SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
environmental justice
Musk's xAI Is Showing Us Exactly Why We Need Public Interest Lawsuits
When powerful corporations are able to completely circumvent basic democratic accountability, public interest lawsuits are a final backstop to protect the community’s well-being.
Oct 05, 2025
The NAACP and the Southern Environmental Law Center are moving to sue Elon Musk’s xAI artificial intelligence company for alleged violations of the Clean Air Act. The company has been accused of illegally operating several dozen diesel-fueled turbines to power Musk’s “Colossus,” a massive data center located on an old industrial lot.
According to SELC, the company operated those generators to power Colossus—and released toxic pollutants—without even applying for a permit to use them.
This entire saga is an excellent example of why public interest lawsuits and strong environmental regulations are critically important. Unfortunately, both are under attack on multiple fronts. The Trump administration and the US Supreme Court have both moved to seriously weaken the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. The White House and the Roberts court, joined by many “supply-side liberals” and proponents of the “abundance agenda,” are also attempting to impeach environmental regulation and public interest lawsuits in the court of public opinion.
Musk’s Memphis misadventures are a case in point of why that’s so dangerous.
No prominent abundance proponent has even attempted to square Musk’s actions with their insistence that we need to remove opportunities to sue to block development.
Colossus went into operation while adroitly sidestepping the democratic process. By dangling promises of tax revenues and economic development, xAI was able to begin operating its massive data center with even some city officials totally oblivious to the process. A company representative who was supposed to speak at a public meeting with the county commission played hooky. Add it all up and it demonstrates how, especially at the local level, powerful corporations are able to completely circumvent basic democratic accountability. In those cases, public interest lawsuits are a final backstop to protect the community’s well-being.
When the government refuses to enforce the laws and allows corporations to run amok, it falls to activists and community groups to force its hand. This is the central premise of Public Citizen founder Ralph Nader’s decades of progressive politics, and something that many centrist Democratic pundits have begun to deride.
What such pundits invariably miss, however, is that despite Nader’s successes, there are still innumerable instances where governments fail to hold powerful corporate interests accountable. In an emblematic example, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson argue in their bestseller Abundance that, while Nader’s approach was important in the late 1960s and early 1970s, we are now at a juncture where such litigation serves mostly to delay important policy implementation and no longer serves a critical purpose. But for all too many disproportionately poor and majority-minority communities like South Memphis, a public interest lawsuit of the sort denigrated in sweeping fashion by pundits is their last, and honestly only, means of protecting themselves.
The framework deployed by the abundance movement, which is echoed by the Trump administration and the Supreme Court, assumes away instances like xAI in Memphis. Indeed, no prominent abundance proponent has even attempted to square Musk’s actions with their insistence that we need to remove opportunities to sue to block development.
Unfortunately, Musk’s machinations along the Mississippi are part of a longstanding pattern of the government ignoring, and sometimes engaging in, development that poses acute harms to vulnerable—disproportionately majority-minority and poor—communities. South Memphis has been repeatedly left exposed to toxic waste by exploitative industrial practices and government neglect. The Tennessee Valley Authority dumped its toxic coal ash waste there. The same exact site where Colossus now sits once hosted a polluting factory.
And it isn’t just South Memphis. Across the United States, there are abundant examples of communities hung out to dry. The corridor of petrochemical factories between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, Louisiana, for example, has been dubbed “Cancer Alley” because its residents are subjected to such high levels of carcinogenic pollution. Other areas with heavy fossil fuel infrastructure are called “sacrifice zones” because of how much cancer and chronic disease residents endure.
Even now waste facilities are almost always sited in poor neighborhoods that don’t have the wealth and political capital to block them. Lawsuits are the final bulwark to defend those communities. Calling for them to taken off the table is dangerous, especially with the White House and Supreme Court eager to ape such talking points to justify removing any means of blockading the whims of the powerful.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Atlanta Must Put Equity at the Heart of City Planning
Unless residents are meaningfully included from the start, we’ll continue to pay the price for decisions that will be made without us.
Sep 21, 2025
On some streets in Atlanta’s Westside neighborhoods, you can smell the flood before you see it. Gray wastewater rises into the roads, seeps into homes and cars, and lingers long after the storm has passed. Residents step onto their porches, hands over their faces, taking in the now-familiar scene. All it takes is a strong rainstorm to overwhelm a system that was never built to support the people who live here.
In one area, flooding became more severe after new construction added housing density without adequate upgrades to drainage infrastructure. A developer installed a retention pond across from a residential block as part of the deal, but it hasn’t been enough. This pattern is not unique to Atlanta. Many cities with legacies of redlining, highway expansion, and racially unequal investment are now experiencing the cumulative toll of decades of neglect and the rising cost of excluding communities from the decisions that shape their neighborhoods.
The flooding that plagues Atlanta’s Westside isn’t just a weather issue. It’s the result of decades of disinvestment, shortsighted planning, and infrastructure that was never designed to serve the communities that live here. And while other cities long ago updated their water systems to separate drinking water from wastewater, Atlanta still runs both through the same outdated pipes. When a heavy rain hits, the system overflows, and neighborhoods are submerged in sewage.
Many of Atlanta’s historic Black neighborhoods are situated at the base of hills, downhill from the wealthier, whiter parts of the city. That’s not a coincidence. It reflects a long history of redlining, highway construction through Black communities, and the repeated exclusion of Westside residents from decisions that shape our lives. We live in the lowlands, and we’ve been treated like an afterthought for generations.
Atlanta often celebrates its civil rights legacy, and as someone who calls the Westside home and works to support communities across the region, I understand the weight of that history. But legacy alone won’t stop the floods.
Now, as the city rushes to accommodate new developments, from Mercedes-Benz Stadium to the Gulch, we are told that flooding will finally be addressed, but only because it now threatens new investment. Downtown Atlanta sits atop massive concrete structures built 50 feet above what was once an industrial rail hub. These platforms were funded with public money, including half a billion dollars to support a luxury development in The Gulch.
Developers were handed city resources and made a promise to include affordable housing and community benefits. As part of a nearly $1.9 billion incentive package, developers agreed to make 20% of the new housing in Centennial Yards affordable. Instead, builders opted to pay an $8 million in-lieu fee, thereby avoiding any affordable housing options altogether. It’s a legal way to sidestep the promises used to gain public support in the first place. And without strong accountability, that money rarely flows back into the communities that were supposed to benefit.
Existing Westside neighborhoods are absorbing the infrastructure demands created by new development. One of many examples is Georgia Power's proposal to build a new electrical substation just two blocks from an elementary school to power nearby luxury developments. These decisions are made without our input, yet our neighborhoods are left to manage the fallout at once: an overwhelmed watershed system, expanding energy needs, and the strain on roads and public services that were never built to support this kind of growth.
This kind of development process is reactive and extractive. It’s a pattern I have seen over and over again. A developer shows up. A problem is discovered, and the community raises concerns. At that point, the city scrambles to hold a few meetings or patch together a short-term fix. But the damage has already been done.
This isn’t just inconvenient. It’s disruptive to our lives and our stability. It undermines property values, displaces long-time residents, and increases the financial burden on families already stretched thin. I have seen neighbors leave not because they wanted to, but because living here became unsustainable.
Living through the consequences and working inside the systems that produced them, I know change is possible, but only if we change how decisions are made. My journey, shaped by life in Atlanta’s Westside neighborhoods and a career focused on building community power, brought me to lead the national Just Communities initiative. The Westside is where so much of Atlanta’s civil rights legacy was born. That history of resistance and resilience is not just part of the past. It’s what drives me, and many others, to continue fighting for justice.
Just Communities is grounded in the belief that equity is a forethought. It shapes the process, not just the outcomes. The Just Communities Protocol offers a practical road map for doing exactly that. At its heart is the Declaration of Collaboration, a tool designed to formalize shared governance among community members, city officials, and developers. It’s not about public input after the fact. It’s about building structures where residents shape decisions from the beginning: what gets built, where, and how.
Right now, the City of Atlanta is updating its comprehensive plan, zoning ordinances, and watershed infrastructure. These are opportunities to finally do things differently. However, unless residents are meaningfully included from the start, we’ll continue to pay the price for decisions that will be made without us.
Atlanta often celebrates its civil rights legacy, and as someone who calls the Westside home and works to support communities across the region, I understand the weight of that history. But legacy alone won’t stop the floods. Honoring it requires more than symbolism; we need a new process, one rooted in justice and shared power. If we want different outcomes, we must change how decisions are made. Until that happens, communities like mine will continue to pay the price.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Climate Justice Is Under Siege; Help Us Defend It
Why we can’t afford to lose the progress frontline communities have built.
Aug 26, 2025
The climate justice infrastructure dedicated to serving vulnerable communities across the United States took decades to build. And it is now at risk.
After nearly 20 years working in frontline communities on environmental justice and community development, I joined Emerald Cities Collaborative as president and CEO in April 2022. Hope around renewed commitments to climate justice, community resilience, and economic opportunities was palpable, as the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and Inflation Reduction Act had just been signed into law shortly after my start. With an influx of federal investments and mandates for racial equity, the promise of that moment energized the climate justice and environmental justice movements.
Today, a coordinated attack on the environmental nonprofit sector and diversity, equity, and inclusion threatens to dismantle the physical and social support networks that serve frontline communities. It is imperative that we understand what’s at stake, who benefits from the current infrastructure, and what the consequences of inaction could be.
Climate justice infrastructure provides the framework for implementing equitable climate investments for all that advance racial justice, economic justice, and environmental justice. This infrastructure includes the physical investments—such as green buildings, solar panels, green infrastructure—and the social supports necessary to ensure their equitable implementation. From community organizing to capacity building for grassroots nonprofits and workforce development programs, environmental nonprofits serve as the backbone of this social infrastructure. These efforts address both climate change and the systemic inequality that leads to disproportionate impacts on vulnerable communities.
We must stand up for nonprofits and the future that they help build—a climate future that is not only green but just.
Significant public and private investments in greener, more resilient energy, water, food, and housing infrastructure—driven by the urgency of climate change—created an unprecedented opportunity to address the environmental, income, wealth, and health disparities within low-income communities and communities of color. Realizing the full potential of these rapidly accelerating investments required a coordinated strategy that integrated local coalition building, policy, project, workforce, and small business development support. This is where the environmental nonprofits stepped in. Environmental nonprofits provided their expertise, on-the-ground leadership, capacity building, and connective tissue to support community-led climate projects, advocacy, and policy.
The breadth of organizations building this critical climate justice infrastructure is remarkable—from national nonprofits and statewide advocacy groups to grassroots organizations and volunteer community groups. We are grateful for their commitment! At Emerald Cities Collaborative (ECC), our history, experience, and dedication to climate justice, along with our support for coalitions and partnerships, equity-centered clean energy policies, and economic inclusion efforts, uniquely positioned us to serve as an intermediary within the broader ecosystem. ECC deployed a coordinated strategy of local coalition building, policy education, project implementation, workforce initiatives, and contractor development to connect disadvantaged communities nationally and in our primary regions (Northwest, Northern California, Southern California, DC-Maryland-Virginia, and Northeast) to the growing clean energy economy. We connected federal and state funding to grassroots implementation and translated new federal initiatives into community-accessible dialogue. The overarching goal was to ensure that the climate and economic benefits of the emerging clean economy were reachable to low-income communities and communities of color.
As a result of the efforts of national nonprofits, community-based organizations, and institutions, many organizations and communities historically left out were able to access federal funding for community climate investments, many for the first time. Communities that have borne the brunt of environmental injustice have benefited from stronger leadership, enhanced organizational capacity, and new tools for community education and organizing.
These gains are all at risk due to the growing attack on environmental nonprofits, the rollback of climate policies, and the disintegration of environmental justice funding. Legal and reputational attacks, such as naming Emerald Cities Collaborative in the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Exploring the Green Group Giveaway Behind the Biden-Harris Environmental Justice Programs report, demonstrate how politically motivated attacks are being used to sway public opinion. This, coupled with the outright illegal termination of environmental justice grants, has had a chilling effect on our work.
However, the impacts are not evenly distributed. Grassroots organizations and BIPOC-led nonprofits are disproportionately vulnerable to these attacks compared with large national organizations with greater resources and political capital. Fear and misinformation have caused some philanthropic funders to pull back. Organizations are being forced to divert resources from mission-critical work to legal defense and crisis communications. And this does not include the mental and emotional toll that environmental justice and climate justice leaders are experiencing.
The stakes are high. Without the valuable work of these organizations, climate solutions may revert to top-down, extractive models that center profit over community. The loss of high-road jobs, apprenticeships, and clean energy workforce programs, along with increased vulnerability to extreme climate events, will unduly affect frontline communities already facing the greatest risk. At the same time, the voices of Black, Indigenous, and immigrant-led movements are in danger of being systematically excluded from the climate conversation.
For us to meet our national climate goals and the just transition agenda, we need strong local, community-driven infrastructure. How can we ensure that the momentum for equitable climate investments in frontline communities is not entirely lost? Will we use this moment to accelerate climate justice—or allow fear and misinformation to dismantle it?
Now is the time for philanthropy, government, and the public to stand in solidarity with national and frontline organizations. Philanthropy must fund general operating support and legal protections for national BIPOC-led and frontline nonprofits. We must resist and roll back state-level attacks on nonprofit speech and operations, as well as the easing of climate policies. And we must educate audiences, donors, and lawmakers about the irreplaceable role of climate justice organizations.
The attack on climate justice infrastructure is about PEOPLE, PROGRESS, and PRINCIPLES! We must stand up for nonprofits and the future that they help build—a climate future that is not only green but just. We must stand up for communities that are resilient and thriving, not just surviving. The alternative is not an option.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular