Environmental Justice: Not an EPA Bug, But a Feature

"If Texas is required to comply [with new EPA regulations], the state could be faced with a large number of plant retirements, thousands of lost jobs, and significantly higher energy costs." -- Cornyn shut out of Senate hearing on new air regs that affect Texas. [Hat tip to Mark Alger.]

This is known in Greenie jargon as "environmental justice." It is akin to "social justice" in it's construct. As such it bears no resemblance to true justice where the facts and evidence of a case are used to arrive at a verdict.

In short, greenie's view environmental justice as penalizing with regulations those who are either viewed to be able to withstand the added costs (allegedly they wouldn't do it to the poor directly) or for acts of the past that were not penalized but should have been (Texas having been such a large source of oil makes its particularly vulnerable under this view).

"What are they being penalized for" you ask? Well all that pollution of course. "What polution?" Well, CO₂ is now a pollutant because the EPA says so, "So in keeping with environmental justice, Texas has no right to protest any regulatory restrictions, so they certainly have no right to be present on my committee." said an unnamed unofficial spokeperson for Mrs. Senator Boxer.