more likely to become refugees when the impacts of climate change become too much to bear, given that the system has failed to serve us. If we do not carve out a Black climate agenda, there’s no reason to believe anybody else will.
Jariel Arvin
Wow. That’s tough.
Tamara Toles O’Laughlin
It’s tough because it can sound like we’re erasing the efforts of Black, Indigenous, and other people of color to work together. But Black people have always been the litmus test for change in this country. Black people are always left in the margins by systems of policy working together to diminish us, leaving us chronically underserved from generation to generation — even in our mother’s wombs.
So, when the hate is that deep, we have to come up with our schedule and agenda for survival.
