Op-Ed: The Transition of NJSCA from the Carbon Cashback Project

Now more than ever, it is clear that we must take bold action to mitigate the impacts of rampant fossil fuel emissions on our climate. However, even when faced with challenges that will define the political landscape of this nation for decades to come, many are still convinced that half-measures that leave emissions reductions up to chance will be enough. Many of these take the form of market-based methods like carbon pricing and trading. These kinds of policies have gained credence as of late, from as far away as countries like Sweden, to as close as our own backyard with the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. However, in seeking to hand off the pressing questions of how much we should emit and where we should emit to some perceived higher logic of the market, these kinds of approaches attempt to reject our collective responsibility for ensuring an equitable reduction in harmful emissions. That is not to say that those who promote such policies are purposefully ignoring these concerns. But from our experiences as students advocating for carbon pricing at the state-level and listening to communities that have been most impacted, we learned firsthand the kinds of issues that can not only be ignored but exacerbated by policy that fails to directly account for the disparate impacts that pollutants have on our state and its communities.

 

In 2017, the founders of the New Jersey Student Climate Advocates (NJSCA)  – a mix of high school, undergraduate and graduate students with a passion for sustainability – in concert with many soon-to-be student activists around the world, strongly believed that the incoming administration was going to take an apathetic and even antagonistic stance on climate change. As a result, NJSCA began as students researching political solutions that could be pushed for at the state-level to combat climate change. Inspired by similar efforts at the national level, we ultimately opted to develop a carbon pricing policy, one which would for the first time make it costly to recklessly pollute the environment and, we thought, would lead to emissions reductions across the board.

 

For the first two years of its existence, NJSCA almost exclusively dedicated itself to working on that policy, a carbon fee and dividend system which we called “Carbon Cashback.” The idea was to place a rising fee on New Jersey’s fossil fuel emissions with the purpose of utilizing its generated revenue to invest in green jobs and infrastructure and send dividends back to NJ households to mitigate the impacts on lower-income individuals.

 

The Carbon Cashback project was a huge undertaking that, in spite of numerous challenges, culminated in the creation of a viable bill draft based on the input of hundreds of stakeholders and the development of a foreseeable path towards getting support for the bill in the legislature. But, in our immediate efforts to develop policy and in spite of our broad outreach, we had a crucial blind spot: we had failed to fully consider what our policy would have meant for communities at the frontline on issues of pollution and environmental justice. 

 

Policy should be designed to meet community needs. After receiving feedback from environmental justice groups, those who advocate for the empowerment of traditionally underrepresented stakeholders, we began to realize that climate action is not one-size-fits-all: not all climate action is beneficial for all people. While carbon fee and dividend policies are shown to have the potential to reduce emissions, research conducted by the EPA and Dr. Nicky Sheats (among others) has revealed that these measures can leave behind already vulnerable populations. Specifically, market dynamics can exacerbate the rampant emissions problem minority-populated or low income urban communities currently suffer from. Consequently, these communities that have historically suffered neglect regarding environmental issues can be left worse off. In not fully understanding the viewpoints of these key stakeholders, we had boxed ourselves in on a policy that would not have been able to meet the needs of many New Jerseyans already suffering the impacts of environmental degradation. 

 

Faced with this, NJSCA took a bold step and suspended our efforts on the Carbon Cashback project. For any advocacy group, seeing a window of opportunity close is tough – but, for our members, some of whom had this as their first major environmental policy push, the impact was deeply disheartening. Despite our concerns, we understood that we should strive to achieve meaningful, long-lasting change in communities across the state through a community-driven approach, rather than one dependent on only the support of government officials and academics. This period of reflection forced us to ask questions about our values and goals as youth advocates: 

• What values do we want to push through our advocacy? 

• Whom do we truly represent?

• Beyond numbers, fees and graphs, what kind of New Jersey are we looking to create at the end of all this?

In our answers to these questions, we found that what we were pursuing was inconsistent with those goals and we decided to change course.

 

While our pivot as an organization has been challenging, particularly since we cannot claim to speak for environmental justice communities in NJ, we feel that it was necessary given the implicit consequences in the kinds of policy that we were supporting. Likewise, when others - including dedicated activists and green policymakers - propose climate change mitigation strategies that share the same fundamental market mechanisms that our policy once did, we feel the need to speak out. This inevitably comes with controversy, as we are a student organization with much to learn when it comes to climate advocacy. But at the same time, we firmly believe that the role of youth advocates is to push the boundary of typical policy discussion, even if it at first feels unwelcome to established environmental initiatives. And, while we should not let “perfect become the enemy of good”, for the sake of the communities in NJ most vulnerable to becoming “sacrifice zones” for this state’s emissions, we need to start asking ourselves if the policies that we are developing are good enough.

 

Authors:

Yaw Asante, Alice Feng, Melina Mahood, Siddhant Makkar, Michael Hwang, and Jackie Vandermel are members of the New Jersey Student Climate Advocates (NJSCA), a student-led organization focused on developing community-focused, climate-change mitigation policy.