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An exploration is made of how the environmental justice movement in the United States has taken on some of the communicative and participatory demands and practices of critical pluralism. The movement has been critical of the communicative methods of the mainstream – the top-down organizational structure and its one-way nature of communication, and the lack of attention to issues of public participation in policy-making – and issues of communication have been a central focus in the development and demands of environmental justice. Accepting the diversity and the situated experiences of individuals and cultures has fostered the use of, and demand for, a variety of innovative communicative processes. Internally, the movement has attempted to employ more open discursive processes, paying particular attention to communication within and across diverse groups. Externally, the movement has made demands with regard to issues of communication and more discursive and participatory policy-making on government agencies, particularly the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Chapter 1 begins by stressing the severity of climate change (CC) and showing how, contrary to popular belief, atomic energy is not a viable solution to CC. Many scientists and most market proponents agree that renewable energy and energy efficiencies are better options. The chapter also shows that government subsidies for oil and nuclear power are the result of flawed science, poor ethics, short-term thinking, and special-interest influence. The chapter has 7 sections, the first of which surveys four major components of the energy crisis. These are oil addiction, non-CC-related deaths from fossil-fuel pollution, nuclear-weapons proliferation, and catastrophic CC. The second section summarizes some of the powerful evidence for global CC. The third section uses historical, ahistorical, Rawlsian, and utilitarian ethical principles to show how developed nations, especially the US, are most responsible for human-caused CC. The fourth section shows why climate-change skeptics, such as “deniers” who doubt CC is real, and “delayers” who say that it should not yet be addressed, have no valid objections. Instead, they all err scientifically and ethically. The fifth section illustrates that all modern scientific methods—and scientific consensus since at least 1995—confirm the reality of global CC. Essentially all expert-scientific analyses published in refereed, scientific-professional journals confirm the reality of global CC. The sixth section of the chapter shows how fossil-fuel special interests have contributed to the continued CC debate largely by paying non-experts to deny or challenge CC. The seventh section of the chapter provides an outline of each chapter in the book, noting that this book makes use of both scientific and ethical analyses to show why nuclear proponents’ arguments err, why CC deniers are wrong, and how scientific-methodological understanding can advance sound energy policy—including conservation, renewable energy, and energy efficiencies.

This chapter involves the United States, with attention focused on President Donald Trump’s administration. After an overview of energy justice in the context of America in 2020, the chapter considers the Trump administration’s approach—or absence thereof—to the precepts of energy justice. The chapter begins with an assessment of President Trump. The following section describes the likely position of the Republican Party on issues of energy justice. That is followed by a more detailed examination of the Trump-Republican Party actions involving matters that illuminate their approach to energy with significant focus on climate change and the administration’s efforts to roll back essentially all of the climate change-related measures put into place by former President Barack Obama. Finally, the conclusion considers where governmental policies may be heading and suggests that the Trump agenda is very much a contested one.

The atmosphere and much of the rivers, lakes, and oceans of the Earth are oxygenated. Any pyrite that comes into contact with these environments becomes unstable and breaks down. The process is called oxidation. It is an exothermic process and, as described in Chapter 5, this process was thought to heat the Earth. It is the opposite of reduction, which we discussed with regard to the microbial formation of sulfide from sulfate in Chapter 6. The counterintuitive concept important here is that oxidation is a chemical process that does not necessarily need oxygen. This idea—that you can oxidize things in the absence of oxygen—is one that most natural scientists are aware of but that they need a couple of nudges occasionally to remind themselves about. This means that pyrite oxidizes not only in oxygenated environments—although that is what we are most familiar with—but also in oxygen-free environments. Among the products of pyrite oxidation are large quantities of acid. Although this happens naturally during rock weathering, the intervention of humankind has led to an enormous increase in the exposure of pyrite to the atmosphere. This has produced contamination of the atmosphere, groundwater, and watercourses on a regional scale. It has also increased the amount of uncontrolled coal burning in coal seams, coal mines, and coal waste tips worldwide, making whole towns uninhabitable and laying waste to large areas. In this chapter I consider in more detail what exactly the process of pyrite oxidation is and how it affects the Earth’s environment today, as well as the problems it stores up for humanity in the future. In chemical terms, oxidation does not mean just the addition of oxygen. Oxidation is a reaction that involves the removal of one or more electrons from a compound because of a chemical reaction. One of the most familiar oxidation reactions is combustion, where substances burn in air to produce heat. The way to put out such a fire is to restrict oxygen access using a chemical foam or fire blanket. Since this reaction with oxygen was the best known, the process was called originally called oxidation.