On October 1, 2021, FEMA activated the first phase of Risk Rating 2.0 — the most sweeping overhaul of National Flood Insurance Program premium calculations in the program’s 53-year history. Gone were the static flood zones and elevation-based rating tables. In their place: a proprietary algorithm crunching distance-to-water measurements, flood frequency variables, reconstruction cost estimates,
In March 2021, FERC released its final Environmental Impact Statement for the now-cancelled Byford Crossing compressor station expansion — a project that would have sat within three miles of eleven majority-Black communities along Louisiana’s petrochemical corridor. The document ran 1,247 pages. A private consulting firm produced it under contract to the pipeline operator, drawing on
Conservation-induced displacement is the removal or exclusion of people from land and water they have long inhabited or used, carried out in the name of biodiversity protection, carbon sequestration, or ecosystem services. It sits at the intersection of fortress conservation, green grabbing, and market-based environmental policy. For readers of this blog, the stakes are not
Technological solutionism is the belief that every social, economic, and ecological problem can be fixed with the right device, algorithm, or engineered intervention. In climate policy, this belief now underwrites a sprawling apparatus of carbon capture machines, satellite-based forest monitoring, blockchain carbon registries, desalination plants, and “climate-smart” agricultural apps. The problem is not that these
Carbon markets have become the default climate finance tool of the neoliberal era. They turn greenhouse gas emissions into tradable commodities, invent new property rights over the atmosphere, and promise efficiency through price signals. But in frontline communities—from forest-dependent peoples in the Global South to fence-line neighborhoods near industrial polluters in the North—carbon markets have
In April 2021, the Navy detected a fuel leak at the Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility in Honolulu. The complex is staggering in scale: twenty steel-lined tanks, each roughly the height of a twenty-five-story building, holding 250 million gallons of jet fuel, built into a volcanic ridge 100 feet above the aquifer that supplies
Carbon Markets: How Corporate Offset Schemes Shift Burdens to Frontline Communities By Dr. Samara Patel | Political Ecology of Climate Finance Carbon markets are the poster child of mainstream climate policy, but they rest on a dangerous idea: that the right to pollute can be bought and sold like any other commodity. Whether we’re talking
I’ve spent fifteen years tracing the money behind climate solutions, and here’s what I’ve found: carbon markets aren’t broken. They’re doing exactly what they were built to do. The trouble is, they were designed by and for the very corporations that created the climate crisis—not the communities now living with its consequences. When you follow
When FEMA arrived in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria in September 2017, the agency brought more than tarps, generators, and bottled water. It brought a story. The narrative was so deeply embedded in federal disaster policy that it functioned as infrastructure itself. Here is how it goes: a natural disaster strikes. Communities demonstrate resilience. Federal
How Environmental Impact Statements Tell Stories: Narrative Structure as Regulatory Power and the Counter-Documentation That Challenges It In December 2017, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission released its final Environmental Impact Statement for the Mountain Valley Pipeline, a 303-mile fracked gas project cutting through Virginia and West Virginia. Buried somewhere in its thousands of pages was
