I am going to have some version of the following submitted next session:

When a state agency advances “equity” in any policy area, “equity” must be defined and a metric must be developed and used to assess and evaluate the “equity” policy. 

This would apply to public K-12 and higher education as well.

Maine’s Climate Council will submit an updated climate action plan (Maine Won’t Wait) after the election as the new legislature convenes. It is bad enough that the plan backs policies that will raise our energy costs, make the grid less reliable, damage rural Maine, and avert no climate change whatsoever. On top of that, the plan places a major focus on “equity,” which is not defined. Scarce resources are to be devoted not to averting climate change but rather, as near as I can tell, to mitigating alleged disparate impacts on allegedly oppressed victims of systemic racism. It is a great plan if you are a woke climate alarmist. Otherwise, not so much.

I have been unable to find a definition of equity in the plan, despite searching through hundreds of pages of supporting documents. I have repeatedly asked for a definition and asked where that definition was. The Mitchell Center for Sustainability provided extensive support (our tax dollars at work) and proposed a collection of metrics to track...but no definition of what it is they are trying to promote. They did say what equity is not: equality, that pesky concept from the Declaration of Independence.

The first document I looked at was Assessing the Potential Equity Outcomes of Maine’s Climate Action Plan: Framework, Analysis and Recommendations from September 2020.

From the Introduction:

Our work brings together the insights and collective thinking of scholars and activists in the fields of environmental justice, climate justice, and energy justice. Each of these ways of thinking about the distribution of benefits and burdens and the effects of systemic racism, oppression, and marginalization on people’s lives has utility when considering the equity of a climate action plan. Environmental justice has primarily focused on the ways in which people of color and poor people are unequally exposed to environmental harms and has probed the roots of inequality, asking why those who have already been subject to disadvantage are also exposed to environmental harms.

MCC_EquityAssessmentReport

_201007.pdf (maine.gov)

Who could argue with that? I am confident that with such brilliant and objective analysis, our climate and equity woes, whatever they may be, will be quickly and effectively dealt with.

I believe this is actually fairly standard practice woke practice. In my final years in the University of Maine System, the Chancellor and Campus Presidents promoted “equity” and “social justice” without ever defining those terms, despite repeated requests to do so. Last year I challenged the Sunrise County Economic Council to define the “equity” they were promoting. They were surprised that anyone would even ask and to my knowledge, have not done so.

My own operative equity definition is “equal results,” but equity advocates have been unwilling to adopt that definition or supply one of their own.

I believe the reason that equity advocates have been unwilling to provide a clear and measurable definition is that it would likely violate the Fair Admissions Supreme Court of the United States decision that racial preferences in college admissions violate the equal protection clause. The last thing the left wants is to lose their ability to impose government-sanctioned racial discrimination as a means to promote “equity,” which is whatever they say it is.

I am going to try and make it a practice not to support organizations that promote “Equity” without defining it and to challenge every DEI diva I encounter to define equity and explain why racial preferences and discrimination are OK as long as they are deployed by individuals of the right hues and views. Sure sounds like “separate but equal” to me. I will probably be banned from the University and Augusta.