When the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced earlier this year that it was reversing the Endangerment Finding — the long-standing federal policy establishing that greenhouse gases pose a clear and present danger to public health — climate deniers declared it a “total victory.” The reality is, however, just the opposite: it was both a clarification of the enormous cost of the constricting impulses of scientific skepticism and a crystallization of the imperative of enhancing innovation and efficacy in community-based strategies and local organizing to mitigate and adapt to climate change.

And the harms of the step-back are a clarion call for organizations like The Kresge Foundation — together with countless organizations working at all levels of civil society — to recommit, fortify, and expand our climate efforts.

The endangerment finding was the legal cornerstone of the federal government’s authority to regulate carbon emissions, demonstrating the importance of local organizing. Its repeal means that the federal government now has no regulatory interest in, and no legal authority to limit, the greenhouse gases produced by cars, power plants, and industries burning oil, gas, and coal.

It is a move at once short-sighted, ill-informed, and insidiously detrimental to communities in every corner of the nation. From the extreme heat of downtown Phoenix to the sunny-day flooding of Miami, from the wildfires of Southern California to the dust storms and air toxicity of El Paso, and from drought-induced crop-yield losses in the Great Plains to heat-induced increases in parasitic and disease livestock vulnerabilities in the Midwest, the repeal disregards the health and well-being of all Americans and intentionally obscures real-word consequences in countless dimensions. It is the worst kind of ideological cynicism.

Kresge is focused on improving the quality of life of residents of American cities who are living with low-incomes and in disinvested communities. These communities face disproportionate exposure to air pollution, extreme heat, flooding and other environmental hazards, and will bear the greatest consequences of this EPA decision. And yet, they have the fewest resources and least political power with which to buffer the economic, health and social fallout of a policy that shapes the ebbs and flows of their daily lives.

Read the full article about local organizing and federal policy by Rip Rapson and Shamar Bibbins at The Center for Disaster Philanthropy.