Why the Inflation Reduction Act is Less a “Climate Bill” and More a Poison Pill for Black and Indigenous Communities and Movements

The brother El Hajj Malik El Shabazz (aka Malcolm X) once explained, “If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” The tale of two narratives associated with the recent signing into law of the so-called Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) accentuates his words at a critical moment. Communities on the frontlines of the climate crisis find themselves entrapped in a cycle of climate cataclysms and cumulative pollution derived from legacy and systemic environmental racism and classism.

Among other problematic issues, the so-called climate provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act allow for more oil drilling on federal lands. Greenwashing and Democratic party duplicity are nothing to celebrate for Black and Indigenous communities.

[blackagendareport.com]

In the beginning there were promises in regards to our social awarenesses that were all wrapped up in one big acknowledgment of what needed confronted. Infrastructure, inflation, healthcare, exacerbated education debt, drug pricing, taxing the wealthy to help. In the beginning I warned it would all be whitewashed and the shit would run down hill onto us. Sure as the sun would rise day after day there on, that big plan was cherry picked apart to into pieces to benefit the ruling class and their corporations just as I warned. And once again as warning after warning over decades, they're flipping the bill over to us. Covid and trade wars wasn't enough to punish us with this growing unethical practice against the citizenship. Our entire representation also added 10's of billions towards funding and supporting a fascist genocide and war for a needless geopolitical strategy which exacerbates the potential of global war. Please feel free to detail to me the differences between the republican and democratic parties. I'm fairly certain a number of us have done well detailing that isn't possible. Our representation comes as a microcosm compared to the ruling class. We barely register on the meter.

{This, to me, is a fair inquiry. If a Republican introduced a piece of legislation that included opening up 600 million acres of oil and gas leasing in the Gulf of Mexico, dedicated billions of dollars to unproven “false climate solutions” like so called carbon capture and sequestration, extended the life of aging nuclear power plants, allowed for increased mining of uranium, and tied it to a commitment to ratify a separate, rubber stamped American Petroleum Institute (API) side deal that would deregulate landmark environmental laws like the National Environmental Policy Act, as well as the Clean Water Act, which have both acted as vanguards for historically marginalized environmental justice communities, would we still refer to it as a “historic climate bill?” One would hope that the answer would be emphatically, “Hell no!”

So, the question then becomes, why are historically white-led environmental groups, commonly referred to as “Big Green,” as well as far too many anointed climate “thought leaders,” renowned climate writers, and liberal media outlets assigning terms to the IRA such as “climate bill,” and “a win for environmental justice?” Is it because the Democrats, the party that gave us the “Crime Bill,” a racist “New Deal” and, a virtually non-existent Voting Rights Act, and rammed it through a unilateral reconciliation process, are the ones who introduced it?}

{We must be clear - Big Green, the Democrats, and their operatives are exercising a sanctimonious variety of greenwashing and climate denialism so long as they continue pilfering the IRA as a climate bill.}

In other words. Those who actually write the policies. We get promises, or directives, what ever they chose to call them at the time. You go out and tell them this while we (public relation firms, NGOs, and think tanks) develop a scam to trap the citizenship in to benefit the ruling class who owns and pays all of us. Be good boys and girls and you'll keep your position and higher social status in our structured delusional reality.

{“Somehow, we’re both a bargaining chip and the people that can save the day when it comes to elections. Those are moral contradictions that can’t stand for too long. Something’s got to give,” Dallas Goldtooth, who declared, “We’ve been sold out for this vague notion of ‘compromise,” Rhianna Gunn-Wright, who reflected, “What was so painful for a lot of people, including me, was seeing the one-note celebration of this ‘historic’ bill,” and Colette Pinchon Battle, who reminds us, “Once again, the only climate proposal on the table requires that the communities of the Gulf south bear the disproportionate cost of national interests bending a knee to dirty energy – furthering the debt this country owes to the South.”}