Colette Pichon Battle, founder of Gulf Coast Center for Law & Policy, delivers the keynote address at the Obama Fellows 2022 Climate Summit Thursday, April 21, 2022, at the Palazzo.
Friday, April 22, 2022 | 2 a.m.
Leading scientists say humanity has until 2030 to mitigate the worst effects of climate change — mostly by transitioning away from fossil fuels in favor of sustainable energy.
Colette Pichon Battle has her own vision for how the next eight years might unfold.
Battle, an Obama Foundation Fellow, is the founder and executive director of the Gulf Coast Center for Law & Policy, a public interest law firm that aims to advance “ecological equity and climate justice” in communities of color on the frontline of climate change, according to its website.
Battle was the keynote speaker for the Obama Foundation Fellows’ annual climate summit Thursday at the Palazzo.
Rather than directly taking aim at large corporations in the energy and agricultural sectors, Battle argued that institutionalized racist structures — from slavery in colonial and early America to the redlining practices that kept racial minorities segregated amid urban sprawl — gave way to an “extractive” economy that prioritizes profits over public well-being.
“We are dealing with structures, we’re not dealing with individual bias,” Battle said. “It’s a system in which public policies or laws, institutional practices and cultural representations work in reinforcing ways to perpetuate racial movement.”
“It’s the subtle racialized patterns and policies and practices that go throughout our political system, our economic system, our sociocultural system, and they are in all of our structures, and they generate differences in wellbeing between whites and others.”
Battle, a practicing attorney, first entered the arena of climate justice after experiencing such inequalities firsthand, she said.
A southern Louisiana native, Battle saw the devastation left by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the historic Category 5 storm that caused over 1,800 fatalities and more than $125 billion in damage.
Redlining, Battle argued, was what put poor Black people around New Orleans in neighborhoods that were below sea level (only the city’s oldest neighborhoods are above sea level) and leveled by Katrina. It’s often a community’s poorest — and by extension disproportionately people of color — who suffer the consequences of natural disasters elsewhere around the U.S.
“When that storm came, it wiped us out,” she said. “And it didn’t wipe us out because we (Black people) didn’t make good choices. It wiped us out because the system only allowed us to live in a certain place.”
Additionally, after Katrina’s 30-foot storm surge leveled the Gulf region, those communities of color that were most affected by the flooding were also left to deal with runoff of gas and oil and toxic chemicals from nearby industrial sites, Battle said.
“This is the kind of thing you have to think about in disaster recovery, because you literally get paid recovery dollars based on the value of your home,” Battle said. “And guess what that does? This necessarily makes the value of my home, despite the fact that I have the same square footage or even more, it makes it less because I’m in a Black community because I was segregated. And now the government check that everybody gets is now based on market value that is rooted in a discriminatory system.”
Battle cited several industries — namely oil, coal and industrial farming — that not only pollute the environment but also perpetuate a structure that incentivizes “unlimited growth to produce unlimited profits” at the expense of workers.
Rather than investing in alternative fuels or carbon-capturing technologies — and placing these experimental ventures in vulnerable communities — climate policy should shift in a direction that focuses less on consuming natural resources in the first place.
“We take too much,” Battle said, nothing one American on average has a larger carbon footprint than more than 300 Ethiopians.
“This climate problem is not about greenhouse gas emissions. It is but it isn’t. This is about a philosophy of extraction that is at the root of our economic system,” she said. “These extractive industries in particular that yield the world’s highest profits and release megatons of greenhouse gases into the air, this is the root of the climate crisis.”
To address the worst impacts of climate change that are yet to come, Americans must first reckon with an economic system that is rooted in the exploitation of others, Battle said. It won’t be until then that the U.S. will be able to fight climate change on a meaningful scale globally.
All that can start to change if Americans can identify that racism may still be perpetuated even without holding personal bias, Battle said.
Having a deeper understanding of those around you is a great place to start in dismantling a model that places profits above the well-being of others, she said.
But even then, it may already be too late to take meaningful action in the areas around the world where the effects of climate change will be most severe.
“I come from a community that will be lost no matter what we do,” Battle said. “If we get everything right, my community will go to sea level and rise. And many communities like mine around this world suffer this fate already.”
“We existed before this was the United States and we will be lost because of greed,” she said. “We have the ability to change this and we are choosing not to because we don’t value the people who are on the frontlines of this, and that is us.”
