When the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced earlier this year that it was reversing the Endangerment Finding — the long-standing federal policy establishing that greenhouse gases pose a clear and present danger to public health — climate deniers declared it a “total victory.” The reality is, however, just the opposite: it was both a clarification of the enormous cost of the constricting impulses of scientific skepticism and a crystallization of the imperative of enhancing innovation and efficacy in community-based strategies to mitigate and adapt to climate change.
And the harms of the step-back are a clarion call for organizations like The Kresge Foundation — together with countless organizations working at all levels of civil society — to recommit, fortify, and expand our climate efforts.
The endangerment finding was the legal cornerstone of the federal government’s authority to regulate carbon emissions. Its repeal means that the federal government now has no regulatory interest in, and no legal authority to limit, the greenhouse gases produced by cars, power plants, and industries burning oil, gas, and coal.
It is a move at once short-sighted, ill-informed, and insidiously detrimental to communities in every corner of the nation. From the extreme heat of downtown Phoenix to the sunny-day flooding of Miami, from the wildfires of Southern California to the dust storms and air toxicity of El Paso, and from drought-induced crop-yield losses in the Great Plains to heat-induced increases in parasitic and disease livestock vulnerabilities in the Midwest, the repeal disregards the health and well-being of all Americans and intentionally obscures real-word consequences in countless dimensions. It is the worst kind of ideological cynicism.
Kresge is focused on improving the quality of life of residents of American cities who are living with low-incomes and in disinvested communities. These communities face disproportionate exposure to air pollution, extreme heat, flooding and other environmental hazards, and will bear the greatest consequences of this EPA decision. And yet, they have the fewest resources and least political power with which to buffer the economic, health and social fallout of a policy that shapes the ebbs and flows of their daily lives.
It has long been assumed that federal policy is the primary driver of combatting climate change. No longer. When federal environmental policy has not just left the building, but seeks to deconstruct it and sell it for scrap, local action must step in to protect, to preserve, and to build anew — and philanthropic funders have a vital role to play in spurring local action.
The Augmented Role of Local Action
The contours of that action are already in place. It is local municipalities that are decarbonizing buildings, implementing heat reduction strategies, and designing resilient water infrastructure. It is the private sector recalibrating its investments to take into account the heightened cost structures and risks of climate disruptions. It is neighborhood organizations organizing residents to pursue solar installation in homes and places of worship, to establish community resilience hubs, and to explore other frontiers of innovation and impact that weave together more equitable ways of ensuring that community experience and wisdom is heard, valorized, and incorporated into local decision-making.
The Kresge Environment program has invested in these forms of local action, as well as in a powerful network of organizations with the technical experience, expertise, and skill to help implement them at ever-broader levels of scale.
We are not alone. Philanthropy has a long and distinguished record of precisely this kind of support, both when the federal government was an instrumental partner and when it was not. Foundations like Packard, Hewlett, Moore, Pisces, McKnight, MacArthur and Walton have been stalwart supporters at the national and international level of mitigating the effects of climate change. They have more recently joined forces with foundations like Kresge, the San Diego Community Foundation, and others to fortify local climate resilience efforts.
Doubling Down
And yet, maintenance of effort is necessary but insufficient in a period of federal malfeasance. Philanthropy must — because it can — strengthen both its role as a civic fire-fighter and as a civic builder.
Its civic fire-fighting role entails pursuing legal actions to protect what is defensible, offering longer-term grants to protect and enhance the capacity of at-risk community-based organizations; accelerating our support for rapid on-the-ground responses to unforeseen challenges; and speaking plainly and publicly, without equivocation, about both the harms and the necessary responses to the current policy environment.
Its civic building role involves embracing more risk: calling on tools beyond grants, whether below-market loans, loan guarantees, or equity investments; forging new tolerances for helping local units of government do what they otherwise could not; developing blended investments in traditionally-siloed fields like housing, health, open space, arts and culture and human development.
The Longer Arc
The movements that have produced this nation’s most durable and equitable social progress were not built in Washington. They were built in communities by people who refused to accept that the world could not be different than it was. The climate justice movement is no different. The leaders we are privileged to partner with — in Detroit, New Orleans, Fresno, Memphis, and other cities across the country — are not waiting for permission to build a more resilient, more equitable future. They are building it now.
There is no minimizing the very real damage that will result from repeal of the endangerment finding. But, as the saying goes, rather than seeing this as a sentence ending with a period, we should see a comma at the end — an invitation to complete the sentence on very different terms.
Nonprofit organizations working at ground-level are doing just that. These organizations are continuing to innovate how we approach public infrastructure, building neighborhood coalitions to strengthen community resilience, comparing notes across communities about how to both mitigate and adapt to climate change, and forging coalitions to advocate for forward-leaning zoning, land management, and permitting reform.
There is no substitute for visionary, enlightened federal policy. But in its absence, we will, in fact, create visionary, enlightened, and effective local policy, and practice. If the federal government is determined to step back, civic coalitions are equally determined to step forward. Our collective future depends on it.
Rip Rapson is president and CEO of the Kresge Foundation. Shamar Bibbins is managing director of Kresge’s Environment Program.
