UCSB Library event: Do Environmental Markets Cause Environmental Injustice?

The UCSB Library is hosting a special talk on Tuesday, April 20 at 4pm titled "Do Environmental Markets Cause Environmental Injustice?" Danae Hernandez Cortes, Economics Ph.D. candidate (and our 2021 Grad Slam People's Choice Awardee!), will be presenting alongside Kyle Meng, Associate Professor at the Bren School of Environmental Management and the Department of Economics.

About the Talk
There is mounting evidence that economically disadvantaged and racial minority communities bear a greater share of environmental harms. This systematic pattern can be found across the world and over time. In California, existing large disparities in pollution exposure underlie many environmental justice concerns.

At the same time, policymakers increasingly rely on market-based environmental policies - like pollution taxes and emissions trading programs - to cut pollution. But while these policies lower the economic costs of cutting pollution, the market forces unleashed by them could widen existing pollution disparities between disadvantaged and other communities.

In their talk, Kyle Meng and Danae Hernandez-Cortes will share what they learned when they examined what happened to such inequalities following the introduction of California's greenhouse gas emissions trading program, the world's second largest carbon market. Finding that the program narrowed local air pollution disparities between disadvantaged and other communities, Meng and Hernandez-Cortes will discuss implications and limitations of these findings in other settings where environmental injustices meet environmental markets.

Date: Tuesday, April 20, 2021
Time: 4pm
Register here