By Adam Morris, JD ’24
This article was written in response to a seminar given by Michael Dorsey, Chair and Director, Rob and Melani Walton Sustainability Solutions Service Program at Arizona State University, in an EDGE Seminar at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business in Fall 2023. This article voices one student’s perspective and does not necessarily represent the views of either Duke University or the seminar speaker.
Recently, the EDGE Seminar hosted Michael Dorsey, a professor at Arizona State University and one of the founders of BOSS: Black Owners of Solar Services) Dorsey gave us an overview of the BOSS program—a cluster of business owners, financiers, attorneys, and engineers (among others) who are working together to help the energy transition and to do it in a way that is equitable to all communities. Dorsey also discussed how, particularly in the U.S., there has been a huge increase in investments in solar and wind energy. And, there is some regulatory work that exists to try to make this work done equitably. Specifically, Executive Order 14008 states that investments in clean energy must flow to disadvantaged communities. Despite this, it is also true, as Dorsey stated that, “we are not all in the climate crisis equally.”
During a previous discussion in the EDGE Seminar, I posed the question of how climate solutions can take into account all the communities disproportionately affected by climate change, including those who are suffering and will suffer the worse harms as the planet warms, even if we do ultimately find solutions to climate change. Dorsey began to answer that question in the seminar, but I still wonder: is the climate movement ignoring the tough questions in the interest of technology innovation and solving of the crisis?
The climate movement’s tunnel vision
On a recent episode of the podcast Outrage and Optimism, journalist Amy Westervelt discussed how the climate movement has trouble grappling with harder societal questions. Westervelt shared, there’s “this thing that the climate movement does a lot, where it just likes to pretend that more complicated aspects of issues don’t exist. Like, let’s pretend racism doesn’t exist and then we don’t have to engage with it.”1 I think this is a really important point of criticism of the climate movement. While we are so focused on solving this issue—because we must solve it—we can forget about messier aspects. Many exciting clean energy initiatives have tremendous downsides that impact marginalized communities. For example, marginalized groups tend to live closer to nuclear power plants, meaning they are more susceptible to potential nuclear disaster, even if nuclear power has some enormous advantages.2
Westervelt goes on in the podcast to state that many “pretend there is no downside to an industrial wind farm in an area that people have lived in for a long time that’s been very peaceful and uninterrupted…. Like, actually, some industrial scale-renewable projects might be quite inconvenient for some people.”3 Westervelt is right. Specifically with wind energy, many indigenous communities are being forced to fight for their ancestral rights to land that corporations want to build wind farms on.4 In Africa, a study revealed “widespread child labor, the subjugation of ethnic minorities, toxic pollution, biodiversity loss, and gender inequality” resulting from renewable technology development around mining waste and solar energy.5 These are huge issues that, frankly, are sometimes ignored by the well-funded entrepreneurs and innovators of renewable technologies.
Yet, renewable energy technologies can help many of these very same communities
Westervelt believes we cannot continue to ignore these problems: “I don’t know why we can’t engage with these issues and have the messy conversations. I think it tends to engender more faith in the climate policies, if people actually engage with the messy stuff.”6 Westervelt is right, but the conversation to be had is tricky. As Dorsey discussed, the IRA has done a good job of trying to help address some of these problems. For example, the IRA provides specific incentives to “energy communities,” which are communities “historically sited near environmentally harmful industries like coal mining or oil extraction.”7 Not surprisingly, these communities are often minority and low socioeconomic status. However, the communities need to know how to take advantage of these opportunities—and more initiatives such like BOSS are needed to ensure these communities take full advantage.
More broadly, it has been posited that “green jobs” will be high paying and help bring communities out of poverty. However, as Darren Walker points out in a recent commentary in Fortune, “working people are caught between the rapid expansion of green jobs and the halting progress of worker protections in fields from electric vehicle manufacturing to clean energy installation.”8
Walker suggests that climate leaders must also be zealous advocates for labor rights, and fight for regulations that promote economic-mobility for all.9 While Walker is absolutely correct, many in the climate movement likely still will prefer not to talk about these broader societal issues that arise from needed solutions to climate change.
What Now?
Organizations like BOSS are extremely important in just making the broader climate movement recognize that it cannot ignore the larger societal and environmental justice issues that arise around climate solutions. For the movement to try to benefit all equally, it must not ignore the tough questions, and instead actually engage with all parts of the issues.
Ultimately, I believe that Westervelt is correct that actually engaging with these issues will lead to more faith and belief in the climate movement as a whole. We need as many people buying in as possible, and to do so, we cannot ignore the tough questions.
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Footnotes:
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