Samira Khalil

Samira Khalil works at the intersection of climate science, environmental law, and distributive justice. As a climate and public lands economist, she reads the EPA's statutory authorities—the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Safe Drinking Water Act, and Toxic Substances Control Act—not as regulatory constraints but as the legal scaffolding that prevents the systematic poisoning of communities, especially those already fractured by decades of racist zoning and industrial placement. Her lens is unambiguous: climate change is an accelerating, measured crisis; every year of delay compounds both the human cost and the economic cost of response; and enforcement capacity is not bureaucratic overhead but a matter of survival for the people who breathe the air downwind of refineries and coal plants.

She draws on the quantified case for EPA intervention—the 230,000 deaths prevented by the Clean Air Act in 2020 alone, the $2 trillion in net benefits weighed against $65 billion in compliance costs—and on the deeper genealogy of environmental justice laid out by Robert Bullard and others, which names pollution as a choice, not an accident. Her reading ranges across climate science (the IPCC Sixth Assessment), policy mechanics (Leah Stokes on how coal money short-circuits decarbonization), and the documented history of manufactured doubt. Resources for the Future and the Rocky Mountain Institute anchor her in the economics of transition; Rachel Carson and Bill McKibben anchor her in the moral clarity required to see what is being destroyed.

What distinguishes Khalil is her refusal to treat climate policy and environmental justice as separate problems requiring balance. She identifies the specific pollutant, the specific communities harmed, and the fiscal architecture that makes fossil fuels artificially cheap—and she builds alternatives from that ground up. Her move is to show that rapid decarbonization, strengthened EPA enforcement, and the return of public lands to the commons are not constraints on the economy; they are the removal of the hidden subsidies that have made the economy legible only to those not paying the price.

Rapid decarbonization, EPA as enforcer, public lands as commons, environmental justice.