Podcast transcript: How Black communities are harmed by energy injustice
Listen to this interview as a recording on our podcast page
This is The Nation’s Health Podcast, I’m your host, reporter for the Nation’s Health, Aaron Warnick
2020 has been a landmark year for public health. Several co-occurring disasters have dominated daily life in the U.S. The COVID-19 pandemic has been an omnipresent danger throughout the year, structural racism has brought civil rights to the fore, and the summer saw a spate of climate change-worsened natural disasters. And while the impacts of these events may be felt by all, they do not impact all equally.
People of color are more likely to be seriously sickened or die from COVID-19. Police violence is disproportionately against people of color, with several high-profile killings this year. And Black communities find themselves on the frontlines of a multitude of weather crises, including a brutal summer heatwave and hurricanes.
Many of these problems are linked. Historical dislocation and disenfranchisement of Black people in America has led to communities placed in unhealthful areas. It’s not like a domino-effect. No. These decisions a repeatedly affirmed. They find new life in new tactics. The legacy of the 20th century practice of redlining still shapes cities and health today. Researchers can predict a lot about a person’s health based on their zip code.
To discuss how Black communities are harmed by energy injustice, I’m joined by NAACP climate expert Jacquiline Patterson.
To start, could you tell me a bit about energy justice?
Yeah, definitely. So, when it comes to energy justice, it's again in some ways a subset of climate justice and a subset of environmental justice. Because energy justice is, again, about shifting the undue burdens that people of color face in terms of being impacted by the pollutants from energy production.
Whether it's, as we said, coal-fired power plants, pipelines, oil and gas refineries, fracking, the energy to waste that happens -- the waste to energy that happens with incinerators, all the different ways that digging, burning, and dumping disproportionately affects our communities, including nuclear energy and spent fuel rods.
All of those different practices are harmful as they are done now and that disproportionately impacts people of color. And then the fossil fuel-based energy production is also the number one greenhouse gas contributor of the greenhouse gasses that drive climate change. And then climate change, then, also comes back and disproportionately impacts those communities because of the pre-existing vulnerabilities that we've talked about.
Energy justice means stopping fossil fuel-based energy production, as well as nuclear energy. Energy justice also means that as we shift to a new energy economy that's centered around regenerative ways of creating energy, first and foremost, more energy efficiency and more regenerative design and biomimicry so that we actually have buildings and processes that are in resonance with nature in a way that conserves energy and conserves in general.
But then also, to the extent that we are producing energy, we are doing it through natural processes, whether it's ambient cooling and heating through regenerative design for buildings or it is generating energy from solar and wind energy and otherwise -- well, solar and wind energy, primarily.
Even as we shift to this new energy economy, though, we don't want to just take the same -- as the biblical phrase goes, don't put the new wine in the old wineskin. We don't want to take the new wine of the new energy economy and put it in the old wineskins of the antiquated utility business model that was built on this notion of there being profit margins around energy, which is a critical resource for all of us.
We don't want to continue to have a situation where someone will profit from shutting off somebody's electricity that they need for a respirator that they are dependent on, that they need because it's 114 degrees outside, like it is in so many places today with the heat wave, whether it's to run a fan or to run air conditioning, or energy that's needed to heat a home in the dead of winter. So, we don't want someone to be able to profit from taking someone off a resource that is necessary for life.
As we look at the new energy economy, we want to shift from companies that not only profit off of this life-giving resource, but that also use the profits to not only pay high CEO compensations and so forth, but pay into lobbying against clean energy, against clean air, and pay to groups like ALEC that also lobby for everything from voter suppression to school and prison privatization.
So, for us, again, all inextricably interconnected. And exactly why, when we shift to the new energy economy, we are looking at distributed generation for how we create energy. So, community-owned solar through microgrids and so forth. So, really shifting away from investor-owned utility ownership of our energy infrastructure to distributed generation and community ownership.
So that's at the heart of energy justice and energy democracy for us.
On the subject of redlining, were Black communities moved to areas that were already worse for health or did they become worse for health over time?
It's a combination of both. Certainly, when we talk about redlining, which has been the practice putting certain people in certain communities, particularly redlining African-American folks and keeping away from certain communities and keeping them in other communities. So that is a way that people have been separated and has definitely resulted in what we see even today in terms of segregation.
And then whether it's landfills, which take up a lot of land and, therefore, when they look to place landfills, they look in places where property values are lower, and property values tend to be lower in communities of color and low-income communities. Also, though, property values are lower where there are toxic facilities as well. And so even the fact -- even the historic economic disenfranchisement of communities means that there's a combination of property values making companies go to those communities.
There's also the political disenfranchisement that makes those communities have less power to fight back against when permitting happens. And then there is the historic economic challenges that mean that communities or individuals might buy property in places that have toxic facilities because the prices of land and housing is lower. So, all of those things combine to make communities of color more in harm's way.
As you said, this connects to these larger issues that we work on as the Environmental and Climate Justice Program because the way that we deal with this can't just be through regulations and zoning and so forth. We have to not only push back on the bad, but we also have to push forward on the alternative.
We can't just try to close all the coal-fired power plants, block all the pipelines, stop manufacturing of basic goods that are needed but that shouldn't be happening in our communities, like paper mills and cement kilns and that kind of thing. We have to push forward on the alternatives.
So, this is why, instead of having these large commercial animal feeding operations that pollute communities and are inhumane to animals, we are pushing for local food production. Also, we know that climate change also impacts -- one of the major impacts of it are shifts in agricultural yields. So we see local food production as a way of keeping pollution out of our communities from goods movement that happens from trucks and ships to move food, from the production of food in terms of commercial animal feeding operations. And we also see it as a way of addressing food insecurity that results from redlining that keeps us away from grocery stores and farmers markets, and food insecurity that results from climate change.
So, all of these issues that we talk about that may seem tangential to people who don't understand are directly and inextricably connected.
Does energy injustice impact how Black communities are impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic?
Yes. So much. One, hopefully everyone has heard by now of the Harvard study that has found that in places where there's higher levels of PM2.5, which is particulate matter of a certain size which comes from everything from incinerators to cars and trucks to coal-fired power plants -- basically anything that involves combustion is what generates particulate matter, and combustion engines are in our cars, in our manufacturing plants, in our energy facilities and so forth.
Again, those being disproportionately located in our communities, they are seeing some correlation between the disproportionate hosting of whether it's all of those facilities or the fact that communities of color are more likely to be impacted by near-roadway air pollution. All of that are reasons that we have been tied to some of the higher rates of morbidity and mortality in our communities.
Also, as we said before, in terms of redlining and the historic separation of our communities from healthy and nutritious food -- the term food desert is often used, but a lot of the communities that are in those places that are food insecure don't like the term food desert because it implies something that happens naturally because deserts are natural. We all know that redlining, gentrification and displacement are all intentional things that have happened and separate our communities from food.
On both sides of the COVID-19 continuum, food is central because in terms of whether it's diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, all of those are exacerbated by or tied in some way to diet and our diets are predicated on what we have access to.
As communities of color, particularly, that have been impacted by redlining and displacement and so forth, we do not have the same access to healthy and nutritious foods as other folks. We have a proliferation of these diseases in our communities at much higher rates. All those pre-existing conditions that leave people more susceptible to COVID-19 are disproportionately impacting us.
Then also on the other end of the COVID-19 continuum is the fact that, because of the economic insecurity that has resulted from the stay-at-homes and shutdowns and so forth, and the fact that our communities are more likely to not be able to work from home -- being in jobs that we can't work from home, means we're either displaced from working and not having an income and the one-time stimulus checks are not enough for us to survive and feed our families. Not having access to food there, again, is a challenge and even exacerbates our pre-existing conditions which makes us even more susceptible to mortality if we do contract COVID-19.
Then also when we do have jobs because too many of us are the essential workers that have been going out and then being more exposed to COVID-19 as well so all of those, the disproportionate location of toxic facilities, the redlining, the shifts in agricultural yields meaning food production is less and so forth, all of that is combined to make us more vulnerable to COVID-19 and more impacted by both morbidity and mortality.
What about extreme heat? How are people impacted by this?
So one of the things that we were talking to folks in New York, particularly with urban heat islands, but even other places, there's been a conflict between the stay-at-home orders and the fact that some folks have relied on being able to go to cooling centers in the heat of -- in the dead of summer when it's so hot.
The cooling centers are no longer an option because of COVID-19 and not being able to congregate in that way. Right away that is a challenge for folks in terms of being able to survive the heat.
In New York, one thing they did to address that was to give our air conditioners, kind of window units, for folks which is, on one hand great in terms of, you know, a lot of people stay in but, on the other hand, it's a challenge because of electricity bills going up. One thing they did do in New York, which is good, was to provide relief to the electricity bills and I hope that corresponds to how much the electricity bills are going up.
Air conditioning is a challenge and the task of the economic conditions that we talked about before.
Then also as people are indoors and using individual AC more, then it also comes into contact with, as people are using more in the way of energy indoors, then there's a chance that they will kind of be using these what they call peaker plants, that they only use at the height of when electricity is needed.
If everyone is indoors running individual ACs and have a higher demand from the grid, then these peaker plants which, again, are these coal-fired power plants and other fossil fuel-based plants, nuclear plants, then that again is more pollution that is being pumped out into the very communities that can afford the attacks on their lungs the least. All of these are interconnected issues.
We've seen also how there have been the call for moratoria on the shutoff of electricity but that has not been universal. We have some places where they are at risk of being shut off for nonpayment and their bills are getting higher because of having to be indoors.
I will also say combined with that is indoor air pollution. We have an initiative called Centering Equity in the Sustainable Building Sector out of recognition that our homes are most likely to be energy-inefficient so we have a higher energy burden and pay a higher cost, those low-income communities and communities of color, of our income to electricity bills which is only going to increase with the situation.
We also tend to have the sickest buildings. Whether it's from mold or lead or asbestos or radon. If we're indoors all of the time and we have less energy-efficient homes so that means we are -- we are in this situation where we have homes that are constructed in a way that are making us more exposed to indoor air pollution. Studies show that we as communities of color and low-income communities are already disproportionately exposed to indoor air pollution which also impacts our lungs which also exacerbates our susceptibility to the impacts of COVID-19.
If we're indoors more and being more exposed to these toxins, then again, if there is any exposure to COVID-19, it has a more intensely harmful impact on us. Again, all of these issues are just inextricably interconnected.
What are some of the things that can be done to lessen the damage?
So, whether it is pushing forward on policies like clean air ordinances or protection in defense of the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, or it's addressing coal-fired power plants and trying to close coal-fired power plants and shift to more energy efficiency and clean energy, or it's blocking pipelines or stopping oil refineries and shifting to better ways of generating energy.
Similarly, the same thing with waste. We are trying to push back on incinerators and blocking the building and permitting of incinerators. And the same with landfills, while pushing forward on less consumption in the first place, but then also recovery, reuse, and recycling of goods that are produced.
Basically changing all of our systems to that we are living in a more regenerative way in society and more harmonious with our environment, while also making sure that people have access to the commons, which includes clean air, clean water, access to energy, access to housing, access to transportation, and so forth and so on.
So, in addition to the work I talked about around addressing pollution through advancing alternatives, we also work on adapting to the impacts of climate change so that, again, they are not being disproportionately harshly felt by certain communities and less harshly felt by all.
So that's everything from advancing equity in emergency management, training our folks on how to be stewards of human and civil rights and how folks are impacted by disasters, but also how the Emergency Management System offers services in a way that's equitable.
We work on food justice working on advancing local food access, quality, and ownership and sovereignty. So, shifting away from a system where we have communities that don't have access to healthy and nutritious foods because of historic and modern-day redlining and other challenges.
So we really have a goal to advance local food systems and are working with communities to have the policies that we need to support local food systems, but then also working with communities on the how-to in terms of implementing local food systems.
So those are just a few examples of how we see that intersection and- what we see as environmental and climate justice, how equity is at the center of that, and some of the work we're doing to advance those ends.
And with that, we thank Jacqui for her time and expertise.
For more information on energy justice, visit naacp.org/issues/environmental-justice/
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