“Climate Justice” Research Grant

The Ford Foundation recently awarded a $300,000 grant to Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Michael Dorsey at Dartmouth to research “Climate Justice” (Daily D article here). This glorious marriage of buzzwords refers not to redistributing some of Miami’s warmth to Hanover but to studying the effects of climate change and the various attempts to prevent it on low-income and minority communities. A preliminary finding? Carbon cap-and-trade laws and other market-based programs are unjust. Apparently here, as so often in academia, ‘justice’ is defined as the opposite of capitalism. Among Dorsey’s complaints is that market-based anti-carbon measures often fail to reduce the emissions of pollutants other than carbon. Perhaps his research will further damn such capitalistic solutions by showing that they don’t prevent heart disease or sexual assault, either.