Redefining Discrimination: Dismantling Environmental Protections through the Logic of Reactionary Colorblindness

Equating Racial Remediation with Racism

A first-order tenet of reactionary colorblindness is to portray policies for racial redress as equally pernicious as Jim Crow racism (Okechukwu 2019). This framing requires shifting from a race-conscious view of the Fourteenth Amendment toward an anti-classification understanding.” According to Haney López (2007), “[this] understanding of the Equal Protection clause . . . accords race-conscious remedies and racial subjugation the same level of constitutional hostility” (p. 988) Such an interpretation considers both affirmative action and school segregation to be racist.

A pivotal moment was Fullilove v. Klutznick (1980). Although the Supreme Court’s majority opinion upheld the constitutionality of requirements for racial minority hiring in federal contracts, the dissenting opinion advanced anticlassification logic. Justices Potter Stewart and William Rehnquist pointed to a single line from Justice Harlan’s dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896): “Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.” In endorsing this idea, Justices Stewart and Rehnquist coopted colorblind language conceived to combat segregation and repurposed it to constrain racial progress. They thus created new logics to serve reactionary ends and mapped a colorblind strategy that lawyers and judges would follow going forward (Haney López 2007).

Legal scholarship also spread colorblind interpretations of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In Affirmative Discrimination, Glazer (1987) saw the act as fulfilling, then violating, the anti-classification understanding: “Having placed into law the dissenting opinion of Plessy v. Ferguson that our Constitution is color-blind, we entered into a period of color and group consciousness with a vengeance” (p. 55). He argued that any differential treatment by race was akin to the Nuremberg Laws of Nazi Germany and South African apartheid (Glazer 1987:200; Haney López 2007).

Overall, this approach served to curtail progressive policies by conflating them with racism. As the conservative legal movement strove to preserve racial inequality, it decided to “abandon the use of overt group-based categorical distinctions” and to embrace race-neutral approaches to civil rights laws (Siegel 2000:109). Achieving this goal required extending the anti-classification understanding into other legal areas.

Promoting Colorblind Definitions of Race

Reactionary legal actors weakened the race consciousness of civil rights law by advancing colorblind definitions of race. This involved collapsing distinctions between racial groups and rendering race equal to other demographic traits. This strategy would ensure that the meaning of race would no longer work toward racial redress.

Regents of University of California v. Bakke (1978) was a landmark Supreme Court case for redefining race through an anti-classification lens. The Court’s majority rejected racial quotas in admissions but affirmed the use of race to promote diversity in enrollment. Justice Lewis Powell, despite being a deciding majority vote, strongly argued that racial groups no longer had meaningful distinctions. He stated that the United States had become “a nation of minorities,” with no single group dominating race relations. Powell redefined race as ethnicity so there was no single “white” majority, but rather a collection of European ethnic categories (Haney López 2007). This flattened racial categories so that neither white nor nonwhite groups could claim having suffered historical racism. What existed was not racial discrimination, but rather ethnicity-based competition in which different groups vied to capture state resources. Powell also treated race as just another demographic category, as one of many factors to consider for admissions, alongside geographic background or rural upbringing (Hannah-Jones 2024). In doing so, Powell advanced a theory of race for diversity rather than redress (Hannah-Jones 2024).

These legal interpretations distorted the meaning of race to erase its stratifying power. This turn toward colorblindness sought to make whites’ majority status illegible and thus obscured the role of race as an instrument of subjugation. Powell’s arguments paved the way for reactionary colorblindness to expand, as lawyers and justices would widely cite this language to discredit race-conscious logic (Haney López 2007).

Whites as Victims of Racism

Reactionary colorblindness advances the claim that whites are victims of racism. With Powell turning whites into a minority, a corollary tactic was to depict them as an embattled group suffering from so-called reverse racism. This reactionary narrative explicitly stokes a sense of racial threat related to white identity.

Legal scholar Alexander Bickel (1974) used a logic of white victimization, stating that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was correct in affirming that “discrimination on the basis of race is illegal, immoral, unconstitutional, inherently wrong, and destructive of democratic society.” He then argued that affirmative action violated those principles: “Those for whom racial equality was demanded are to be more equal than others” (p. 133). This claim that whites are disfavored minorities is a cornerstone of reactionary colorblindness (Haney López 2007). The idea rests on a race-neutral view of equal protection in which no meaningful distinctions between racial groups exist, while also activating feelings of white persecution.

Changing What Counts as Racial Discrimination

Reactionary legal actors sought to constrain the legal parameters of racial discrimination. These efforts involved weakening disparate-impact claims, highlighting antiwhite racism, and scrutinizing how race is used in policy. First, conservative lawyers and judges became more critical of disparate-impact claims. In City of Richmond v. J. A. Croson Co. (1989), Justice Sandra Day O’Connor questioned the premise that white contractors’ biased hiring practices were to blame for minority firms’ underrepresentation in Richmond’s construction industry. For O’Connor, past structural racism had no bearing on the present. Moreover, conservative justices increasingly required evidence of discriminatory intent by specific actors, a difficult bar to meet (Siegel 2000). This strategy was essential to what Haney López (2012) called “intentional blindness”: focusing on the explicit racism of individuals while obscuring the implicit ways that structural racism produces disparities.

Second, justices also began interpreting charges of racial discrimination as racism against whites. In City of Richmond v. Croson, Justice John Stevens stressed that remediation policy deprives whites of equal opportunity and “stigmatizes the disadvantaged class [white defendants and whites in general] with the unproven charge of past racial discrimination.” Thus, racial discrimination is narrowed in its meaning and turned into a form of antiwhite reverse racism (Haney López 2012).

Last, the judiciary required that the use of race in any policy be assessed to determine if it violated whites’ equal protection rights. In Regents of University of California v. Bakke (1978), Justice Powell harbored deep skepticism of using race in policy. He wrote, “Racial and ethnic distinctions of any sort are inherently suspect and thus call for the most exacting judicial examination” (p. 291). He called for the judiciary to implement strict scrutiny in cases involving race. For Powell and like-minded justices, the United States had left its racism in the past, so remediation policies served no clear purpose other than reverse racism. As Haney López (2007) argued, reactionary judges believed that racial redress policies were “racial rent-seeking by a new dominant race” (p. 1048). With this logic, the widespread adoption of strict scrutiny from the 1970s onward sought to dismantle remediation policies.

We now turn to the methods and findings which analyze how the recent EOs repurpose the tenets of reactionary colorblindness for anti-environmental goals. These EOs target contemporary policies related to environmental and climate justice. Yet the rhetorical and legal tools used to dismantle these policies are the result of decades of deliberate work in conservative jurisprudence.

Environmental Justice as Race-Based Preferencing and Contrary to Colorblindness

In this section, we show how the administration justifies eliminating environmental justice policies and programs in the EOs by claiming they perpetuate racial preferences and contradict colorblind individualism. In the EOs, the government uses a reactionary colorblindness technique that omits race by claiming race neutrality while dog whistling race to activate white racial anxiety. Although this tactic was pervasive across the EOs, we focus on four specific orders that fulfilled long-standing aims for reactionary colorblindness.

On January 21, Trump signed EO 14173 (Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity). It opened by stating, “Longstanding Federal civil-rights laws protect individual Americans from discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. These civil-rights protections serve as a bedrock supporting equality of opportunity for all Americans” (italics added). The EO then pivots to argue that DEI policies breach these colorblind principles, while simultaneously using dog whistles that stoke a sense of white racial threat:

Illegal DEI and DEIA policies not only violate the text and spirit of our longstanding Federal civil-rights laws, they also undermine our national unity, as they deny, discredit, and undermine the traditional American values of hard work, excellence, and individual achievement in favor of an unlawful, corrosive, and pernicious identity-based spoils system. Hardworking Americans who deserve a shot at the American Dream should not be stigmatized, demeaned, or shut out of opportunities because of their race or sex.

By referring to an “identity-based spoils system,” this EO portrays programs for racial redress not as necessary tools to overcome past and current injustices but as reverse racism or as competition between ethnic groups over resources, power, and preferential treatment by the state (Haney López 2007). The EO continues by arguing that DEI diminishes “the importance of individual merit, aptitude, hard work, and determination” and instead “has prioritized how people were born instead of what they were capable of doing.” The administration uses language that omits race yet immediately seeks to capitalize on feelings of racial grievance, implying that whites are denied opportunities because racial minorities get ahead on the basis of their race and not merit.

Following two pages of reactionary colorblind arguments, the EO then lists dozens of items to revoke and reform. The first one pertains to environmental justice. In a section titled “Terminating Illegal Discrimination in the Federal Government,” the EO rescinds EO 12898 (Federal Actions to Address Environmental Justice in Minority Populations and Low-Income Populations). This 1994 EO was an important mechanism for adjudicating environmental justice claims (Gross and Stretesky 2015). Moreover, given that Trump’s EO based its legal authority in the Title VI provision of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, labeling the 1994 order as discrimination turned civil rights protections on their head (discussed more later).

EO 14148 (Initial Rescissions of Harmful Executive Orders and Actions) eliminated nine previous EOs related to climate and the environment that the Biden administration published. In the opening lines, the EO claimed that a “divisive and dangerous preferential hierarchy” had replaced “hard work, merit, and equality” in federal institutions. Its justificatory logic then continued, “Orders to open the borders have endangered the American people and dissolved Federal, State, and local resources that should be used to benefit the American people. Climate extremism has exploded inflation and overburdened businesses with regulation.” In this EO, the government draws on language of abstract liberalism and appeals to white victimization. It then mentions “open borders,” a racist trope that inflames white fears of declining majority status and propagates white replacement conspiracy theories (Allen et al. 2024). The paragraph ends with the administration’s claim that climate mitigation imperils social stability, thereby bundling anti-environmental and racist ideas into the same revanchist project.

Some EOs use the rhetoric of merit to strip racial equality principles from federal employment. EO 14170 (Reforming the Federal Hiring Process and Restoring Merit to Government Service) states, “Federal hiring should not be based on impermissible factors, such as one’s commitment to illegal racial discrimination under the guise of ‘equity.’” The EO then targets the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for reform. EO 14177 (President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology) proposes similar actions. Through this EO, the administration assigns the U.S. Department of Energy a leadership role in reforming federal institutions that supposedly “elevate group identity above individual achievement.” Both EOs use a zero-sum framing—colorblind merit versus race-based group preferences—to justify excluding historically marginalized workers from employment in institutions that defend the environment.

EO 14281 (Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy) dismantles disparate-impact liability, a legal tool that reactionary actors had long reviled. This EO uses the two-step tactic of omission and dog whistling repeatedly. One passage claims that “a pernicious movement” seeks “to transform America’s promise of equal opportunity into a divisive pursuit of results preordained by irrelevant immutable characteristics, regardless of individual strengths, effort, or achievement.” Another sentence states, “Under my Administration, citizens will be treated equally before the law and as individuals, not consigned to a certain fate based on their immutable characteristics.” The administration presents race consciousness as a betrayal of liberal values and equal protection under the law. At the same time, the implication that race consciousness exemplifies racism and divisiveness stokes a sense of group-based aggrievement among whites.

The administration then attacks disparate-impact liability for assuming that

unlawful discrimination exists where there are differences in outcomes in certain circumstances among different races, sexes, or similar groups, even if there is no facially discriminatory policy or practices or discriminatory intent involved, and even if everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed.

With this claim, EO 14281 embraces the discriminatory intent principle that narrows the conception of racism to the individual, while also hand-waving away structural racism.

In this EO, the administration dictates that “all agencies shall deprioritize enforcement of all statutes and regulations to the extent they include disparate-impact liability.” It rescinds regulations related to Title VI in the U.S. Department of Justice. It demands that the attorney general report to the president “all existing regulations, guidance, rules, or orders that impose disparate-impact liability or similar requirements, and detail agency steps for their amendment or repeal.” The government uses EO 14281 to revoke a legal instrument that environmental justice groups have used in lawsuits for decades (Bullard et al. 2008; Cole 1994). ²

The Supreme Court’s interpretation of disparate-impact liability in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College (2023) paved the way for EO 14281. The Court ruled that the use of race in admissions violated the Equal Protection Clause. Concurring with the majority decision, Justice Neil Gorsuch interpreted Title VI through the lens of reactionary colorblindness. He wrote that Title VI prohibits only intentional discrimination, leaving little theoretical space for disparate-impact claims. Gorsuch added it is “always unlawful to discriminate among persons even in part because of race, color, or national origin” [italics original] and that “nothing in [Title VI] endorses racial discrimination to any degree or any purpose.” The Court used this rationale to dismantle a race-conscious policy that conservative legal actors had targeted since the 1970s.

Anti-environmental actors quickly embraced this decision to thwart disparate-impact claims by environmental justice groups. The State of Louisiana filed a lawsuit against the EPA, which had initiated Title VI investigations of the state’s petrochemical industry for environmental justice violations. Using language based on the recent Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard decision (Sivas 2025), Louisiana argued that the EPA exceeded its ability to enforce Title VI and that disparate-impact claims required proof of intentional discrimination. A U.S. district judge ruled in favor of Louisiana, thus weakening the EPA’s power to use civil rights law to fight environmental racism (McGill 2024). This lawsuit followed a petition from Republican attorneys general in 22 states demanding the EPA cease using Title VI for environmental justice. Saying such enforcement amounted to “racial engineering,” the attorneys general referred to language in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard that declared race consciousness in federal policy to be unconstitutional and discriminatory (Phillis 2024).

These cases illustrate how conservative legal actors zeroed in on Title VI and disparate-impact claims. EO 14281 and the jurisprudence preceding it reveal how reactionary colorblindness travels from non-environmental to environmental spheres. Yet this language has also been used in environmental justice settings. Polluting industries have presented themselves as victims to galvanize opposition against environmental rules (Schneider and Peeples 2018). The EPA was historically reluctant to include race as a factor in its environmental justice assessments (Bullard et al. 2008). The current form of reactionary colorblindness may be a new version of similar tropes that have previously operated in environmental domains.

Overall, this section shows how the administration both omits and dog whistles race to achieve anti-environmental goals in these EOs. The language of colorblind individuality frames environmental and climate justice policies as violating equal protection, whereas racial appeals activate white resentment. These strategies work hand in hand to justify rolling back environmental and climate protections.

“Forced Discrimination”: DEI, Environmental Justice, and Climate Mitigation

This section discusses how the government uses language in the EOs that equates environmental and climate initiatives with “forced discrimination” to rationalize dismantling such initiatives. By leveraging anti-DEI panic in these EOs, the administration portrays environmental and climate programs as antithetical to equal protection. They thus repurpose the reactionary colorblindness tactic of labeling remediation as reverse racism and creating a narrative of false victimhood.

On inauguration day, Trump signed EO 14151 (Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing). It opens by stating, “The Biden Administration forced illegal and immoral discrimination programs, going by the name ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI), into virtually all aspects of the Federal Government.” This EO’s goal is to “advance the policy of equal dignity and respect,” using a variation of this phrase three times throughout the document. It declares that federal practices “shall reward individual [italics added] initiative, skills, performance, and hard work and shall not under any circumstances consider DEI or DEIA factors, goals, policies, mandates, or requirements.” This anti-DEI sentiment follows the logic of reactionary colorblindness by stoking fears of white racial persecution.

EO 14151 repeatedly conflates DEI and environmental justice. The order mentions environmental justice in five different line items, always in the context of DEI. For example, it calls to “terminate, to the maximum extent allowed by law, all DEI, DEIA, and ‘environmental justice’ offices and positions.” The EO requires all agency heads to send to the Office of Management and Budget a list of “Federal grantees who received Federal funding to provide or advance DEI, DEIA, or ‘environmental justice’ programs, services, or activities since January 20, 2021.” Departments and agencies are ordered to send to the Office of Management and Budget “reports on the prevalence and the economic and social costs of DEI, DEIA, and ‘environmental justice’” programs and activities. Each mention of environmental justice is in scare quotes, indicating that the administration does not believe the concept has legitimacy. Overall, through EO 14151, the government characterizes DEI as mandated discrimination, and transposes that idea onto environmental justice policies to justify their elimination.

Similarly, EO 14281 claims that disparate-impact liability forces public and private institutions to racially discriminate. It states, “Disparate-impact liability all but requires individuals and businesses to consider race and engage in racial balancing to avoid potentially crippling legal liability.” This claim rests on the reactionary assumption that businesses must engage in so-called reverse racism against whites to avoid civil rights lawsuits. The EO adds,

Disparate-impact liability imperils the effectiveness of civil rights laws by mandating, rather than proscribing, discrimination. As the Supreme Court put it, “[t]he way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

In referring to Justice John Roberts from a 2013 ruling on the unconstitutionality of using racial classification in school admissions, the administration defines racial remediation as racism.

Other EOs wielded anti-discrimination language in innovative ways related to low-carbon energy, electric vehicles (EVs), and climate justice. EO 14260 (Protecting American Energy from State Overreach) states that its goal is to increase the production of “oil, natural gas, coal, hydropower, geothermal, critical mineral, and nuclear energy resources.” Yet state-level climate regulations impede those aims: “when States target or discriminate against out-of-State energy producers by imposing significant barriers to interstate and international trade, American energy suffers, and the equality of each State enshrined by the Constitution is undermined.” In this EO, the administration argues that “these States . . . unduly discriminate against out-of-state businesses . . . and retroactively impose arbitrary and excessive fines without legitimate justification.” This anti-environmental rationale in defense of non-renewable energy depends on weaponizing victimhood. The hypothetical victim in this case is non-renewable energy types from certain states.

Paralleling the tactic of racial anti-classification, this language flattens distinctions between energy types and obscures uneven climate impacts between renewable energy and fossil fuels. Using this logic, any policy treating high-carbon energy as uniquely harmful is viewed as discriminatory. This EO brings to the federal level a strategy that some fossil fuel producers have taken at the state level. The American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative group, has written “model legislation that portray[ed] climate policy . . . as unfairly discriminating against fossil fuel companies” (Aranoff 2021). Oklahoma passed the Energy Discrimination Act of 2022, which aimed to protect in-state fossil fuel producers from out-of-state lawsuits (OST 2022). Fossil fuel producers and their allies have thus invented novel ways to leverage anti-discrimination language and law toward anti-environmental ends, with these tactics now applied in federal EOs.

EO 14260 criticizes some states for enacting state-level emissions regulations that supposedly seek “to dictate national energy policy” through discriminatory means. It claims that California “punishes carbon use by adopting impossible caps on the amount of carbon businesses may use, all but forcing businesses to pay large sums to ‘trade’ carbon credits to meet California’s radical requirements.” The government argues in this EO that state-level policies that require permit review slow down energy extraction nationally. The EO also focuses on state lawsuits related to climate change: “States have also sued energy companies for supposed ‘climate change’ harm under nuisance or other tort regimes that could result in crippling damages.” Such a stance follows the rationale of “energy discrimination elimination” bills (Aranoff 2021) which borrow reactionary interpretations of anti-discrimination law by claiming unfair treatment against fossil fuels. This strategy reveals how conservative legal actors learn from anti-discrimination cases to extend revanchist arguments into environmental and climate domains (Sivas 2025). In other words, fossil fuel companies, much like reactionary politicians, appropriate discourses of victimization.

EO 14261 (Reinvigorating America’s Beautiful Clean Coal Industry and Amending Executive Order 14241) declares that “it is a national priority to support the domestic coal industry,” which requires “removing Federal regulatory barriers that undermine coal production.” Such a priority should ensure “that Federal policy does not discriminate against coal production or coal-fired electricity generation.” The government then rolls back coal-related regulations in the EO. Moreover, although these anti-discrimination claims often rest on assumptions that energy sources should be treated equally, the administration confers numerous privileges to coal through this EO, such as prioritizing it as a mineral export and an energy source for artificial intelligence data centers. This EO takes the “whites as victims of racism” tenet of reactionary colorblindness and repurposes it to portray coal as unfairly persecuted. Ironically, it goes one step further by privileging coal over other energy types. In this way, we see how race is reflected in seemingly race-neutral narratives about energy dominance that draw from themes of “victimhood, exceptionalism, and renewal” (Schneider and Peeples 2018:4).

In sum, this “forced discrimination” framing weaponizes civil rights protections and invents new victimhood narratives to advance anti-environmental goals. These EOs project anti-DEI sentiment onto environmental and climate programs, defining these policies as “illegal and immoral discrimination.” This reactionary and colorblind interpretation of anti-discrimination law thus reverses environmental and climate policies oriented around race consciousness and remediation.

Ignorance toward Environmental and Climate Science

This final section shows how the administration detaches policies for environmental justice and climate mitigation from their scientific foundations through its EOs. A goal of reactionary colorblindness, as Haney López (2007) argued, is to disconnect race from “history, context, and power” (p. 1045). Doing so makes structural racism invisible and delegitimizes the rationale underpinning race-conscious policies. By obscuring scientific knowledge and promoting ideas of individualized freedom in the EOs, the administration seeks to discredit the justice-conscious logic that underlies environmental and climate policies. It pursues this strategy of ignorance (Mueller 2020) through two tactics: redefining energy and decontextualizing policy.

The government redefines what counts as energy by prioritizing fossil fuels and marginalizing renewable energy. According to EO 14156 (Declaring a National Energy Emergency), “The term ‘energy’ or ‘energy resources’ means crude oil, natural gas, lease condensates, natural gas liquids, refined petroleum products, uranium, coal, biofuels, geothermal heat, the kinetic movement of flowing water, and critical minerals.” EO 14154 (Unleashing American Energy) defines energy similarly, with renewable energy sidelined. Wind and solar were also excluded in three other EOs that promoted energy: EO 14213 (Establishing the National Energy Dominance Council), EO 14260 (Protecting American Energy from State Overreach), and EO 14262 (Strengthening the Reliability and Security of the United States Electric Grid). This approach omits renewable energy while explicitly enshrining fossil fuels as the beneficiary of federal policy.

These new definitions also determine which energy is deemed reliable by the administration. Following the definitions above, fossil fuels are considered reliable, whereas renewable energy is not. EO 14156 states, “An affordable and reliable [italics added] domestic supply of energy is a fundamental requirement for the national and economic security of any nation.” EO 14154 likewise claims that “burdensome and ideologically motivated regulations have . . . limited the generation of reliable [italics added] and affordable electricity.” This classification thus provides fossils fuels with favored status in the allocation of federal resources.

In contrast, the EOs reclassify wind and solar as undependable energy sources, often using thinly veiled insults. EO 14154 opens by stating, “[Biden’s] policies . . . have driven our Nation into a national emergency, where a precariously inadequate and intermittent energy supply, and an increasingly unreliable grid, require swift and decisive action” (italics added). Although wind and solar are not specifically named, they are referenced in coded terms such as unreliable and intermittent. The White House (2025) later made these implicit references to wind and solar more explicit. They declared the end of subsidies for “unreliable ‘green’ energy sources like wind and solar,” decrying such spending as “taxpayer handouts” associated with the “Green New Scam.” Such language reveals how dog whistling can be used for anti-environmental goals.

The administration decontextualizes decarbonization policies in the EOs by portraying them as “forced discrimination” and by obscuring the structural reasons, namely, climate change, for why such policies are necessary. EO 14154 assails renewable energy and promotes fossil fuels. It calls for “terminating the Green New Deal” and rescinds more than 13 previous EOs protecting the environment and climate, specifically targeting EVs. It eliminates the so-called EV mandate and states that doing so will “promote true consumer choice.” The EO states that current regulations create an uneven “playing field for consumer choice in vehicles,” thereby discriminating against vehicles with internal combustion engines. It ends “state emissions waivers that function to limit sales of gasoline-powered automobiles.” The EO terminates “unfair subsidies and other ill-conceived government-imposed market distortions that favor EVs . . . and effectively mandate their purchase by individuals, private businesses, and government entities alike by rendering other types of vehicles unaffordable.” In sum, by portraying the “EV mandate” as forced discrimination against fossil fuels, the administration obscures the context justifying the important role that EVs play in climate remediation. Once again, the EO personifies a product—gas-powered cars—and claims that they are a victim of discrimination.

Several EOs present pro-environmental policies in a similar light. EO 14208 (Ending Procurement and Forced Use of Paper Straws) targets a so-called “irrational campaign against plastic straws.” It rescinds bans on plastic straws, requires federal agencies to remove paper straws from their buildings and prohibits federal agencies from buying paper straws. Similarly, EO 14264 (Maintaining Acceptable Water Pressure in Showerheads) claims that new forms of water efficiency are part of “the Obama-Biden war on showers.” Such criticism depicts regulations surrounding straws and showerheads as an unfair mandate that inhibits freedom of choice. Moreover, in this context, freedom of choice means the freedom to pollute and deplete resources without constraints or guilt.

EO 14154 directs such criticism toward resource-efficient domestic appliances. In promoting energy deregulation, the EO states that it is now federal policy

to safeguard the American people’s freedom to choose from a variety of goods and appliances, including but not limited to lightbulbs, dishwashers, washing machines, gas stoves, water heaters, toilets, and shower heads, and to promote market competition and innovation within the manufacturing and appliance industries.

Underlying this logic is the assumption that consumers are forced to buy resource-efficient appliances and that this infringes on their freedom of choice. This attitude, at times conspiratorial, toward such appliances has been a mainstay of conservativism since the rise of light-emitting diode (LED) light bulbs that ironically happened under a Republican president (Elkind 2025). This EO’s framing rests on the claim that principles of equal treatment and individualized freedom to choose, central to abstract liberalism, have been breached. The scientific rationale showing how resource-efficient appliances mediate environmental harm is made invisible (EPA 2015).

Through these EOs, the government deliberately obscures the structural and historical context of environmental and climate remediation policies. EO 14154 excludes the environmental and climate context of emissions from policy guidance. It disbands the Interagency Working Group on the Social Cost of Greenhouse Gases, writing that “estimates of the social cost of greenhouse gases, including the estimates for the social cost of methane, or the social cost of nitrous oxide” no longer align with government policy. It rescinds policies related to the “social cost of carbon,” stating that its “calculation . . . is marked by logical deficiencies, a poor basis in empirical science, politicization, and the absence of a foundation in legislation.” With these actions, this EO strips away the structural context in which harmful impacts occur and delegitimizes the scientific rationale justifying the calculation of these social costs in federal policy.

Some EOs use the language of anti-discrimination and victimhood to target policies for environmental and climate justice. In claiming that some states discriminate against out-of-state energy producers, EO 14260 eliminates any “State laws purporting to address ‘climate change’ or involving ‘environmental, social, and governance’ initiatives, ‘environmental justice,’ carbon or ‘greenhouse gas’ emissions, and funds to collect carbon penalties or carbon taxes.” EO 14154 similarly frames fossil fuels as unfairly persecuted. It narrows the parameters of environmental accounting and bars agencies from using methods for environmental analysis and permitting processes that include structural dynamics. It states that “agencies shall strictly use the most robust methodologies of assessment at their disposal and shall not use methodologies that are arbitrary or ideologically motivated.” This passage implies that methods ignoring environmental and climate justice are rigorous and ideologically unbiased.

EO 14260 also criticizes state-level climate protections: “Many States have enacted, or are in the process of enacting, burdensome and ideologically motivated ‘climate change’ or energy policies that threaten American energy dominance and our economic and national security.” It singles out New York and Vermont:

New York . . . enacted a “climate change” extortion law that seeks to retroactively impose billions in fines (erroneously labelled “compensatory payments”) on traditional energy producers for their purported past contributions to greenhouse gas emissions not only in New York but also anywhere in the United States and the world. Vermont similarly extorts energy producers for alleged past contributions to greenhouse gas emissions anywhere in the United States or the globe.

By putting the terms climate change and compensatory payments in scare quotes, the government questions their scientific validity. Such language reflects the EO’s earlier claim that climate change is “ideologically motivated,” rather than scientifically grounded. In labeling climate reparations as “extortion” of fossil fuel producers, it presents these tools, which are essential to climate justice, as a criminal act. Last, the administration engages in denialism about how fossil fuel emissions contribute to climate destabilization. With the scientific and historical context stripped away, the EO creates a fictitious victimhood status for fossil fuels and a promise for renewed dominance (Schneider and Peeples 2018). As in reactionary colorblindness, distinctions in classification and historical contributions to inequality are both erased.

Perhaps the most egregious example of decontextualization, already discussed, is seen in EO 14281, which ends disparate-impact liability. By narrowing the conception of discrimination to individual intent, this EO pushes the structural dynamics fueling environmental racism into the shadows. Factors such as industrial zoning, real estate discrimination, and state neglect are excluded from judicial consideration (Carrillo 2021). Disparate-impact liability requires studying context and history to make sense of racial stratification, which is why reactionary colorblindness has incessantly promoted interpretations on the basis of race-neutral individualism.

Environmental and climate justice policies were founded on scientific consensus related to the unequal distribution of burdens, the industrial origins of pollution, and the reality of structural racism. The administration strategically seeks to ignore these factors, thereby borrowing a similar reactionary tactic that had been wielded against racial remediation policies. In this sense, reactionary colorblindness provided a legal and rhetorical instrument that easily traveled across non-environmental and environmental domains to undermine policies for justice and remediation.