The Future of Environmental and Energy Justice

Shalanda Baker and Suzanne Russo discuss environmental justice in the context of the clean energy transition, Baker’s work on equity at the US Department of Energy, and collaboration among communities and policymakers.

Suzanne Russo: Now that you’ve had some time to reflect on your role at the US Department of Energy, has anything surfaced that you’re most proud of? Is there anything that you really hope the next administration can carry forward?

Shalanda Baker: I mainly think about three things. One is that I built a team. I went in with the clothes on my back, literally, and a book I wrote called Revolutionary Power, and I was like, “How are we going to embed justice into this energy transition?” I started day by day. I built a strategy, and then I recruited folks from all over the country to join me in that work and empowered them to do the work.

The agency didn’t already have anyone who really worked on the energy justice mission; by the end, I had over 100 people working on behalf of the mission. They were empowered to do great work on policy and work with small, disadvantaged businesses. They were in communities, working hand in hand with folks to let them know what was happening in the administration. We were running and moving fast, and I’m so excited to see that team continuing to do great work.

The second thing is that we built the policy architecture for energy justice. That architecture is something that people know about. We educated every single person in the agency—over 100,000 people—on what energy justice and environmental justice are.

The last thing is about Community Benefits Plans. If I had my ideal world, as a blank slate, we wouldn’t have to deal with structural racism or embedded power in this job. Community Benefits Plans may not have been what I would have designed, but they were the best tool that we could create, given the constraints that we were working within.

The Community Benefits Plan framework, for those who may not be familiar, requires every single applicant for funds from the Department of Energy to have a stakeholder-engagement plan. They also have to have a plan for actually distributing benefits pursuant to the Justice40 Initiative—to disadvantaged communities. We’re talking about job creation, energy benefits, and other types of benefits. They also have to have a plan for partnering with community colleges and institutions that serve underrepresented populations, like our historically Black colleges and universities and our Hispanic-serving institutions. Every applicant has to have a plan for that partnership and to create high-quality, good-paying jobs.

When we rolled that out two and a half years ago, people’s heads were exploding. They were like, “What? We actually have to do stuff now to get this money? We don’t just have to be smart and have good technology?” No. You actually have to be able to talk to people and show us your promises to communities.

I’m really proud of that, because this framework was hard fought. The community benefits framework was the best thing that we could create, given the circumstances in which we were operating. And the framework will endure, because it is embedded in the $100 billion of program funding that the department will be rolling out over the next 5 to 10 years.

Do you have any suggestions for the community groups that are seeking more transparency around the process for community benefits planning and around accountability of implementation?

When you think about a place like the Gulf South, which historically has been burdened by pollution, and which then is going to be asked to house billions of dollars of new infrastructure, how do you tell people about it? We designed the Regional Energy Democracy Initiative, which is the last little hard thing that I tried to do before leaving the agency, to create hubs that will be clearing houses of information for communities and, in its most ideal state, also help to negotiate community benefits and publish information on community benefits for community awareness.

When I was leaving, the amount of new funding for a small area between Houston, Texas, and Lake Charles, Louisiana, was $8 billion, which is just the federal share. That’s over $16 billion of new public-private projects going into a small, very rural, low-income environmental justice community or set of communities.

We knew that there had to be some capacity for these communities. I think the Regional Energy Democracy Initiative framework is a good start to help these communities learn about and access this funding. Just because we’re standing up new programs and initiatives, like Justice40, doesn’t mean that they’re just going to magically happen, so we still need folks who are working hard where we’re standing up different regional hubs.

We know we wanted to start in the Gulf South because of historic impacts and what we already were projecting in that area. But the hope is that there will be other structures like the Regional Energy Democracy Initiative around the country, and these structures truly can be the engines of information capacity for communities for this extraordinary moment of development that we’re going through. That’s the hope.

One of the other things that you helped design was the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF). The fund is a part of the Inflation Reduction Act, though the fund has only recently been allocated in spending. The fund is $27 billion and designed to leverage $7 of private investment for every $1 of public investment. This fund is one of the primary ways that the federal government intended to actually work with communities—to put community organizations that know their community best in charge of how money gets spent. Can you tell us more about the fund structure and about what community expectations should be around the GGRF?

We have more money than ever on climate—over $1 trillion across the federal family. The GGRF is $27 billion of that climate funding and is focused on solar and clean energy technologies. The fund has many components. Dollars will be used to create new projects, but also to facilitate workforce development—to create the whole new set of workers who are going to power the green energy economy.

We also were very clear about new market entrants into the solar and the clean energy industry, so we designed GGRF, which actually was owned by the US Environmental Protection Agency. Jahi Wise, who’s brilliant, really had a hand in it. I weighed in, I gave a lot of input, and a lot of overlap occurred, because the Environmental Protection Agency was relying a lot on what we had done at the Department of Energy to inform the policy design and structure for GGRF.

One of the things that was important was creating opportunities for new market entrants so that the same solar companies that have been playing in the market for years wouldn’t just be gobbling up all that new money that was going to be on the table. At its best, if GGRF is successful, the fund will create an entirely new set of markets for solar and for clean energy, and the fund will help break into those markets that are hard to penetrate, because a lot of the low-hanging fruit has been picked, as scholars who’ve been studying this know. The markets that are easiest to penetrate—upper-middle-class white communities, in large part, who already have taken advantage of solar—is fairly saturated.

The hardest markets are low-income communities, rural communities, and communities of color, and these communities are where GGRF is designed to penetrate on the solar front, but also again on the clean energy–technology front. The ideal is to have workers that are building those projects come from those communities, and for companies that originate from those communities to be part of those new projects.

All of this is happening within a system that is structurally unjust. All this great policy is happening in a society that is resistant to justice and resistant to change. The folks who are implementing have to have a high tolerance for friction. So, anyone listening who’s a part of GGRF cannot turn away from the hardest stuff. They have to stay the course. They have to spend that money quickly. [Given] who will be in the White House in January 2025, those administering the fund may feel more urgency and want to spend the fund quickly—and urgency cuts against justice. Folks working with GGRF have to be thinking carefully and quickly and, ideally, coordinating across all the GGRF grantees, so that they’re slicing up the market. Groups that have expertise in working with those particular diverse and underserved communities need to be able to get to the table.

Come January, we’re going to have a new president, new state and local leaders, and new members of Congress. Do you see opportunities for communities that are at the heart of the environmental justice movement within this political transition, regardless of the election outcome?

We are all bracing for whatever is going to happen. But again, here is some context: We have more money out in the world, in environmental justice communities, than we’ve ever had before. Not only the $27 billion in the GGRF that is going to be spent, which hopefully will be an evergreen fund in those communities—we also have $177 million that was distributed through the Thriving Communities Technical Assistance Centers.

The Environmental Protection Agency, in partnership with the Department of Energy, stood up these 18 different centers. Community-based organizations received more money than they’d ever received to provide technical assistance to frontline environmental justice communities. This is infrastructure that has been stood up and is going to flourish and go through growing pains, but the ball already is moving down the field.

To take us back to 2019 or 2020, the only way we have a Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act and have over $1 trillion in spending is because a diverse coalition of Black and brown voters; environmental justice folks; and traditional, white environmental organizations came together and said, “We care about the climate and the planet, and we’re going to make some trade-offs together to get some work done.”

A lot of questions are coming out of the Biden-Harris administration, and rightfully so. Questions remain about how we are going to implement Justice40, what the benefits are, and whether those benefits float. But the next big policy initiative has to make Justice40 real and continue to dismantle 400 years of structural racism.

Another issue is that we’re going to need more money to address climate change. If we have a goal as a country of halving our emissions by 2030—that’s six years from now. We need the right policy tools and instruments to get us there. More money is not going to be it. We need money that is structured in the right way, empowers the right communities, builds wealth in the right places, and remediates the right kind of harm.

We still need the coalition. We still need Black, brown, and Indigenous people to work together. We need the traditional, white-led organizations that are well-resourced to be at the table using their resources and providing technical assistance. We need the Resources for the Futures of the world to provide research to support a policy agenda. This next generation of folks needs to step in.

Hats off to Bev Wright, Bob Bullard, Peggy Shepard, and many others who are environmental justice stalwarts and were at the table when a lot of this design work was being done. Now, it is time for the next generation to step in. We don’t have that long. We have 25 years to avert catastrophic climate change.

A permitting bill, which is bipartisan and was introduced into the Senate this summer, has legs and seems likely to pass, though probably not until next year. The bill has attributes that would clear critical obstacles to decarbonizing our electric grid system and modernizing the grid that we have, particularly obstacles related to expanding transmission systems. But the bill also has been criticized for removing critical protections on environmentally sensitive lands and on the communities that historically have borne a far greater share of the burdens of the energy system that we have right now. Can you talk to us about your perspective on those trade-offs and on the path forward for more quickly decarbonizing our energy system in a just way that centers equity?

In my book, I introduced the term “climate change fundamentalism,” which is working to avert catastrophic climate change first, at the expense of communities, and saying, “We’ve just got to avert catastrophic climate change, full stop.”

I criticize that approach as being a very ahistorical approach, and I argue that leaving behind communities that already are on the front lines of climate change—and, by the way, did very little to contribute to the climate disaster—is immoral. I made a moral argument. After spending three and a half years in the Biden administration, I want to make a practical argument.

No matter what permitting framework is designed, communities are going to protest if they don’t see themselves in these energy projects and the energy economy, if they don’t see real benefits flowing from this energy economy, and if they’re not at the table to design how these projects get built in their own communities. And they should protest.

This is a practical dimension. We can model a permitting framework to get us to net zero. But if the model doesn’t take resistance from communities into account, and if it doesn’t take into account the places where that infrastructure is going to be housed, then the model is not a good model and is not nuanced enough to take into account the social-science dimension of what’s happening in this energy transition. When folks are thinking about permitting, they have to bring in the people who understand what’s happening on the ground and who study those communities.

I’m all for accelerating permitting in the energy transition. We have to move at a speed and a scale of development that is unprecedented, but we also have to do new things. We have to bring communities to the table on day one, and we have to make sure economic benefits actually flow from these projects into communities. Communities have to see themselves in the energy transition.

We recently had a workshop at Howard University that brought together energy justice researchers who had published new research with policymakers and with those in agencies who develop the rules to implement policies. We heard a few times that policymakers don’t know who to talk to in communities. Policymakers don’t know how to get community input on the timeline that they need as they’re considering legislation or developing legislation. Most policymakers also don’t have the time to read academic journals, which, as researchers, we like to think can fill some of this gap between communities and policymakers. A critical gap still seems to exist between communities, community-driven solutions and ideas, and policymakers. Do you have any other advice from the policy side on how to find those community-connection points?

At the policymaking level, we need more diverse policymakers and people who come from communities. We need to diversify all sorts of rooms and get industry to talk to communities. Even if companies are not getting grant money from the Department of Energy, they have to talk to communities on day one to change the culture of how we do things. I’m really excited about being back in academia, because we have to break some of the structures within academia, too. Given the speed at which we need to move in the next 25 years, we have to start breaking down those structures now. We need people who are courageous and may not have all the answers.

We’re in this moment when a lot of great research has been done. Great models exist in terms of communicating with communities about policy. Now, we just have to do it at scale and with speed.