How can we build a transition to renewable energy that doesn’t leave the already marginalized behind?

A story from Baltimore

In 2009, the residents of Curtis Bay—a multiracial, working class neighborhood on Baltimore’s industrial southern edge, learned that history was about to repeat itself. Many of the residents could remember how fifteen years ago nearly all the residents of the nearby neighborhoods of Fairfield and Wagner’s Point were evacuated from their homes—built on land that had been more or less sacrificed to petrochemical-driven development and thus rendered unfit for human life. The tight-knit communities—mostly black in Fairfield, largely white in Wagner’s Point, were torn apart, and the houses that remained brought down by demolition or decay.

Now, Curtis Bay, already the most polluted neighborhood in the city, would be made into another sacrificial victim—the nation’s largest trash burning incinerator was going to be built less than a mile from Benjamin Franklin High School that hundreds of young people from the community attended every week day. The most galling part of the proposed incinerator plan, however, was the pretense that this all was somehow “green”—the business plan for Energy Answers, the company behind the scheme, depended on selling the electricity generated by burning trash to the public and nonprofit institutions, including the very school board responsible for the wellbeing of the children at Ben Franklin, as renewable energy. This was thanks to a 2011 Maryland law, supported fervently by then governor Martin O’Malley, that made it possible for sustainable energy quotas to be met as easily buying power from a company burning trash as from those putting up solar arrays or wind farms—and exempting such “green” incinerators from inconvenient regulations like those that prevent schoolchildren from breathing mercury.

What happened in Curtis Bay shows quite clearly that our transition to green energy (or in this case, “green” energy!) is not an automatic process driven unambigously towards happy outcomes by technological progress and good intentions. Who benefits from the green transition is clearly going to be dictated by money and power. Those with neither are likely to be left off the sustainability bus—or even thrown under it.

Not your typical school board meeting

But there’s another lesson to be learned from Curtis Bay: organized communities can successfully demand something other than business as usual. It started with just a few high school students, who started talking about building neighborhood resistance to the incinerator. With the help of local economic human rights organization called the United Workers, that small initial group snowballed into a massive campaign, bringing students and neighbors together with supportive activists and artists from across the city, all showing up at meetings of the institutions who had signed up to purchase power from the planned incinerator, and demanding they do otherwise. Against all expectations, as of August 2015, it looks like they are winning. The consortium of school boards, local governments, and nonprofits has canceled their contracts with Energy Answers, and the incinerator is far from even beginning construction. Meanwhile, Curtis Bay residents have become leading voices working to create an alternative development plan.

Solar, naturally, has come up as an obvious choice, in no small part due to a parent of one of the children attending Benjamin Franklin High, who also happens to be a self-taught utility-scale solar installation designer. Adamantly opposed to the mercury and other pollution Energy Answers’ project promises to pump into the neighborhood’s air, she’s put forward some detailed and rigorous plans for just how much power could be generated in a truly sustainable fashion on the footprint of the proposed incinerator location. In so doing, she’s made it clear that real alternatives are possible. But alternative energy sources, by themselves, are not automatically wins for economic justice—we need alternatives that are structured to truly benefit communities.

What follows tries to offer a catalog of such solutions: what are the kinds of alternatives that not only sustainably generate electrical power, but also generate economic power in the communities that currently need it most? With the recent announcement by President Obama of a major initiative to support a more inclusive solar economy, it’s imperative that folks concerned with economic and ecological justice have a solid understanding of what’s possible—both within current frameworks and as a result of continued mobilizing and organizing.

The problem with solar

Solar capacity in the United States, while still only meeting a small percentage of our overall energy needs, is growing by leaps and bounds. And the fastest growing sector here is residential solar. But the important question is: who is taking advantage of these new possibilities? When, as one study claimed, installing solar is a better investment than the stock market in 46 of our 50 largest cities, who is accumulating all the new wealth being generated on our decentralizing electrical grid?

Who is accumulating all the new wealth being generated on our decentralizing electrical grid?

For the most part, the growth in residential solar is being driven by a system of incentives and financing which largely targets middle-class households. The tax credits that reward residential investments made in green power largely require homeownership and stable personal finances as prerequisites—at least in the absence of robust mechanisms to facilitate inclusion in the solar boom for renters and low-income households. Companies like Elon Musk’s Solar City and Sungevity, which lease residential photovoltaic systems to homeowners, are growing tremendously, thanks to the generous tax credits their customers can take advantage of.

Historically, the American middle class was largely built on such industry-friendly government subsidies—the homes whose roofs today are going solar in record numbers are largely a product of the federal tax deduction for home mortgage interest, a massive subsidy to middle class property owners and the construction industry. While home ownership is a powerful way for working people to build assets, not every American had the same opportunity to take advantage of these incentives.

Starting with the New Deal, racial discrimination (“redlining”) in the way federal housing policy was conceived and implemented resulted in a white middle class enjoying relative financial stability and the benefits of an investment in home ownership, with both low-income and middle class communities of color locked out of this pathway to prosperity. The discriminatory practices around predatory lending in the run up to the financial crisis of 2007–2008, and the subsequent wave of foreclosures, further wiped out much of the wealth that had been built up through homeownership, however difficult, in communities of color.

Today, this pattern continues in the transition to green energy. While the explicit racial animosity that expressed itself in the redlining maps marking black and brown communities as dangerous might be absent in the policies around solar, certainly the pervasive and persistent results of ongoing racial discrimination in housing policy and real estate financing has has made it that much harder for those on the economy’s margins to benefit financially from the green transition.

Of course, there’s a real need to reduce carbon emissions quickly enough in order to avert planetary disaster, and any cuts to solar subsidies could be catastrophic. But that doesn’t absolve us from considering the economic implications of how we subsidize green energy. We need to challenge policymakers to create and support pathways to sustainability that reverse rather than reinforce existing lines of economic privilege. We need to multiply ways to reduce the barriers preventing low-income communities from making investments in the green economy, and to multiply the ways in which these investments can be held cooperatively and in common. There’s no silver bullet here—just a lot of great strategies that need to be amplified and generalized with the resources needed to take them to scale. Here’s a few key ones to consider: