EXPO 2020: Advancing Climate Solutions Through Environmental Justice

2020 RENEWABLE ENERGY & ENERGY EFFICIENCY EXPO Panel 1: Training a 21st Century Clean Energy Workforce Panel 2: Macro Benefits of Microgrids Panel 3: Advancing Climate Solutions Through Environmental Justice Panel 4: Efficient Buildings as Energy Grid Resources Panel 5: Sustainable Transportation Panel 6: New Frontiers in Clean Energy Research & Development

On July 30, 2020, the 23rd Annual Congressional Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency EXPO and Policy Forum brought together 25 businesses, trade associations, and government agencies to showcase clean energy industries. The bipartisan House and Senate Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Caucuses served as the EXPO's honorary co-hosts, and the event was held online because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The third, marquee panel of the day, "Advancing Climate Solutions Through Environmental Justice," jumped off current events to look inward and think about how the clean energy industry can do a better job telling the stories of frontline communities and explaining how environmental justice can and must be part of future climate change policy. 

U.S. Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland), who is the Deputy Co-Chair of the Senate Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Caucus, provided prerecorded introductory remarks.

View the full panel video above, or read the highlights below.

Group 3—Advancing Climate Solutions Through Environmental Justice

American Association of Blacks in Energy (AABE) Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) Energy Storage Association (ESA) Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) MCE

Introductory Remarks [prerecorded]: U.S. Senator Chris Van Hollen (Maryland) Paula Glover, President & CEO, American Association of Blacks in Energy (AABE) Abby Ross Hopper, President & CEO, Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) Kelly Speakes-Backman, CEO, Energy Storage Association (ESA) John Bowman, Managing Director, Government Affairs, Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) Stephanie Chen, Senior Policy Counsel, MCE

HIGHLIGHTS

Paula Glover, President & CEO, American Association of Blacks in Energy (AABE)

• African American communities are lagging behind in access to education, employment, wealth attainment, housing, and suffer from higher energy costs and energy burdens [the share of a household's income that goes toward energy costs]. These inequities, as well as a lack of representation and a lack of participation have been around for generations.
• Energy efficiency is one of the most effective ways to combat climate change and is the least costly climate mitigation asset.
  • According to the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE), we can reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent by 2020 through energy efficiency alone, but to do so energy efficiency must be available across all income levels.
• There is a direct connection between energy burdens and efficiency, as more efficient homes lead to lower energy burdens. Unless we fully resolve the issues of energy efficiency access, inequities will persist.
• According to the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, low-income households experience larger energy costs than all other economic demographics.
  • The energy burden is particularly high for Black families—64 percent higher than for white households. Data reveals that, for African American households, 42 percent of the excess energy burden is due to inefficient housing.
• A significant portion of these inequities can be avoided by using robust energy efficiency policies, such as retrofitting housing; installing energy efficiency appliances; and implementing targeted programs that ensure low-income families have access to energy efficiency solutions.
• If low-income housing stock is brought to the same energy efficiency levels as the median, we could eliminate 35 percent of the household energy burden.
• This new energy economy could result in significant economic gains. We need to prioritize legislation that connects African Americans and other minority groups to jobs, leadership, and contracts.
• Energy efficiency is the fastest growing sector in the industry, but communities of color are underrepresented, with only 8 percent of the sector's workforce being Black [Blacks represent 13.4 percent of the U.S. population overall]. These numbers are reflected across all energy sectors.
• Moving forward, we need to prioritize access, and look at climate policy through the lens of environmental justice. The inequities that exist are multifaceted and layered. Solutions need to take into account all these inequities. The gaps are wide and shrinking them requires a level of intentionality and focus that may seem foreign: the problem is difficult, and finding a solution may also be difficult. If we are up to doing the work right, we can lessen those gaps.

 

Abby Ross Hopper, President & CEO, Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA)

• In our industry and for SEIA, it is critical to acknowledge the interrelated nature of these issues.
  • The climate, economic, health and racial justice crises have been long standing, systematically put in place, and incredibly linked.
  • Communities of color are the most dramatically impacted by these crises.
• Clean energy is a critical component of how we can create policy to address more than one of these issues at the same time.
• In the solar workforce, there are clear gaps in terms of the workforce being representative of society.
  • According to SEIA's Annual Diversity Study, 8 percent of the workforce is African American workers, 9 percent Asian workers, 73 percent white workers, and 26 percent women.
  • Looking at job titles, 88 percent of senior executives are white, while only 2 percent of senior executives are Black.
• One of the ways that we try to build a more inclusive workforce is improving supplier diversity. We are challenging ourselves to make sure that our companies are intentionally spending at businesses that are Black-owned or women-owned.
• Intentional policy pieces introduced by Congress really make a difference. For example, SEIA has supported the Blue and Green Collar Jobs Act by Representative Bobby Rush (Ill.) that would support renewable energy workers.
• When thinking about customers, we must consider who has access to solar energy and how do we ensure that families of all varieties have access to solar, which is a low-cost, reliable energy source.
  • Community solar is a great tool for homeowners and non-homeowners to still have access to solar energy.
  • The Low Income Solar Energy Act proposed by Senator Tammy Duckworth (Ill.) would help invest in solar.
• At SEIA, we have elevated diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice issues to the board level. We are holding ourselves accountable and ensuring that justice is threaded throughout our work, rather than being an afterthought.

 

Kelly Speakes-Backman, CEO, Energy Storage Association (ESA)

• ESA works towards a more resilient, efficient, sustainable, and affordable grid and represents a diverse group of 190 companies across the entire value chain of storage. Improving storage enables the rest of the clean grid.
• Over the past 5 years, 32 states have added storage planning requirements, 9 states have set targets, 6 states have launched incentive programs. The industry has installed 1,500 megawatts of new storage since 2015.
• It is important to have a diverse set of interests and perspectives if we want to make change. ESA wants to change the way we’ve generated, delivered, and used energy in the past.
• Social justice is the right thing to do. It is absolutely necessary to be conscious and active about creating a diverse and inclusive workplace.
  • We need to reimagine how we construct the grid. We need new perspectives from people with different socioeconomic backgrounds, ethnicities, ages, and disciplines.
  • We have to work collaboratively, integrate diverse experiences, reset our priorities, and find ways to move forward in a sustainable and equitable manner.
• Dr. Tony Byers, author of The Multiplier Effect of Inclusion: How Diversity & Inclusion Advances Innovation and Drives Growth, explains how quantifying diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace can bring more profitability to companies, more benefits to the communities they serve, and longer-term stability for all.

 

John Bowman, Managing Director, Government Affairs, Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC)

• NRDC looks at environmental justice from a number of different angles, working with its partners to pass laws at the state, local, and federal level as well as litigating on behalf of its partners.
• NRDC has learned that people who live in areas with polluted air are especially impacted by the COVID-19 virus. NRDC looks to mitigate these issues at the state and federal levels.
• NRDC strongly promotes the National Environmental Justice Act introduced by Sen. Cory Bookers (N.J.), which would go a long way towards making things equal for disadvantaged communities.
  • The bill expands upon President Bill Clinton’s 1994 Executive Order on Environmental Justice and would require federal agencies to consider the cumulative impacts on environmental justice when permitting Clean Air and Clean Water Act projects.
  • It would allow communities to bring statutory and common law claims and would reinstate a right of action under common law.
• NRDC is focused on ways to get climate gains in environmental justice (EJ) communities, such as proposing the creation of an EJ fund with a $50 million annual budget to address pollution and other threats in EJ communities.
• NRDC, alongside 282 environmental justice groups, signed the Equitable and Just Climate Platform, which is built on three precepts: everyone has the right to breathe clean air, live free from dangerous levels of toxins, and share access to healthy food.
• The platform proposes meaningful investments in disadvantaged communities to promote electric vehicle (EV) ownership and EV infrastructure, electrify transit sources, and help federal agencies that will allow for resilience investments.
• We need to spread this information and educate minority communities to help give them access to important resources such as solar and affordable EVs.
• There are lots of opportunities within the clean energy economy to employ the people who have lost their jobs during the pandemic.

 

Stephanie Chen, Senior Policy Counsel, MCE

• MCE is California’s first community choice aggregator, serving 34 communities across 4 counties within the San Francisco Bay Area.
• The dominant strategy for environmental policy and investments has been a top-down approach. However, this approach only perpetuates racial and socioeconomic inequities.
  • In California, despite having a cap and trade policy and some of the most aggressive environmental regulations in the country, pollution is still concentrated in the same Black and Brown communities.
• Instead of using a top-down approach, we should start local and aggregate upward. By starting with the most impacted communities, identifying the pollution sources and prioritizing replacing them, we are placing the most impacted communities at the front of the line. This approach still makes progress towards the global goal of climate change mitigation and still uses all the tools we are already familiar with.
  • The California Climate Investments initiative is a good example of this approach. After enacting cap and trade, California passed a series of bills that dedicate 35 percent of auction revenues to projects that reduce emissions and create jobs in environmental justice (EJ) communities. Collectively, these investments have added up to $3 billion since 2013.
• In order to invest in them, we first need to identify EJ communities. The CalEnviroScreen looks at 20 environmental and socioeconomic indicators to identify the communities that are most burdened by poverty and pollution.
  • The CalEnviroScreen has been helpful across all clean energy policy analyses as it helps identify what's working and what's still needed in these communities.
• We need to intentionally build inclusive processes. One of the key principles of EJ is that the communities closest to the problem are also closest to the solution.
  • One of the most innovative climate investments is the Transformative Climate Communities (TCC) program, which is built around an inclusive process where community members come together to decide how best to spend their grant based on the needs they’ve identified.
  • These participatory processes result in holistic projects.
• In Watts, a community that is disproportionately low income, is overwhelmingly Black and Latino, and has always been an impacted community, community leaders brought together over 200 residents for a planning and design process as part of TCC. As a result, Watts will be getting hundreds of energy affordable housing units, bike paths, urban farms, solar installations, cooler playground surfaces and over 4,000 new trees.
• Our approach also needs to be economically just, which is especially important as we think about economic recovery and the role that clean energy can play.
• In EJ communities, polluting industries often offer the best jobs. We need to put in place the mechanisms needed to train and sustain a nation-wide clean energy workforce. Clean energy jobs should offer family-supporting wages, robust benefits, and offer opportunities for career advancement. We don’t want anyone to have to choose between a good job and a green job.
• Some of the most successful energy justice projects in California have included a local hiring requirement. MCE Solar One is a 10-megawatt solar farm located in the city of Richmond, CA, which has a 50 percent local hiring requirement. MCE partnered with Solar Richmond, a local nonprofit job training program, to train a cohort so that we could meet the local job requirement.
  • For many of the participants, this was not only a good job and career springboard, but it was also meaningful to them that they were building something clean and green in their community.
• The unifying theme of all these efforts is that they are local by design. They focus on the most impacted communities and on the families and small businesses that need financial incentives the most. They are both economically and environmentally progressive.
  • In the aggregate, these efforts will result in significant change that we would not be able to achieve through an exclusively top-down approach.

 

Q&A

 

Question: We had a briefing last year on coastal resilience in Louisiana where one of our panelists told a story about how a community-based approach to climate adaptation was changing the minds of people in his community. In the past, communities were told about decisions, but now they are part of the decision making. How do we make climate policy more community-based and how do we ensure that we are hearing from frontline communities and those who are most impacted?

Chen: As we are thinking about policy and progress related to climate change, we know how dire the crisis is. There is a sense of urgency that can feel in competition with the need for inclusion because we know that inclusive processes take time. We want our most impacted communities to be involved in the decision making, and to be the ones designing and creating the options. That process takes time, particularly when you are talking about communities that are not well versed in the technical and economic solutions. But they are incredibly well versed in the community’s needs and what the community can bring to the table, which oftentimes is more substantial than we realize. So, the first thing is that inclusive processes take time and need to be built into our policy process. The second thing is that, for stakeholders, it's incredibly important for us to be building relationships when we don’t have an immediate need in front of us. We want to build relationships on a level playing field and start that approach in between times of urgent need so it can be a balanced conversation.

Bowman: I couldn’t agree more. NRDC has an entire team that focuses solely on EJ issues, and they do that at each of our U.S.-based offices. We try to meet our community partners where they are. For instance, we litigated on behalf of Flint residents without running ads and raising money and we built a lot of good will that way. But we have our challenges, too. In the past, we’ve worked with communities and asked them to advocate for a specific set of policy proposals, but did not follow up after they were helpful. We are trying to fix that now. We have to build these relationships when we don’t need each other and build a level of trust so, when we do need to come together, we can do that.

Glover: I think this is an example of why community members need to be there from the beginning. The fact that we are working now to build relationships is indicative of the problem. These community members should already be involved and should be in our organizations. Real diversity and inclusion is when they are there from the beginning, before a problem has been identified. They are the informants who tell our organizations where the problems are. So, the time to do something is when nothing is happening. In my opinion, we all do it the wrong way: we have something we are trying to address; we need the community to support the solution; then we tell them what we think the problem is and how they can support us. The entire process is completely backwards. We need to challenge ourselves to be there when nothing is happening and allow community members to come to us and say, “Here is where we need your help.”

Speakes-Backman: Addressing the issue of trying to get ahead of the problem, having a diverse and inclusive workforce helps you to identify what may be a problem so you can address it before it even becomes an issue. In terms of businesses, that means bringing community-focused mindsets into your project management and development. For policy, its funding state and local jurisdictions to help bring people around the table. We need to prioritize that funding. It’s important that we avoid the problem to begin with because they are more expensive to deal with once they happen.

 

Question: The first time I thought a lot about these issues was after Hurricane Katrina. I hope that we have learned from that, but I’m not sure that we did. How do we ensure that this time is different? What can we do in a tangible way that we currently aren’t doing so that we don’t find ourselves in the same situation in a couple years?

Hopper: I think that's a really important question. We can’t just sit and hope that it will be different. We have to act with intention. Investing time, energy, and space into personal relationships, organizational relationships, and community relationships. Those relationships really matter. What we struggle with at SEIA is how we embed EJ into our decision-making process and into our business model. I don’t have the answer, but that is a different enough frame that we could at least have a chance of making progress.

Glover: What I would add is: how do we ensure that EJ isn’t one-off? Because we deal with everything in a siloed manner, which is more expensive, inefficient and more likely to fail. We aren’t working together. When we talk about EJ at AABE, we bring our members that work on EJ in on every policy position that we debate. Those individuals are there informing and educating us. We need to think about the nuances and other connections that we need to be considering as we’re making a recommendation as an organization. That’s our starting point: always ensuring that every single voice and interest is represented, so we can learn from them what we may not know or what may be hidden.

Bowman: We need better leadership. We haven’t had leadership at the presidential level since Bill Clinton with his 1994 Executive Order. We need to have leadership at all levels. As folks who work in policy, it's also our responsibility to make EJ a priority for elected leaders so that they can craft the policy that will prevent this from being a one-off. I’ve worked in congressional offices in the past and we did not talk about EJ or take any leads on EJ issues. That was bad on us.

Speakes-Backman: I agree with all of the previous statements. I would like to add that we need to formalize intent. Begin to measure your intent, like SEIA has, in terms of what your diversity and inclusion looks like at every level in your organization. Require people to be trained and have that consciousness. The other parts may or may not follow, but we will all at least be intentional about what we are doing. It’s so important to formalize and communicate that.

Chen: I would add that we have to invest. We live in a capitalist society and our economy drives our social change just as much as policy does. And so, we need to make sure we are designing ways for EJ solutions to be profitable. One of the things that we have seen in California with our solar incentives and storage is that money can buy change. We must not forget the role that the economy can play and point that engine, especially in the recovery stage, in the policy direction that we want it to go in.

 

Question: To what extent do educational opportunities or choices made by students of color impact their access to employment? What are some ideas on how we can help diversify the pipeline of future leaders and professionals?

Chen: Expanding that question a little bit, it’s not just about the choices students are making, it’s about the options available to them as well. How can we make sure there is a comprehensive suite of options for students to choose from and that they can choose based on their inclinations and abilities, rather than only choosing from the few available options.

Glover: We talk a lot about education, but we don't talk enough about the importance of a network and having access to a network. We lead our kids to believe that they are golden once they have their degree. That’s simply not true. Many times, you will see that first-generation students are under employed because they don’t have that network when they graduate that allows them to pursue a valuable opportunity. We have to do more to connect with students in school, give them access to our networks, share what the opportunities are, and show them that the opportunities are limitless. We have to work with our students, encourage them and open up the door for them, and give them important insights that they won’t receive otherwise—like the importance of emotional intelligence and being a likable person. Being smart and skilled is important, but having a good attitude and having people like you really matters when pursuing a career.

Bowman: Going back to intentionality, we have to intentionally be in historical Black colleges and universities and reach out to students of color. The NRDC has long-standing relationships with top schools, but we have not done the same with colleges of color. We are starting to do that now and are trying to do a better and more comprehensive job. To be candid, the civil unrest has opened a lot of people’s eyes within our leadership. We’ve been discussing diversity, equity, and inclusion over the past two years, but now there is a stronger push. And I’ve seen it happening throughout the community. The Sierra Club made a statement recently about their commitment to people of color and EarthJustice is making strong pushes to diversify not only their workforce, but also the places where they work. We need to be intentional and think about it every day.

Hopper: Adding my voice to Paula’s point about opening up networks, in our diversity study, we asked the percentage of employees who found their job through a referral or by word of mouth: 44% of white respondents got their job through referral or word of mouth, while only 28% of Black respondents got their job through referral or word of mouth. It demonstrates that opening up our networks is important. Paula and I co-hosted an event last year at Solar Power International, and our intent was to create space and open up our networks to others. Humanness is so critically important.

 

Question: We’ve talked about what we can do and when we should be doing it. Looking ahead, how will we know whether what we are talking about today will have made a difference? What will progress look like to you? What are the near-term goals we have to adopt to advance environmental justice?

Speakes-Backman: If a panel that looks as diverse as what we have here is not remarkable, then we will have made progress. To me, this is a remarkable panel of experts that look different from each other. I don’t think that’s common yet.

Chen: I want to touch upon metrics. What gets measured, gets done. We’ve seen that if we set a goal, even if it's an audacious goal, and we dedicate resources towards reaching that goal, we can get there. It’s a question of setting goals that are centered around justice and using our same set of tools, but pointing them in a different direction. I think change could be subtle because we will be using the same tools, but it will look radically different in terms of what we are using those tools for and who is at the table.

Glover: I wanted to add on to what Kelly said. A panel like this is incredibly rare. For me, success is if I can walk into a room and not be the only person who says there is something wrong with this picture since I can count the number of people of color on one hand. Or, we don’t have to be the ones asking why there aren’t more women here. Instead, there’s a man pointing out the problem. To me, that’s significant progress because it demonstrates we all recognize the same issues.

Hopper: What gets measured gets done. Part of why we invested in our diversity study is to know what our starting point is so we can measure progress in terms of gender and racial diversity and identify where those diverse people sit in our organization. I think about board diversification. Our board is very white and very male, so there is clear progress to be made there. I don’t know how we can measure increased participation of frontline communities in the decision-making process, but, to me, that is part of what progress looks like.

Bowman: We have given our board goals and suggested that they should diversify by a certain amount and year, along with a roster of names that would be a good fit. I’ve made two hires who are people of color who would not have applied to the position had I not reached out to them. We have to continue to bring people in who look different from us. Going back to intentionality again, we have to want to do it and think about it every day.

 

Compiled by Grace Linhares