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WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) – In its latest move to signal loyalty with the Democrat Party’s left-wing base, the Biden administration has unveiled a new office dedicated to “environmental justice.”

Created under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), the Office of Environmental Justice (OEJ) will “engage all Justice Department bureaus, components and offices in the collective pursuit of environmental justice,” as defined by the administration’s Comprehensive Environmental Justice Enforcement Strategy, according to the new office’s website.

That strategy, the administration says, “provides a roadmap for using the Justice Department’s civil and criminal enforcement authorities, working with EPA and other federal partners, to advance environmental justice through timely and effective remedies for systemic environmental violations and contaminations and for injury to natural resources in underserved communities that have been historically marginalized and overburdened, including low-income communities, communities of color, and Tribal and Indigenous communities.”

“Although violations of our environmental laws can happen anywhere, communities of color, indigenous communities, and low-income communities often bear the brunt of the harm caused by environmental crime, pollution, and climate change,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a press conference announcing the OEJ. “For far too long, these communities have faced barriers to accessing the justice they deserve. The Office of Environmental Justice will serve as the central hub for our efforts to advance our comprehensive environmental justice enforcement strategy. We will prioritize the cases that will have the greatest impact on the communities most overburdened by environmental harm.”

The announced focus of the OEJ on racial and class dimensions to environmental issues reflects the Biden administration’s belief in “intersectionality,” the contention that the interests of the political Left’s various identity-based factions are all interdependent, from abortion “access” to the LGBT agenda to wealth redistribution to criminal justice “reform” to illegal immigration. 

Such rhetoric is a recurring theme of administrative pronouncements, such as an October 2021 “National Strategy on Gender Equity and Equality,” which declared abortion, immigration, climate change, race, sexual orientation, and more to all be under its purview.

The new office also highlights the administration’s commitment to the narrative that anthropogenic global warming (AGW) — the view that human activity, rather than natural phenomena, is primarily responsible for Earth’s changing climate — is an established phenomenon and a cataclysmic threat to humanity, although a full view of the scientific evidence paints a dramatically different picture.

Activists claim there is a “97 percent scientific consensus” in favor of AGW, but that number distorts an overview of 11,944 papers from peer-reviewed journals, 66.4 percent of which expressed no opinion on the question; in fact, many of the authors identified with the AGW “consensus” later spoke out to say their positions had been misrepresented.

Further, contrary to claims that people are dying due to climate change, data from the International Disasters Database show that “climate related deaths” (i.e., deaths due to floods, droughts, storms, wildfires, and extreme temperatures) have dramatically and steadily declined since the 1920s. 

AGW proponents suffered a blow in 2010 with the discovery that their leading researchers had engaged in widespread data manipulation, flawed climate models, misrepresentation of sources, and suppression of dissenting findings. 

In March 2019, Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore called AGW alarmism a “complete hoax and scam,” a “kind of toxic combination of religion and political ideology” that is “as bad a thing that has happened to science in the history of science.”

As for the Office of Environmental Justice, PJ Media’s Rick Moran argues that the “real danger” is, “as with anything having to do with the enforcement of environmental laws, the government’s tendency to wildly overregulate with no means for private citizens or companies to correct the overreach.”

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