Short take: Energy transitions - on whose terms?
An interview with US Congresswoman Marie Gluesenkamp Perez really stayed with me after first listening to it.
She spoke about the way that clean energy and energy efficiency measures are often framed in ways that have little to no connection with the lives of communities they are being imposed on, ignoring local knowledge and practice and in turn inspiring inevitable push-back.
“There’s been this obsession with technology and whatever lobbyist is in your office shilling triple-glazed, argon-filled windows. And a blindness to the actual skilled trades of: You know what? If you put the long side of your house facing south, you put an eave on it — if you put a skirt around a mobile home — a metal sheet that connects the bottom of the mobile home to the ground — that creates an air gap and saves a [expletive] ton of energy. And now those folks, a lot of whom are on fixed income living in a mobile home, their energy bill just went way down…
We ignored a lot of the things that we know in the trades are the low-hanging fruit of energy efficiency and utility and a progressive tax system. That’s one of the things that bothers me. The electric vehicle tax credits, the heat-pump tax credits — those were profoundly regressive tax strategies.”
Yet shifts are underway in many contexts that finally center the fact that climate change is a deeply human experience (and like all human experience, full of inequities), and that efforts to address it have to take that into account.
Five recent examples:
Here in NYC, the city administration is saying that while the state is trying to delay its climate targets on an affordability basis, it sees climate action in the opposite way - that done right, it will bring down energy costs and improve affordability.
The city’s new climate and environmental justice chief Louise Yeung has said:
“The cost of living is increasingly difficult for New Yorkers to remain in the city and to have a good quality of life. Embedded in that is also the amount of money that we are paying for our utility bills, the amount of money that we are spending to rebuild after it floods, and there’s so many ways that our climate solutions can be part of our economic justice. Climate solutions can be part of our affordability.”
On a personal note: installing solar panels on our roof last year was a way more complicated and long process than it needed to be, but now that they’re up the drastically reduced electricity bills and seeing that our grid dependence is around 2% on average is pretty awesome.
In Europe, a new regional program hones in on the urgency of access to affordable housing, and the fact that climate measures have to come in tandem with affordability. In parallel the “TASH” initiative (Taskforce on Affordable and Sustainable Housing) - which I sowed the seeds for in its early days - spotlights what that means for financing.
In their new report “Living at the crossroads: affordability, climate and real estate investment” the TASH coalition lifts up the fact that “most institutional capital in European housing remains concentrated in short-term, asset-level risk management models that can exacerbate un-affordability, poor climate outcomes and market volatility.” They call for policy that supports scaled investment in innovative models, currently at the fringes, that are aligned with housing rights and with climate goals.
In Antigua, government leaders recognized that an energy and resilience shift - and securing the financing to make it happen - was going to involve bringing along multiple sectors, from utility companies, to residents, to builders. As a speaker on the recent built environment course I taught put it, that work is complex, takes time, and crucially it involves finding language that lands with the actors you need to move.
And then of course, the insanity that has been the US and Israel’s war on Iran and Lebanon has made the risks of fossil fuel dependence - even putting climate impacts aside - clearer than ever.
Later this month, 85 countries are gathering in Santa Marta, on the Caribbean coast of Colombia, for the First International Conference on the Just Transition Away from Fossil Fuels. Following petrostates’ sabotaging of fossil fuel-phase-out commitments at Cop30, Brazil initiated this process that seeks to make change happen faster than politically-negotiated texts by moving in numbers and harnessing market forces.
And in an example of an economic and political dynamic happening across the continent and beyond, China is currently massively scaling up solar panel exports to Cuba as it grapples with sweeping blackouts exacerbated by the oil blockade.
It’s close to impossible to be optimistic these days without sounding willfully naive. But it’s by joining the dots and seeing the patterns between shifts that are happening in multiple, diverse contexts that the space for alternative ways forward begins to expand dramatically.