This is part 2 of the discussion of issues from this past weekend’s Tulane Environmental Law Conference. I want to touch briefly on the Friday night keynote by Jerome Ringo.

Mr. Ringo is originally from Lake Charles, and a former employee in one of the petrochemical facilities there. He went on to a career as an environmental advocate, rising to the post of chair of the National Wildlife Federation, representing U.S. NGOs at the Kyoto meetings and subsequent world global warming treaty meetings in Montreal and Berlin, before achieving his current post as president of the Apollo Alliance. Mr. Ringo gave an inspiring speech about the challenges facing the new generation of environmental policymakers, then answered a series of questions from the audience.

During the question-and-answer session, one questioner asked Mr. Ringo where he thought we were as a society on the spectrum from where we’ve been to how far we have to go in terms of environmental advocacy. Part of Mr. Ringo’s answer focused on how, as long he has been involved in environmental activism, he has been struck by how different his audiences continue to look from him. He then talked about how minority populations and the poor are disproportionately affected by pollution, but are severely disproportionately represented in the environmentalist community, and how the message of environmental groups needs to be re-tooled to reach out to the communities most affected to achieve a common understanding of what is a common problem.

To a degree, environmentalism continues to be a luxury item. A Prius doesn’t come cheap. In a short-term paycheck-to-paycheck world, five one-dollar standard light bulbs make more sense to the consumer than one five-dollar high-efficiency light bulb. As was highlighted in a Saturday session regarding challenges to construction of new coal-fired power plants, it is the state regulatory bodies’ charge to approve facilities that lead to the most affordable source of electricity for rate-payers (of course, the conclusion that new coal-generated electricity will be cheaper in the mandatory cap-and-trade world that we will enter within the next year or two is far from foregone). These are the changes and challenges for environmental policymakers. It is clear that environmental changes must be made before we reach critical points-of-no-return, but it is also critical that this movement consider the already existing disproportionalities and disparities that are inherent to our society.