There is no doubt that the poor and marginalized suffer from the impacts of pollution and climate disruption — particularly communities of color. They are at the frontlines of the climate emergency. For example, of the 73 waste-burning incinerators across the United States, an astounding 79 percent are located within three miles of low-income and minority neighborhoods, which are exposed to mercury, lead, and soot. The Green New Deal is not only a serious climate plan, but an opportunity to uproot historical injustices and inequities to advance social, racial, and economic justice, including redressing the exclusion of black, brown, Native American, and other vulnerable communities from the programs that made up the original New Deal.
As president, Bernie will:

1. Ensure an inclusive, comprehensive process from start to finish. Workers and communities on the frontline of fossil fuel extraction, transportation and use and those most vulnerable to climate impacts must be involved from the creation and implementation of regulations and protocols to the distribution of funds and carrying out the work of the Green New Deal.
2. Follow Environmental Justice principles. It is an unfortunate reality that institutional racism also impacts environmental health, and thus the public health and safety of millions of low-income families, people of color, and tribal communities. African American and Latinx communities deal with 56 percent and 63 percent more air pollution, respectively, than they create. Tribal lands are only 4 percent of the United States land base, yet a quarter of our nation’s 1,322 Superfund hazardous waste sites, as well as the vast majority of our abandoned uranium mines, are in Indian country. Additionally, federal leasing of public lands for fossil fuels extraction significantly impacts numerous indigenous communities that share more than 3,000 miles of contiguous border with National Forest lands.

The Green New Deal must serve to address modern and historical inequities and environmental racism. We will follow Environmental Justice principles and:

1. Ensure the full and equal enforcement of all environmental, civil rights, and public health laws and aggressive prosecution of violators. Hazardous waste sites, chemical and industrial plants, aging lead pipes, and decaying infrastructure that endanger the health of all citizens will be fully regulated to ensure the health and safety of all. The EPA’s Office of Civil Rights will step up its investigations into alleged environmental justice violations, including corporate polluters as well as the elected officials who enable them.Ensure that Green New Deal jobs and job training resources are made available to low-income and disadvantaged communities equitably, and ensure equal access to clean energy, electrification, efficiency, and transportation funding, grants, and other incentives. We will promote cleaner manufacturing and materials recycling, safe conditions for farm workers, and a clean energy economy, while providing safe, healthy job sites and other economic benefits to people of color.
2. Focus job training and local hiring to reflect the racial and gender diversity of the community receiving federal investments. Federal procurement will prioritize minority- and women-owned businesses, cooperatives and employee-owned firms, and community-owned and municipal enterprises. Programs such as the Historically Underutilized Business Zones will be expanded under the Green New Deal to promote job growth in economically distressed communities.
3. Update permitting rules that allow polluters to target poor communities for polluting infrastructure. Cumulative environmental impacts will be measured and we will require polluters to remediate them. Precaution for the health and safety of our children and planet should be valued above profit.
4. Ensure that all agencies abide by Executive Order 12898, which according to the EPA requires agencies to “identify and address the disproportionately high and adverse human health or environmental effects of their actions on minority and low-income populations, to the greatest extent practicable and permitted by law.”
5. Extend civil rights protections to ensure full access to the courts for poor and minority communities to seek legal protections by overturning the Sandoval Supreme Court decision that set an unreasonable burden of proof of racism for claims of environmental racism, including disparate and cumulative exposure to environmental health risks.
6. Follow the Principles of Environmental Justice adopted at the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit. The goals and outcomes of the Green New Deal should continue to be developed under the Jemez Principles for Democratic Organizing with strong and consistent consultation with the communities most affected by the currently unequal enforcement of environmental laws.
7. Ensure that funding from the Green New Deal for parks and public lands are distributed equitably in urban, suburban, and rural areas. Superfund hazardous waste sites should be fully remediated, instead of simply covered up to make urban parks.
8. Fully survey and track pollution in vulnerable communities. The EPA EnviroScreen will be enhanced to provide comprehensive information about cumulative environmental impacts. States will be required to report progress made on environmental justice every five years. Traditionally under-represented communities will receive significant public education, technical assistance, and outreach as part of agency rulemakings and public commenting processes to elicit participation.
9. Promote urban sustainability initiatives to improve the environmental and social conditions of low-income neighborhoods and communities of color without rendering those neighborhoods inaccessible for future residents of limited economic means.
10. Ensure the creation and implementation of the Green New Deal is accessible to people with disabilities and non-English speakers. All publications will be in multiple languages, including Braille, and meetings will have language interpreters, including sign language, as appropriate.
11. Create equitable hiring standards. We will ensure that all the funding that stems from the Green New Deal plan follows standards and guidelines to ensure the jobs created by investing in infrastructure are jobs are available first to displaced workers, veterans, formerly incarcerated people, people with disabilities, and people from vulnerable communities.
12. Impacted communities, including Tribes, will receive dedicated grant funding. Funding that flows from this plan will prioritize, to the greatest extent possible, communities on the frontlines of fossil fuel extraction, transportation and use and those most vulnerable to climate impacts. Funding will be prioritized for low-income communities, communities of color, people with varied abilities, Tribes, rural communities, and community-based organizations and community development funds. Each agency involved in carrying out the Green New Deal will be required to coordinate in an interagency process to ensure local communities are involved in carrying out this plan.
13. The first two years of this plan will be spent very aggressively laying down a social safety net to ensure that no one is left behind. Because this plan is so comprehensive in ensuring we solve the climate crisis, we must prioritize establishing a social safety net in the first years of the implementation of this plan:

Energy assistance. While we do not expect energy prices to spike because the federal government is going to weatherize homes, electrify heating, and keep electricity prices stable, we still want to ensure that families are protected during the transition. We will expand the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) by $25 billion to help low-income families pay their heating and cooling bills. Additionally, the program will be expanded to provide 10 percent of program costs for maintenance of new efficient heating and cooling systems and technical assistance for the installation and use of new furnaces, heat pumps, boilers, and other upgrades for the duration of the 10-year transition.

Ensure a hunger-free transition. Because the cost of energy and food are so intertwined, we will provide $215.8 billion for free, universal school meals, including breakfast, lunch and snacks. We will expand the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) by $311 billion to increase the benefits from the “thrifty” plan which provides inadequate benefits to the more generous “low-cost” food plan, include those with incomes up to 200 percent of the federal poverty line, remove punitive work requirements, remove barriers for college students to access SNAP, and ensure people are not denied benefits due to past interaction with the criminal justice system. We will also expand the SNAP program and benefits to the people of Puerto Rico, the Northern Mariana Islands, and American Samoa so they are on par with the benefits in the continental United States.

14. Ensure Tribes and Native American people benefit from this plan.

The federal government will abide by treaties and respect tribal sovereignty while upholding the trust responsibility in every step of this plan.

Tribes will be eligible for all funding available through this plan. Tribes will be able to request technical assistance from agencies carrying out the Green New Deal to equip them with the resources needed to co-manage resources and review federal government actions through the consultation and consent process.

We will abide by the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and ensure the free, prior and informed consent by Indigenous Peoples.

15. Invest in Environmental Justice centered community economic development.

We will repair, dismantle, and convert fossil fuel infrastructure on our federal public lands. We must not only clean up existing blighted sites, but as we transition away from fossil fuels, we must ensure no infrastructure is abandoned in a way that would create health or safety dangers for the surrounding community. We will spend $100 billion on fossil fuel well and mine cleanup.

We will clean up Brownfield and Superfund sites. We will clean up and repair thousands of contaminated sites. We will invest $238 billion to clean up Superfund sites and $150 billion to clean up and revitalize Brownfields, and other areas and communities that have been polluted by the fossil fuel, chemical and mining industries.

Source: Sanders