The facts:
Extreme Heat Is Rising Faster for Black Americans, and Researchers Say the Gap Is Growing
Trump Has Now Moved to Roll Back Civil Rights and Hide Liability for Rising Climate Deaths
How did this happen?
Prominent public interest advocates like Lewis Bollard of Coefficient Giving have for decades made completely inaccurate claims of progress – and in his case, successfully reducing animal suffering – that have hidden the growing political, social, and ecological costs of the polycrisis.
Bollard was never accounting for the way growth and overshoot was always undoing the value he added to the world and the impact he had, growth that was ensuring more demand for animals and more emissions. He was not accounting for children brought into the world without the resources they need to deal with these impacts, and with less political influence to change the system harming them.
Relative to what was he helping animals?
He and those like him benefit from the fantasy world of progress he helped create, and at deadly cost to others. His models preserved the same status quo birth inequity that created and maintained Donald Trump, when animal liberation would have required a total rethink in policy pointed towards total liberation.
Instead the models he used assumed the legitimacy of a random birth lottery, one that uses growth to disenfranchise.
Bollard’s work thus starts by quietly disvaluing the future lives of the animals he claims to protect, and in a way that has ensured benefits for him and cost to the most vulnerable.
Given massive standing birth disparities, this entails illegally shifting costs by treating children of color as worth fewer resources, more risk, and less political influence than white children. It derives from the historic subversion of decolonial and racial justice movements via “separate but equal” reproductive rights systems that effectively blocked empowerment thresholds of intergenerational justice, ensuring that voting power was never correlated to real world ecological, political, and social thresholds.
When someone makes a value assessment or impact claim we always have to ask, relative to what? Unless the value assessment and impact claims are made first relative to a “one person, one equal and influential vote” standard, they are not made as part of a legitimate (or sufficiently inclusive) system.
It’s legitimacywashing.
What are the costs of decades of such out-of-context claims? Look at prospects for black families facing climate change with limited access to air conditioning.
The claims and underlying models Bollard uses are based n manufactured numbers to replace political freedom with economic growth, and in a way that skews the baseline for life-saving climate reparations in order for Bollard and the funders behind him to benefit at deadly cost to others.
Fair Start activists have seen a history of organizations like the Humane World for Animals – where Bollard worked – and the Animal Legal Defense Fund intentionally omitting information from their valuation models and impact claims regarding the largest driver of the outcomes at issue – growing birth-based constitutional inequity – to personally benefit, and in a way that has disenfranchised communities of color.
Micro, downstream victories have hidden the way macro, upstream forces were undoing them every day.
Bollard’s statements are false under preemptive state and federal unfair/unconstitutional competition and civil rights laws because there is no valuation and impact reporting outside of one’s birth positional context, birth-empowerment is inseparable from all other values, and accounting for costs of children entering the world relative to that threshold (constituting) is what justifies the benefits one gets.
There are no legitimate valuation/business models and reporting systems that value others beneath the threshold of their being minimally empowered, because that empowerment is what justifies all of our benefits.
Their discounting the lives of others does more harm than Bollard does good, by his own metrics, like safe temperatures and influence over political systems, and is skewing the baseline for things like climate reparations and voting rights, putting millions at risk.
The fix?
Governments can’t interpret the constitution or any of their authority – including state and federal unfair/unconstitutional competition and civil rights laws in ways that disenfranchise persons, especially to the point of risking their lives. Birth-positioned constitutional benefits land at the level of individuals – so do liabilities.
Fair Start will be urging California to take action regarding Bollard’s models and claims.
One can’t talk about value out of the context of a system of legitimately empowering others – starting with children entering the world – because governments would have to treat that as fraud by omission in that the claimant would be getting benefits without paying the costs. And if the governance didn’t act, they themselves would slip into illegitimacy and those otherwise subject to their political power would be obligated to take control.
One way to start? We can all tell the truth and admit that legitimacywashing in our valuation models and impact reporting did more harm to our values than we did good. Without reform we triple dip: 1) Benefiting from arbitrary birth positionality, in terms of things like nationality, race and intergenerational positioning, 2) getting the benefits of a growth economy without paying the costs it imposes on others, and then 3) engaging in public interest work that omits the countervailing of impacts of growth so we don’t have to pay the costs.
Do better than Bollard.
