New Jersey environmental justice advocate Maria Lopez-Nunez, lower left, speaks with organizers of the Transportation and Climate Initiative on September 29. Hear her here.
By Steve Haner
“I think TCI is just taxing poor people so that we can subsidize rich people’s electric cars.”
So said New Jersey’s Maria Lopez-Nuñez, Deputy Director, Organizing and Advocacy for the Ironbound Community Corporation. She was speaking during an online seminar September 29 organized by Transportation and Climate Initiative advocates.
That particular comment can be heard at about 3:10 into this recording of her speech. The full meeting is recorded here, and her remarks start at about 1hour and 43 minutes in. Listen to her whole speech if you can. Listen to those that follow and you will learn she was not alone.
Lopez-Nunez is dead on correct that TCI imposes a major and very regressive tax to deliver minor reductions in CO2 emissions, and that moving people into electric cars merely moves the source of CO2 emissions from the roads to the power plants.
Run the projected CO2 emissions savings from TCI through the climate change models at the heart of this whole worldwide debate and the result is infinitesimal changes in the feared future temperature increases. Selling this as saving the planet is not credible, so the push is on to find a new rationale. The effort to make that “environmental justice” by targeting the tax money to their causes is not being well received.
