(Music: “Silver Lanyard” by Blue Dot Sessions)

Anne Brice (intro): This is Berkeley Talks, a UC Berkeley News podcast from the Office of Communications and Public Affairs that features lectures and conversations at Berkeley. You can follow Berkeley Talks wherever you listen to your podcasts. We’re also on YouTube @BerkeleyNews. New episodes come out every other Friday. You can find all of our podcast episodes, with transcripts and photos, on UC Berkeley News at news.berkeley.edu/podcasts.

(Music fades out)

Tony Reames: It is indeed an honor and a privilege to be among the list of folks that have participated in the Hitchcock Lecture Series over the last 115 years, and to be the first to participate in this new iteration of the lecture. Was anybody here at the first lecture in 1909? No? OK, I just wanted to recognize if anyone was. So as you heard in my introduction from Jayana, I recently returned to the academy from a couple of years serving in the Biden-Harris administration. I’ve been back for a year this week. I left the department on December 1st, 2023, and I’ve taken the last year to reflect on that experience, something that I did not initially expect to be a part of, but fortunate that I had that opportunity.

And so with that in mind, I’d like to spend a few moments with you this afternoon to really talk about my perspective on the arc of energy justice that I see as really a pursuit to ensure that energy is affordable, reliable and that it’s clean and that all people can access it. Now, asking me, who is used to teaching a semester-long course, 90 minutes twice a week on energy justice to boil that down to 50 minutes is definitely a Herculean task, but I think it’s one I’m up to the challenge, and I will be looking around for cues to see if I’m going too long. So if you can signal that I need to wrap it up, let me know. But are you ready? Are you ready for this ride? Can I get a mm-hmm?

Audience: Mm-hmm. 

Tony Reames: All right. So I want to frame the conversation today starting with a couple quotes that may be an introduction to some of you and a reintroduction to others. First is the heavily-quoted text by Dr. Martin Luther King that says “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” How many folks are familiar with this quote? OK, good show of hands. It’s often used in instances to understand our country’s incremental march to toward the promise of a more perfect union. But what is the true origin of this quote? As a researcher, I had to look that up because I’ve used it a lot without any additional knowledge about its history.

So according to the writer Michael Smith, Martin Luther King’s quote was paraphrasing of a portion of a sermon that was delivered in 1853 by the abolitionist minister, Theodore Parker. In that sermon, Parker said, “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe. The arc is a long one. My eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by experience of sight, but I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see, I am sure it bends toward justice.”

Now, for Parker, there is no guarantee that the moral universe will do as he wishes. It is only through his own conscience and thereby his own actions that justice will ever be achieved. Former President Obama often used Martin Luther King’s quote just as it is in the first part of this slide, but in later years, he started to revise the quoting. You can see that here, and I think his revision makes Parker’s point more clear, right? “The arc of the moral universe may bend toward justice, but it does not bend on its own.” So as we go through my slides today, I want you to keep in mind that to be able to achieve justice, it takes a sense of urgency, this insistence and earnest and persistent quality. It takes intention, having a concentrated will on something or some end or some purpose. And so with that in mind today, we’ll talk about a moral arc of energy justice.

How many people are familiar with this concept of energy justice? Should be, right? You came here, and I know some of the folks in the room, so that’s great. When we think about energy justice, it’s really this idea that the goal is to achieve equity in both the social and economic participation in our energy system while we also remediate social, economic and health burdens of those who have historically been harmed by that same energy system. And so when we think about it, we must ensure that those who are experiencing the persistent harms of our current energy system are actually at the front of the line to benefit from our transition to a cleaner energy future. The energy justice framing recognizes that racial and economic disparities that we see throughout the United States in particular, result from the legacies of things like land theft, resource extraction, slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, and a host of other policies that were government sanctioned.

And just as those policies were intentional, our efforts to undo their persistent harm must also be intentional, and it must also be government sanctioned, right? So it’s very clear that our current energy system is not equitable. Black households are more likely to live in communities in the shadows of fossil fuel generation. Other communities of color are first and worst to experience the impact of climate emergencies. Communities with economies that are dependent on our reliance on fossil fuels experience harm as our energy economy shifts. Think about predominantly white communities in Appalachia, offshore drilling communities on the Gulf of Mexico, and refining communities like Richmond here in the Bay Area. All right, we got a little amen corner here. These are just some of the issues that we must address when we consider energy justice. So now, how many people believe that energy is a human right? OK. How many people believe that it’s codified in anybody’s constitution as a right? The answer is no, right?

No country explicitly guarantees energy as a right in its laws. While several countries have policies and frameworks that strongly imply the right to excess energy, this concept of a right to energy is still just gaining traction. But in 2015, the United Nations adopted a standalone goal on energy. Goal 7 of the sustainable development goals aims to ensure that energy is accessed by affordable, reliable, sustainable modern energy for all. That same year, 2015, my colleague at Columbia University, Diane Hernandez, issued a call for energy justice with four basic rights: the right to energy that is healthy, sustainable; the right to the best available energy infrastructure; the right to energy that’s affordable; and the right to uninterrupted energy service, which I think is really the forefront of people’s mind here in California as you all deal with wildfires. So energy justice really started as a global concept. It was this idea that developed and developing countries experienced disparities when it came to access of modern energy technology.

And you can see on the right-hand slide there that we still have a long way to go. Some 675 million people across this globe are still living in the dark. Our investments in energy efficiency continue to go down from a global perspective, but we’re at this amazing moment that demands, again, this idea that our approaches to energy are met with urgency and justice. So the summer, the Secretary General Gutierrez said that we’re on a highway to climate hell as global temperatures racked up the 12th straight heat record. Just a couple of weeks ago at COP29, the UN Secretary General asked attendees to listen in a moment of silence. He said, “That sound you hear is the ticking clock. We are in the final countdown to limit global temperatures rising to 1.5 degrees Celsius, and time is not on our side,” so continuing to drive that point home. And energy is one means by which we can address our climate crisis.

Now, while energy is not codified as a basic right, we do have tenets that we can use to understand energy disparities and inequities to actually apply a framework of justice to how we make decisions about our energy system. I spend most of my time looking at distributional inequities in our energy system, so a goal of distributional justice is that the distribution of resources, opportunities, and benefits within our society are fair. Once we understand distributional injustices, we have to recognize the vulnerabilities of different communities. And so an approach to recognition justice emphasizes the importance of acknowledging and respecting identities, values and contributions of marginalized groups. And once we do that, people have to be a part of the process to make new decisions, procedural justice, which is the fair and transparent process to be used when we make decisions.

And then lastly, the ultimate goal is restoring people who have been harmed, restorative justice, aiming to repair harm done to victims globally. We have this energy justice conceptual framework from scholars in the UK, Benjamin Sovacool and Michael Dworkin, really thinking about ways we can approach this idea of energy justice from elements that we can all agree that energy should be available and affordable to things that might be a little more difficult. Who is responsible for energy harms to understanding intersectionalities in our energy injustices? Now as I think about my work in energy justice, it’s often book-ended by these decadal challenges and conditions that are happening as it relates to society and energy intersections. A lot of my work starts in the 1970s during the energy crisis of that time, really trying to understand how energy impacted different communities when energy prices were going up due to global conflict that impacted energy-producing countries.

And so this first image here is from Jet Magazine, which is a popular African American magazine that really was one of the first ones to talk about how the energy crisis was impacting Black Americans in the U.S. Some of the first studies of race and energy came out at this time. In the 1980s and 1990s, we began to see our government retrench from being a part of energy policy and really energy deregulation, allowing prices to fall, which was good economically, but it also allowed energy to really increase as a commodity and the capital underpinnings of energy to rise. And then in the 2000s and 2010, as the world faced an economic recession, energy was seen as one of the mechanisms to bring about economic revitalization, but also people thinking about it as a triple bottom line for sustainability; social, economic, environmental sustainability. And I often say that we are living in the United States of energy and security.

It may be one of the few things that can bridge red states and blue states and bring us all together. These are just headlines that I’ve collected over the years from different parts of our country that address issues of affordability, a tsunami, a shutoff, powerless in the pandemic to households that are choosing between food and energy. We call it heat or eat. And also our natural disasters are wreaking havoc on our energy system. From historic blizzards in Michigan where I live, to PGE making decisions to turn people off with wildfires, our energy system, while reaching 99.9% of households in this country is very insecure, whether physically or whether economically because people can’t afford it. And we have data that tells us people cannot afford energy.

Although we have people working in the energy industry, we have people looking out their windows at the smokestacks from energy generation or refinement. In 2015, some 14% of U.S. households could not afford their energy bills. 21% were making the decision between buying food and medicine or paying their energy bill. Eleven percent were keeping their home at unhealthy temperatures, whether too hot or too cold because they couldn’t afford energy or they couldn’t repair their HVAC system. And we see how those numbers have gone up over time in 2023 because of some policy changes to address energy affordability. We see those numbers going up, but they fluctuate because our support for energy-poor households also fluctuates. And this chart shows you just how it fluctuates. So in the U.S., we have two main federal programs for energy assistance. One is called the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, or LIHEAP. We like to take acronyms and give them sounds.

LIHEAP has been around since the 1980s, but it was modeled off of assistance programs in different states during that period of the 1970s that I talked about, the energy crisis. So most of our response to energy poverty come from that period in the 1970s when we were facing a major energy crisis. But you can see how the appropriations to the LIHEAP program have fluctuated over time. You’ll see a couple peaks there in 2009 and 2021. These are major pieces of legislation known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. The second program, oh, well, just to explain LIHEAP a little more, LIHEAP is actual bill assistance. So it’s a block grant that goes from the federal government to states to pay utility bills. Who do you think benefits from LIHEAP?

Audience: [Inaudible]

Tony Reames: No, the utilities. So there’s a huge lobby behind the LIHEAP program every year. There’s LIHEAP Lobby Day, which again, I support the LIHEAP program. The second program is WAP or WAP, the Weatherization Assistance Program. That program also came out of the 1970s modeled after state programs during the energy crisis. These are the two longest running federal energy assistance programs actually in the world. So weatherization is a program that I feel actually gets us to a solution. It is free retrofit for low-income households; new windows, new insulation, new HVAC systems, really addressing the energy consumption issue that leads sometimes to energy poverty. Those same peaks you see there are during the American Recovery Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. But look at that stat on the bottom. Six times the amount of money is going into what some of us call the Band-Aid, one-time payments, maybe seasonal payments.

You might get two, a winter payment and a summer payment. And the data shows that some 90% of people that participate in the LIHEAP program never catch up on their past due bills. So it’s not a solution, but I think these programs in concert could work together. And one other interesting point, LIHEAP is in the Health and Human Services Department, so it’s viewed as a social service program. Weatherization is in the Department of Energy. It’s viewed as an energy program. Sometimes when they go to the state, they’re in the same agency, sometimes they’re in different state agencies. And so that causes all these other bureaucratic problems when it comes to reporting and making sure that someone who gets bill assistance is then referred to a program that focuses on their energy efficiency. And this concept of energy burden has broader implications. Energy burden is a proportion of your income that you spend on energy costs and it can impact your public health.

The map on the left shows darker areas where energy burdens are higher, people are paying more of their income in energy than places with the lighter color. A national study that we did looking at county-level energy burden found that each percent increase in energy burden is associated with detrimental public health implications; 240 more premature deaths, people dying earlier, a 7% increase in the number of county residents that say their health is fair or poor and a five-year decrease in average county life expectancy. And we showed data like this to think about alternative solutions to the energy poverty issue. Is this a medical or a public health issue? Can we give a prescription for a home retrofit? Can we use Medicaid and Medicare dollars to retrofit homes and reduce asthma and other physical ailments associated with your home being too hot or too cold?

Now, I started this work in Kansas City, so I give a lot of credit to folks in Kansas City who really highlighted the challenges of energy for me when I was thinking about, I joked with some of the students this morning, I’m a civil engineer. I did stormwater, wastewater transportation. I wanted to do my dissertation on rain gardens. Anybody got a rain garden and bioswales? But I started doing qualitative interviews because there was money in the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act to actually build rain gardens and bioswales in communities that had combined sewer overflows. So sewer backing up into people’s basements. I was super excited to go into this urban African American community in Kansas City because I wanted every block to have a rain garden or a bio-swale. But the little old ladies that I did interviews with told me I needed a new career path. And so place really matters, right? The context of place, understanding communities really matter, and Kansas City taught me that. And I want to talk about Kansas City really quick.

Kansas City was the first place where I really learned about hypersegregation; residential segregation that was government sanction in the 1920s and 1930s. And so this is a map showing the layout of the Kansas City metro area. So on the left, we see in the 2020 census, the percent of people of color by different, I think these are zip codes. So you can see purple, higher percentage of people of color down to the yellow or brown color, lower percentage of people of color. Now, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation created these redlining maps that have really come back into people’s understanding now to identify communities that were risky investments for residential development or buying homes. And you can see red were places that were considered risky, risky investments when it came to home purchases versus green were less risk. And you can see how that overlay, again, we’re talking about these were 1930 maps and the impact that it still has in the year 2020.

And so you see this line that talks about Troost Avenue. Troost Avenue is the longest north-south street in Kansas City. It separates school districts, racial groups, incomes, city council districts. It’s really like a perpetual wall between haves and have-nots. And you can see it in the housing, very similar style housing, built at the same time. The housing on the east side of Troost, wood siding, single-pane windows. On the west side of Troost, the less risky investments, double-pane windows, new aluminum siding. That has a direct impact on people’s energy consumption and their energy bills. And so we created a model to try to understand these dynamics, particularly focused on heating, because heating is tied to the physical structure, the building envelope and you can see the dynamics of inefficiency a lot greater. And so what we looked at was this metric called energy use intensity. The higher the energy use intensity, the less efficient that home is. And so what we see is as median household incomes go up, energy use intensity goes down.

That means those homes are more efficient, so higher income areas have more efficient homes. But if people were in poverty, less educated, older, African American, Hispanic, or renters, energy efficiency was not high. And we had high energy use intensities. So this understanding of place and housing and the intersection with energy really formed the basis of my understanding of the distributional injustices in our energy system. So fast-forward to 2014, I arrived in Michigan. There’s a massive movement in Detroit between community members and the utility company and the regulators. How many people know their energy commissioner? OK. It is unfair if you work in the space. I didn’t even know what a public service commissioner was, and I called myself an energy scholar. How do you think you can explain that to someone who’s sitting in poverty, they can’t pay their energy bill, they’re just trying to get bill assistance? They have no idea that this elected or appointed person has that much power in their energy bill.

So groups in Detroit and other parts of Michigan were trying to make sure that people understood that. And there, again, there’s clear benefit versus burden dynamic in Detroit. So these are three counties in the Detroit Metro, Wayne, Macomb, Oakland County, and that black circle there shows a cluster of power plants. On the left-hand side, you see electricity consumption. The redder areas are where people consume more electricity. The yellow areas people consume less. On the right-hand side is energy burden, red areas people spend a higher proportion of their income on energy costs, yellow or less, smaller proportion. Now, what do you see in this map? Around the utility clusters it’s yellow, right? People are either not consuming as much energy because their homes are smaller or they can’t afford it. But then when you look at the energy burden, again, people are looking out their window and can see smokestacks that are generating energy for the rest of the metropolitan area and they can’t even afford it.

This benefit versus burden is what we try to address with the concept of energy justice. And those heating dynamics also existed in the Detroit area. This is Wayne County where Detroit is. We saw again where incomes were higher, consumption was higher, but inefficiency was lower. The same thing with education and poverty. Now interestingly enough, when you look at heating consumption, just kind of brass tacks, there’s little statistically significant difference in consumption because it’s cold for everybody. But you do see that dynamic of difference when it comes to how efficiently people use that heating. And so some people may say, “Well, why don’t poor people just get the most efficient technology?” Like it’s that simple, but it’s not. And I wanted to show that even something as simple as changing out your light bulbs from an incandescent bulb to an LED is difficult when you’re poor. And so we went into about 130 stores in the Detroit Metro to see if light bulbs were available. So incandescent bulbs, the least efficient bulbs in green and LED bulbs in orange, the most efficient bulbs.

And we divided the county up into four categories, less than 10% poverty and more than 40% poverty. So if we went into a store in a wealthy neighborhood, up top, about 100% of the stores had incandescent bulbs at that time, and 91% of stores had LED bulbs. But let’s travel to a poor neighborhood. A majority of stores still had incandescent bulbs, but just over half carried an LED bulb. So you could potentially walk into a store in a poor neighborhood and not find an LED bulb. So what are your chances or your opportunity to be more efficient? And then let’s talk about the cost. So same color, same categories on the left-hand side, wealthy neighborhoods, right-hand side, poor neighborhoods. So if you walk into a wealthy store, you can buy an LED bulb for about 5.20 at that time. This was a few years ago. If you go into a poor neighborhood, so if your store had an LED bulb, it was almost $8. Or you could buy the incandescent bulb, which you’re already used to for about $1.50.

So if you’re poor, what are you going to do? And let’s see, what does that look like, the transition to more efficient technology? $3 for wealthy people, $6 for someone that’s poor, twice the cost to transition to a more efficient bulb. So it’s not easy to be poor and be green. That was the outcome of this paper. And there’s also people that fall in the gap, right? We have programs, government-sponsored programs for people that are 200% of federal poverty. If you have credit, you can do it on your own. But what about the people in the middle, people who make $1 over 200% of the federal poverty level? What we found in Michigan was that one in eight households fell in that gap, and there was no program for them to participate in. So we needed to do something about this. So then there was a lot of attention on this issue at the federal level, which was not always the case. The Energy and Commerce Committee actually had a virtual panel, a virtual hearing during the pandemic on generating equity, improving clean energy access and affordability.

That was my first congressional hearing. I was super excited. I was like, “Oh, wow, I get to go to the Capitol.” It was the pandemic. I didn’t know how that was going to happen, but we did it virtually. So I did it from my bedroom; put on a nice blur so the Congress folks couldn’t see that I was sitting in my bedroom. But it was an amazing conversation. There were two Democrat witnesses and one Republican witness, and we beat up on him pretty bad, but it was a really friendly conversation. And he and I keep in touch to this day. But then there was a man running for president. Some of you may have heard of Joe Biden. He was really centering energy and environmental justice in his campaign in ways that I had not seen before. And so several of us got together from different universities and research institutions to put together some policy options for an equitable energy transition to lay out what it would cost to create a more equitable energy system.

I thought that was the extent of my federal engagement until I got a call to join the administration after President Biden won to really support this idea of energy justice. And so as was mentioned, I had a few roles in the Department of Energy coming in first as one of the senior advisors on energy justice. This was the first time in an administration that energy justice was a part of a role. Then becoming the Deputy Director of Energy Justice and then ending my leading the office that was focused on the weatherization program that I talked about early and was my hope to go into the Department of Energy and drastically change it, but super naive. And so I’ve learned a lot about the federal government and the challenges and the limited opportunities that exist. But President Biden put us on a trajectory to really address the climate crisis. So you see on the left-hand side in 2022, these are our primary energy sources. 60% of our energy comes from fossil fuels, 22% from renewables and 18% from nuclear.

The goal is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 50% to 52% below 2005 levels by 2030, reach 100% carbon-free pollution, electricity by 2035 and achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. So how are we doing? So here’s a chart that I think really highlights both the progress that we’ve made, the challenges that we face, and then thinking about it in the context of our recent election. And so I have this line here that shows us 2030, our first goal. The red line shows where we were before we pass the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. The green shows where we will end up with the passage of those two laws, and the blue is where we should be. So let’s take a look at that 2030 line. We have a lot of work to do, and so it’s going to take a lot of external pressure to keep things going. So I think it’s clear for folks in this room that the energy transition is happening, right?

You can see that our mix of energy resources is shifting by 2050. The Energy Information Administration says that about 44% of our electricity will be renewable by 2050. And you can see how renewable energy has grown over time or is projected to grow. But as I mentioned, low-income and rental-occupied households are still less likely to adopt clean energy. Communities with lower incomes and more households of color are still burdened by particularly dirty energy infrastructure. And these communities have the highest energy burdens, but also face climate change risk and burdens. And so it’s happening, but we still have work to do on the equity perspective. So this is a study from some of your colleagues here that looked at the racial dynamics of rooftop solar adoption. And I’d like to point out the first bar for African American census tracts, about 53% had solar installations while 47% did not. And compare that to other racial and ethnic groups.

And so my question was, is there something interesting about particularly Black communities that their rooftops are not solar ready? And the answer is no. Black people have roofs too. So there is something in the dynamics of how we deploy programs and design programs that end up leading to the disparities that we see. And so using data with some colleagues at the National Renewable Energy Lab that looked at solar potential, you see 80% of rooftops and communities have solar potential across racial and ethnic groups, so again, understanding how we design and implement programs to actually achieve energy justice. And this is just a national study that looks at those dynamics that I talked about when it comes to energy use intensity, again, the burden and the benefit of our climate and energy system is experienced differently by people of different races.

And we also see that, again, when we look at energy and security nationally, seeing 36% of African Americans, 35% of Hispanic and Latino households, 34% of two or more races experiencing energy and security at disproportionate rates. And so how did I get to this understanding of this intersection between energy and race? And why did it become so important for me to continue that when I got to the Department of Energy? So one of the first quotes I read when I was looking through the literature on energy and race was this report from 2004, 20 years ago from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation when we were thinking about a carbon tax nationally, really to understand how a carbon tax would impact communities differently. And so the executive summary of that report starts with this sentence, “Where U.S. Energy Policy is concerned, African Americans are the proverbial canaries in the mindshaft.” And you can look at different data sets to understand, again, this inequity when it comes to energy and race.

And President Biden and Biden-Harris administration and many of the appointees that were secretaries and administrators also begin to think about that and how we designed programs. And so on his seventh day in office, President Biden signed his climate executive order, Executive Order 14008, tackling the climate crisis at home and abroad, understanding that despite peril, there was promise in the solutions to address climate change, that there are opportunities for good jobs as we try to achieve our net-zero economy. But it needed a government-wide approach as well as some external government folks, Rachel and the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council. And that success would be a coordinated effort at the federal level, working with communities, other stakeholders at the state, local and Tribal government levels. But one nugget in that executive order that allowed us to do some of the things that we did to address the disparities and inequities that I’ve shown was in Section 223, the Justice40 Initiative.

And the Justice40 Initiative said that 40% of the overall goals of our federal investments in all of these areas should go to disadvantaged communities. Those communities are experiencing climate change, first and worse, unable to afford many of the clean energy technology that we’ve been discussing. And I know here in California, you all know about how you characterize disadvantaged communities. You know either how difficult that is or what it means when you begin to identify communities. So I’ll be honest, it took a long time to get to that definition. I think one of my first conversations about the map were while President Biden was still running for office. So it was back then that they started tinkering with the map and it took a long time to get here, but I’m thankful to say that we do have a map that was published in 2022 to identify communities that should be the beneficiaries of our climate and clean energy investments. So it represents about 28% of the U.S. population.

It’s considered living in a disadvantaged community. And I talked about this whole of government approach to Justice40. It was tri-led, which is an interesting concept. We know co-led, but having three different offices try to run this, the Council of Environmental Quality, the Office of Management and Budget, and the White House Climate Policy Office, with advice from an external group, the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, and an internal government group, the WHEJIC, the White House Environmental Justice Interagency Council. Secretaries, including 23 federal agencies, and then ideally, we created the Office of Energy Justice and Equity with a ton of different groups to on this. So I show this to show that there was an all-hands-on-deck approach to making sure that our energy system was more equitable and just. Our fearless Secretary of Energy who spent some time here with you all previously really made it clear that Justice would serve as our North Star as we fight climate change and bring economic prosperity to our great nation.

And to do that, we had to set some policy priorities. And so we set eight Energy Justice Justice40 Policy Priorities in DOE. I’ll run through them really quick. Addressing energy burden, addressing environmental burdens, addressing parity and clean energy adoption, low-cost capital, ’cause it costs money to go green, thinking about our contracting and making sure that we were creating more diverse energy companies, clean energy job training, focusing on energy resilience and focusing on energy democracy. That procedural justice piece was really important to us because we wanted people to be engaged as we created this new energy system in ways they haven’t been before. And who would believe that in 1978, a year after the Department of Energy was created, that there was an office that dealt with energy and race? How many people knew that? I didn’t know either and I was in that office.

Yeah, 1978, again, coming out of the energy crisis, one response that the government made was that oil companies were basically ripping off communities, particularly communities of color with higher energy prices. And so part of that lawsuit established an office that would support communities in their energy transition back in the ’70s. So the Office of Minority Economic Impact was created. Now, this office has a really amazing mandate, and one that had never been truly realized, to create a research program that looks at energy programs, policies and regulations and how it impacts minority communities. So a whole research office doing everything I was doing at University of Michigan. And so I was super excited to be able to go to the department and actually help establish an office to fulfill this mandate from 1978. So we worked to change the name of the larger office to the Office of Energy Justice and Equity, and then I established the Office of Energy Justice Policy and Analysis with about a dozen folks down here in the bottom who I am trying to get to hold on and stay in the office as the government transitions.

But we did a lot in a short period of time, really trying to create a national home, working with our colleagues at the National Lab to be a national think tank or a thought leadership home for energy justice in the federal government, creating tools and documents. And the picture in the middle is super special to me. That is a Congressman Bobby Rush, who was chair of the Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on the Energy and Commerce Committee in Congress, a retired representative now from Chicago. And just before President Biden was elected, he proposed an Office of Energy Equity at the Department of Energy. It never made it out of committee, but we found that proposal and actually used that to do the administrative launch of the Office of Energy Justice Policy and Analysis. Was able to go to his retirement, give him my business card, and he was like, “Oh, thank you so much.”

And I was like, “No, read it.” He read the card,” and he was like, “Oh, my Lord.” So he is a pastor, and he started showing it to people and I was like, “We really respect the work that you’ve done, and it was your proposal that actually led to us creating this office.” So super special moment for me. But DOE went from a $40-50 billion-a-year agency to like $140-50 billion agency thanks to the Infrastructure Law, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the CHIPS and Science Act. So you can see all this additional money that came to the agency. So we hit the road to let people know that these resources were coming. Again, a little naive about how people think about federal funding and how federal funding actually gets to communities. So we were going into communities talking about trillions of dollars, and people were like, “Well, when will I see it?” And that question stuck with me because a lot of times federal dollars don’t actually get to individuals, they go to places.

But we heard a lot ’cause we launched the Energy Justice to the People Roadshow. And based on what we heard, we knew we needed to do something different. We couldn’t necessarily do it through a lot of different policy changes, but the one thing we did have control is how we impact applications to the department for grants. And so what we ended up doing was creating something called the Community Benefits Plans. If any of you are in research and getting money from DOE, you may have seen this. But we added a new section to the application that counts for 20% of the score where an applicant has to say how they’re going to work with and benefit the community where they’re trying to build a project, so early and often engagement with communities to really understand how this project will benefit them. So labor engagement, focusing on the workforce, focusing on diversity, equity, inclusion, and then implementing Justice40 with those eight benefits that I talked about. And this is throughout the application process from application to the ramp up and construction of the project.

Also, working with some of our national lab colleagues, we created a tool to help communities think through things like how many homes need to be retrofit in your community to reduce energy burden? How many houses have the technical potential for solar? Can you do community wind? And so people could use this model to present a proposal to an applicant and say, “It’s going to cost $10 million to make our whole neighborhood energy efficient,” as a starting point for the conversation of community benefits. And then we wanted to make sure that data was available and that we were transparent on where money was going and also doing an environmental justice scorecard. So what’s next federally? I couldn’t do this presentation without mentioning Project 2025, particularly because they actually cite some of the work that we were doing, interestingly enough, actual citations in the document. But in the Department of Energy section, it says, “Focus on energy and science issues, not politicize social programs.”

And so there’s a section that actually calls out programs that sound innocuous such as “energy justice,” Justice40, and DEI can be transformed to promote politicized agendas.” Now think about the data that I showed you on the inequities that exist in our energy system. So the fear is that there could be a rollback because the identification and recognition of those disparities are politicized social programs. And so when you think about our fellow Americans who are working in the federal agencies trying to eradicate the inequities that we just demonstrated, this is potentially what they are up against. So please keep them in your thoughts. But what keeps me motivated is that there is money out in communities doing things that are positive and beneficial, like modernizing our public schools and nonprofits. The first time we’ve ever done federal investment in schools and nonprofits around energy efficiency, billions of dollars into Appalachia and other energy communities, working with communities on technical assistance to plan for their energy future, and then the philanthropic world actually integrating Justice40 into how they work with communities to prepare them for the energy transition.

And so people are thinking globally, but acting locally. Albuquerque, New Mexico is the first city to actually sign a Justice40 Order. In Detroit where I am, they have a climate action agenda that they are actively pursuing. One of them focuses on accelerating energy efficiency and clean energy. And then I’ve taken over this Detroit Sustainability Clinic where our whole goal is to help the city and the communities in that city implement their climate and sustainability action. And so across this country, people are doing things locally. And I think the Justice40 Initiative thinking the energy justice work will continue. It may be less so at the federal level. We’re hoping our colleagues at the Lab continue to push that work, do the research that shows both the disparities that exist, but what’s working. And I think we can continue to march toward a more equitable and just energy future. So with that, thank you all again for your time today, and stay in the fight to push energy justice. Thank ypou.

(Music: “Silver Lanyard” by Blue Dot Sessions)

Anne Brice (outro): You’ve been listening to Berkeley Talks, a UC Berkeley News podcast from the Office of Communications and Public Affairs that features lectures and conversations at Berkeley. Follow us wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can find all of our podcast episodes, with transcripts and photos, on UC Berkeley News at news.berkeley.edu/podcasts.

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