This webinar series will go on all year, 2008, 2020 through 2021, and is supported by the community engagement initiative, the Biden schooled institute for public administration, the officer diversity and inclusion, the Faculty Senate, African heritage who's hot caucus, and the University of Delaware anti-racism Initiative. My name is limit over B, and I am a professor in the Department of Theater, as well as one of the co-chairs for the new anti-racism initiative along with Allison Parker and TED davis. So the depth of George Floyd and injuring a Jacob Blake and many other African Americans who have been subjects of police violence have moved people of all races and ethnicities throughout the world to respond to these atrocities with determination that their deaths will mark the beginning of an n to the long and tragic history of racial injustice. And no Community Challenge is more critical now than securing equal justice. So during the 20-20-20, one academic year, so I mentioned the community engagement initiative along with our partners. Providing this programming and resources designed to hopefully provide some solutions to current racial inequities in our local and global communities. So the broad range of projects, we'll demonstrate the many ways that UD is collaborating and, and with community partners to create a more just and inclusive world. Our presentation today is titled environmental and energy injustice in 2020. Our speakers are Jeremy Firestone, school in marine science and policy. Monica Sanders, Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice. And Eric Ries departments Sociology and Criminal Justice. I'm please provide comments in the chat. There talk will take approximately 30 minutes and then we're going to leave 30 minutes for question and answers. So Eric Ries is an associate professor of sociology, criminal justice, a legal studies at the University of Delaware. He has a PhD in history and law from the University of Florida. And his research focuses on the history of Silver Rights lawyering in the 20th century and the intersection of civil rights and criminal justice litigation. For ten years, he was the member of the Board of Directors of the Delaware center for justice, serving as Vice President of the Board and chairperson of the policy and education committee. And I'm going to turn it over now to Eric and our panelists. Thanks Lynette. The the aisle from Standing Rock to Flint to Wilmington, Delaware, environmental justice movements have become an important force in US politics and society. Frequently these movements turn to the courts as a mechanism to bring about meaningful change. Today, we're fortunate to have two experts on environmental law and policy to help us understand this nexus between social activism and legal remedies for social injustice. Professor Jeremy Firestone holds his principal appointment in the School of Marine Science and Policy, a secondary appointment in legal studies, and is the director of the University of Delaware Interdisciplinary Center for Research in when. He teaches courses in renewable energies, climate law and ocean and coastal law is written on the legal and cultural rights of American Indian wailing and on the emergence of indigenous peoples in international and comparative environmental law. Part of obtaining this PhD, who was a lawyer for the United States Environmental Protection Agency in Boston, lawyer for the state of Michigan, where he practice environmental, natural resources and energy Law. Professor Monica Sanders is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice. And a former senior counsel for the international response for an international response and programs at the American Red Cross. During her time as a committee counsel in the House of Representatives, she led an investigation into official misconduct at fema and the Department of Homeland Security and the Environmental Protection Agency. She also hosts a podcast about equity, inclusion and under-represented voices called amplify this, which I highly recommend. So thank you both for being here. Thank you. As, as, as Lynette over B said, we're going to have a discussion here. I'm going to moderate a discussion between Jeremy and Monica about about issues related to environmental justice. As, as you listen, please feel free to enter any comments into the chat and zoom. And we will also end with a question and answer session from the audience. And so if you have direct questions for Professor Firestone or professor standards, please, please enter them there. And you can continue to enter your questions in chat and comments in the chat throughout this presentation. So I'll, let's start by defining environmental justice. The term environmental justice appears frequently in the public vernacular, but it has a specific origin story. Can you explain how the environmental justice movement began and, and what it actually means, what environmental justice actually refers to. One of his di Jamie, there's actually two stories that I think we should start with, why uncannily, Right? Yeah. So it really began sort of spontaneously in 1982 in Warren County, North Carolina. It really grew organically from a, a sustained protest about the siting of a hazardous waste landfill in a predominantly African-American community? It was cited, it was selected to accept. Pc contaminated soil that had been indiscriminately dispose the long state highways. And the state chose to silence County, not necessarily with even it wasn't that the PCBs were dumped along roads in Warren County, but they decided to side it there. And it as you can see here, it looks what we're seeing today. Looks a lot like what we saw back in Warren County in 1982. With people protesting nonviolently. Really to the point where laying their bodies in the road in order to, to stop the truck shrunk from coming through. That really sort of quintessential nonviolent civil disobedience. The b, certainly in, in, in, in Warren County. It really started as a, as a social movement. In the social movement is probably what people more, more know about. But there's also a legal movements. Social movements can often be supported by, by law. And here we're really talking about two different aspects. One distributive justice and the other dihedral justice. So distributive justice were focused on outcomes. And that communities of color, low-income communities in Indian nations shouldn't be subjected to disproportionate burdens in should share the benefits as well. And then the other portion, the procedural justice, we're talking about meaningful involvement in equal access to environmental decision-making. So earlier today, I went on to that Denmark, the State Department of Natural Resources, environment, to control their website to see what was going on, environmental justice? And the answer is not much. Although they did, to their credit, hold a workshop back in 2019. And they had to really, I thought, revealing slides one on what people view communication was like and what than they wanted communication to be. So they described it. This inconsistent, lacking, distrustful, dismissive, and incomplete in what they were before was transparent, collaborative, consistent, honest, open, informed in meaningful. And so that, that net gets yet. They also look more on the, on the sensitive side for something in gen Rex mission statement, I would say we probably want even will be the mission statement to rules that set forth notions of environmental justice. And so environmental justice has primarily come up around three different areas. One is siting of industrial facilities and as you'll see, a lot has recently focused on pipelines. These Carl, collectively referred to as Lulu's or locally unwanted land uses. Then the provision of clean air and clean water in Flint case really touches as deeply on the issue of clean water and then enforcement of environmental laws as well. So that bad actors should be equally enforced regardless of humidity they work in. So, so thanks. Yeah, so I just want to, to add to that because Jerry made a wonderful point about how social movements can become legal movements. And what's so fascinating about Warren County is that leading up to the court case, some important policy and regulatory events happened as well. Gao took on a review of those sites. And it found that not only was PCB being disproportionately targeted to this Arab American community in Warren County, North Carolina. It found similar activities in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee. I looked at a 2 thousand Census report, has said that 60% of African-Americans live in ten states. And it's all of those states plus New York in Louisiana. So there's no mystery when we start talking about disproportionate impacts. What's important about that is, is a GAO has continued to study those regions and look at how communities are chosen for certain kinds of land use. And we find that African-Americans are at least 20, 26% of the population and all of these kinds of communities. But three out of five are chosen for this kind of activity. We move on. I just wanted to highlight, you know, we want to make the connection between some of the things that are happening today. And I love those photos jeremy shows so that we can visually see what the people who came before us left us in terms of a heritage and how to do this civil disobedience is so needed right now. But an important figure in the environmental justice movement is Robert Bullard. And we talk about how these things kind of come up spontaneously. Dr. bullet is a professor at Texas Southern University. And his interest or his fall into this movement actually happened in 1979. His wife was bringing one of the first cases related to environmental issues under civil rights law. And that's what sparked his interests in environmental discrimination. He wrote this book, dumping in Dixie, Race class and environmental quality is still one of the preeminent studies about EJ and racism. And so as we contextualize his talk and the larger issues that are happening, I think is important to hold. This statement of his in mind is an environmental justice is a natural convergence of the civil rights and environmental movements of the sixties. And that sitting in this moment that convergence is more important is ever. So as we go through these things, I want to continue to highlight that we're in a moment right now where it seems like we're having a reckoning with a lot of different things, but we're actually taking on the mantle of a lot of different things that have been left dope ready to be revisited in some ways, particularly when we're talking about environmental justice. It seems to me as if the, the synthesis of those things when you're looking at climate change, when you're looking at issues related to indigenous populations, to black populations, to communities of color so that these things continue to exist. I was wondering if you could, if you could talk about some of the challenges to environmental justice movements broadly and to the legal, the legal actions of these movements. Specifically, both both in the pass band and as you say, Monica, currently, What's 2020 has been the year that just keeps giving us gift after gift and case study after case study. We've got a couple of wonderful ones that are in the slide deck. But of course I know it's made. The news is that in January, the current administration talked about the National Environmental Policy Act and that the review time would be decreased as would the number of projects that would be subject to this type of review. And then to add a significant amount of poignancy to it in July of 2020 on the 50th anniversary of set Act. That was final estimate law. What that does and we'll talk about this more later, is it makes it more difficult communities to challenge different kinds of activities under that particular long. But what I find even more disturbing than that, and I took a little look around the internet as I was preparing for this is the amount of regulations that have something to do with either emissions, effluents, greenhouse gases, chemical storage that have been rolled back, the disproportionally impact communities of color AT different roles at last count, but harbors energy and environmental law program actually has a regulation tracker so you can watch. So the challenges are significant and they are increasing moment by moment. Or are these recent challenges? So these, are these peculiar to the Trump administration? Or are there had there had been had been impediments to to change in the past. These are recent and now I actually put this link and chat for the benefit of everyone that Washington was as his morbidly curious as I am would like to see how many are being challenged. Some as late as a couple of weeks ago. So they are recent and this amount now often we have regulations that or roll back. What's unusual about this administration is the lack of following what we call notice and comment procedure. Expedited rulemaking is something that we don't typically do in this amount and this order in the society. I'm so what notice and comment means for people who aren't familiar and the audience is that interested parties have an opportunity to make comments, even critiques on agency regulations. It's a way of making sure that the Executive Branch still is representative of the people in the broad constitutional sense. Normally what happens in a rule-making is it's posted. You had a certain amount of time to comment and then it goes through review and the agency and that is published was happening here is you're saying expedited review. Sometimes it's short and comment period or none at all. And then his review by the agency, if at all, and then it's brought into law effectively. And so that's the kind of thing that we're looking at. That's what that project tracker is doing. So little bit off topic, but in reference to nepa being rolled back a lot of time, that is, some regulations allow certain activities that happen if there is no regulatory boundary. So I need a posting queue and again, I'm excuse me, I will do that. Okay, so that's the grading that make up an app. So it sounds like, like translating communities call for justice into legal action requires median some, some specific thresholds. And I was wondering if you could, could discuss some of the, some of the legal instruments that, that support environmental justice and, and set the parameters for its use. Was certainly President Clinton's executive order is, is key because it's binding on all federal agencies. And as you can see on the screen, each federal agency is required to sort of inculcate this into their mission, but also critically to identify disproportionate and high in adverse human health or environmental effects. So under the civil rights laws, the sand of all case came in about seven years later in 2001, which basically said, under the Civil Rights Act, you have to show discriminatory intent in and sort of what's key here. And what's sort of evolved in environmental justice is that you only have to show disparate impact. Now, there's still some some issues there with disparate impact that that that was sort of a real key aspect. Monica talked about nepa. Nepa surely are sort of bedrock law. It's really only lie ever knew that took effect on January one of a year. And it it's it has a lot of advantages. It, but it's not, it doesn't do all that we, all we want. And part of the reason it doesn't do all that we want is this just process-oriented. So it doesn't prohibit unwise action, but agencies can't put a blind or to, to the effects of their actions either stop. There. Now required in the context of nepa. And there was ultimately a 990s seven and integration of nepa and the Clinton exact border on e j, which gave guidance and agencies when they're approving an action or issuing a permit or license or undertaking in action on how to incorporate EJ concerns into the nepa analysis. In there. Again, much focusses on disparate. Impacts. I think also it's quite important because of what Monica just said about some of the Trump rollbacks is that one of the touchstones is also cumulative impacts. And what that means that the Trump administration did. Interestingly, there are nepa rules came in effect on 911 of this year. And they removed the concept of cumulative impacts and they removed the concept of indirect effects. In indirect effects could include not just health effects, but economic effects and other secondary effects that that sighting of a facility could have on the community. And they revised the definition of major federal actions so as to eliminate from full environmental review a whole number of environ of smaller actions even if the effects might be significance. And so I'm I don't believe that that I'm not sure that the nepa law has rules have been challenged yet, but we certainly would expect robust challenge to those rules. And then we'll have to see how things play out after the election. Both because of the Congressional Review Act, which allows review regulations that happened late in administration and because we may have a new administration as well. So what you're saying is that even though environmental impacts often, often take years to manifest themselves, the the changes and how NAEP is carried out that they have to show pretty much immediate and direct impacts for regulation to be promoted. I don't know that they will have to show me it impacts, but they're going to have to show direct impacts. And as we'll see when we look at some of these cases, the cumulative impacts if we're talking about Cancer Alley or Albany, Georgia where we tend to these facilities tend to be cited co extensively with one another very close to one another. And so the cumulative impacts can quite rate. And so if you don't look at it but have environmental burden on, on individuals. But if the incremental burden that each individual project has, then you, you lose a lot of the flavor and you really lose a lot of the context for the kinds of situations that are being asked to live with. So, so statutes and administrative regulations are kind of abstract and technical sub's subs. So can you provide some examples, some concrete examples about how these tools are part of the practice. So that sort of five cases, I guess we're going to talk about them pretty quickly. So we have some time for Q and a and the first queue, all the Standing Rock Sioux tribe or both nepa cases, they come to different results. And as you'll see. A lot of these cases, there's a series of three of the five cases, but I would say are relatively recent, sort of 2017202020. So some of them began during the end of the Obama administration, but things have certainly picked up during the Trump administration. The first one here is, you know, in, in Albany, Georgia. It has is as you can see, several 100 hazardous waste facility, 78 air polluting facilities, toxic polluting facility, 16 water polluting facilities. And most of this pipeline, you can see 84% of this entire pipeline. It really crosses through environmental justice communities. As we'll see, a lot of the newer action actually has been around pipelines. I think it's been an area where we're really seeing a strong convergence between the traditional environmental community focused around climate change. And that the justice community, civil rights community focused around environmental wrongs and injustice. This and I think that's part of it as well. Why we're we're we're seeing all these cases. So in this case, they ultimately were not successful. And this shows you wouldn't, nepa doesn't, isn't quite as strong as it as we might like it to be. In this case, they compared it when you do an IEP and analysis, you require to look at alternatives. But the alternatives can be fairly narrow. And in this case, all the alternatives other than not taking any action at all were pretty narrow. The all impacted ij's entities to have a fair bit. And so this particular one didn't look so much worse than any of the others. And the court said, all you really as long as you go through this analysis, again, it it protects completely uninformed action, but not necessarily unwise. And the court ended by saying nepa requires nothing more. So that was a little disheartening that the Standing Rock Sioux case though, shows that you have to do something. So there's a large reservoir. It spans I don't know if it's maybe 60 miles, 6070 miles. Both the Standing Rock in the Cheyenne River, sue. And they wanted it to two seminal to build a pipeline to transport oil from north from in North Dakota across this reservoir. And here are some images and I think if you follow the news at all, you may have seen these protests were quite vibrant. Protest more 20162017. Where in down in the lower right here you see the encampment where people really stayed for a couple of months at a time. The Army Corps art. So the Army Corps has jurisdiction when you're going to cross navigable waterways. So they're the ones that issue permits. And as you can see, they they looked at a small half-mile radius, which allowed them the only well upstream. Whereas all the environmental impacts are going to be more likely downstream. And upstream census tract from 98% white, whereas the Standing Rock Reservation was 0.55 miles, but it was downstream. They did do a separate tribal EJ analysis. But this analysis really focused only on construction impacts. We didn't really look at spills and what the the the the the tribe was really concerned about the impacts of spills on underage drinking water, which would happen once the pipeline was operational. And here the court said, you know, here actually EPA weighed in and said, you really ought to look at these downstream it impacts. And so we had we had part of it is trying to to get different federal agencies to help you. And in particular, EPA is the one that can be potentially the most helpful. So EPA weight in and then the court was able then to conclude that the Army Corps, by not looking at these these operational impacts, the spill impacts, didn't fulfill its obligations under nepa. And so that sort of shows you that nepa stops you when you don't do anything or you don't do what you did adequately. But if you sort of check your boxes, you're generally going to be in pretty good shape. Monaco. And when I when I talk to people about these issues, inevitably someone brings up cancer clusters. Are there. I think you have some examples of how those are handled under these rules. Here. And I just want to say, and as we're talking about cancer clusters in and what comes to mind is we're going to talk about St. James Parish, Louisiana. And in his presentation, Jeremy talked about the climate change movement versus a social justice movement. Well, I don't think that the, the way that the world is operating now is going to give us too much luxury for those two to be separate much longer. Because for those of us who are watching the weather, storm number 26, we've run out of names now we're just on delta is heading towards part of Louisiana that includes Chemical Alley. This has about a 150 different chemical plants and refineries in that one particular area. And so when we talk about Chemical Alley and cancer clusters, it's a good way to illustrate the difference between a community knowing something and have anecdotal facts and qualitative understanding what's going on versus what the law requires for you to meet the standards of the regulations because for nepa you had to show cumulative impact. Now, we'll see in November when these came within one of these. We visited a tangential case, so this used the term significant. So we have to ask, and that is what communities need to prove, cumulative or as significant. And that's really difficult to discern when you're on the ground and you're not a lawyer who spends their time, you're pondering what language means. But when you're looking for is when you talk about cancer clusters now you at a place of having to prove causality between the incidences of cancer and environmental activity that's happening in your neighborhood. And that can be quite a long leap. It not necessarily falls under nepa. One of them might be a nepa activity, but the other one, which is a great segue into the next piece of the knife legal instrument we're going to talk about is this may be a Federal Tort Claims Act issue. It may be a Civil Rights Act issue and that's quoted the discernment that needs to go into the process of deciding when and for how you're going to bring a case under environmental justice. That right. And I want to move into our Q and a. So but I'd say probably one of the most most publicized kind of events in this area has been the Flint, Michigan situation, whether it's water supply. And I wonder if you could maybe talk about what the what were the problems in Flint, what were the legal issues raised and how are they may be different from some of these other cases Jeremy had been talking about. Are starting to lead. Jeremy is operating this live petaflops. We haven't read anything. And before I know, I want to make sure that we keep jamming this conversation is I want to underscore that Flint is not bays frighteningly, not that different from a lot of other deep urban areas. You have extreme lead and other heavy heavy metal and other types of contamination in aging, eroded, not well maintained and taking care of water infrastructure, which generally is a problem, but even more so when you're in an under-represented, often low taxpayers neglected community of color. The issue with friends, we had that in existence, but the question is whether in its understanding of the problem at the community had appropriate notice of the danger to them or if they were allowed to continue to consume this border. And there were some bureaucratic and some budgetary issues in there. Knowing how dangerous it was, particularly to the children in that community. And there's still lots of activity about it today, I saw on Twitter that a young lady who's named herself misplayed now has a business in water filtering, which just illustrates that while we're going to talk about yes, the water was so bad that you could smell it. Going back to this issue of what's anecdotal in what's known commonly in the community versus what meets the legal standard. Were the communications appropriate? And should there had been an emergency order. And you can see here in the timeline, there was two years between community awareness and agency action. To help you understand the lag time between what we know versus what we want to bring under the law. And I see we're looking at some photos here. I want to pause. You want to add some to Flint while we're looking at these pictures again? They look like wine. Any grant funds is a real hard one for me personally, I grew up about 40 miles south of Flint. I grew up drinking Detroit water from the Detroit water and sewer authority. It's some of the best water in the world. I mean, with the, Michigan is blessed with the great wakes and, and deaths. The water that Flint was on until the emergency manager came in and things ultimately gets switched off to save money. And it's also really heartbreaking for me because I work for the Michigan Attorney General's office and I represented the agencies that we're involved. And actually I even knew one of the persons that was involved. And from that that's on the state. So when the case really here, this particular case it dealing with EPA. But it'll Flint. You know, some of you may remember Flint back Michael Moore's documentary, Roger and Me. So Flint flit, at its heyday had about 200 thousand people living in the city was a quite vibrant GM. Emi was the, the, the most vibrant GM city, and now it has slightly less than a 100 thousand. And the same thing has happened really in the city of Detroit. There's sort of this abandonment of the inter ***** and the abandoned in the inner core. Leaps. Cities finance in great financial difficulty because you've got the same amount of, Oh, yeah. It costs you almost just as much to provide the same to provide the services to half as many people as it does to provide it to all to double the people. And so yeah, it's a really hard one for me. On the, on the positive side, they came up with really interesting legal strategy to use what's known as the Federal Tort Claims Act. So and and again, as we said, it's important to have substantive leavers in not just procedural ones like nepa and hear it in general, we go back to the king, could do no wrong. You can't sue the sovereign unless the sovereign gives you permission. So in this case with the Federal Tort Claims Act, the federal government says. You can see it lasts in tort, which is sort of the legal word for personal injury. You can you can sue us for personal injury for negligent. If a private person would've been liable in accordance with local state law. So it doesn't create a new cause of action. It just waves the government's immunity to suit and image again. Like many say, there's something called the Good Samaritan doctrine that you, we like to encourage good Samaritans, but we don't want good Samaritans who then don't exercise what would be considered to be reasonable or prudent care. And as we saw in the prior slide, EPA knew for almost two years was engaged in these communications. And the court said, yes, a failure to act, even though EPA wasn't primary, the state was primary. And delayed action can be unreasonable care under state law. And that the plaintiffs in this case, the citizens of Flint, had relied on EPA. The EPA undertook a duty that was really owed by the state and stepped into the state shoes. And that the risk of farm was increasing every day. And so this is a recent decision that came down this summer. And yet it doesn't stop things on the upside, which is sort of the other cases are trying to do. But one of the ways the law works is as did deterrent and we put in punishments to deter bad action. We do that through the criminal law and we do it through the civil law and what in, in our system in the US. One of the big ways we do it to deter bad actors is by tort claims. So people want to avoid those large damage claims in the future, we would hope that the next time EPA and the state will be better actors. So I want to give the audience time, test some questions. Please. Please enter. Any questions you might have about these issues in Q and a. I'm going to start with a question from Alexis, student here who asked, Do you have any advice for an environmental science major, but wants to get more involved with environmental injustice that she says she has learned about these issues in our classes. But how does she get more experience outside the classroom? Well, you have Alexis so many options because I said it before or, you know, a lot of us feel a certain level of intellectual and maybe emotional fatigue with 20-20. But the underside of the bright side of it is, is that because there's so many things going on, there's lots of opportunities to volunteer or get involved in different kinds of activities with respect to environmental justice. So as a UT Student, We have an institute right there on campus where you can do things. Last week, I watched the congressional hearing about environmental justice and racism. And there is a call to action coming from a number of youth groups. And I'm happy to post that as well so you can get involved in advocacy work, which is important. If you're interested in the law, which I hope that throughout this conversation perhaps Professor Firestone And I can convince you to consider a career in the law. You will want to think about doing an internship, which many are virtual now because of pandemics. So there's opportunities to connect with organizations outside of Delaware that you normally might not have the opportunity do. And to understand some of these legal levers that we've been talking about and consider that as part of your career path. What do you think, Jamie, what would you advise Alexis today? Well, I would say I offer a couple of case based courses. There are other k-space parses, so I have one on renewable energy and climate law. Students come from all walks of life, from the natural sciences, from the, from engineering, from the social sciences. And what they generally all have in common is they don't know much about the law. And so there's no reason to be afraid of these courses if you're a science student because we're all learning new things together. So I would say that, that would be one thing and the other. I would say, I think one important issue that could come out of that students could work for would be for Gen wreck to move to incorporate EJ into its mission and have rules. We didn't have time to discuss one case, the union Hill case. But we see that because the most states including Delaware are delegated lender, the Federal Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act. If you have robo AS state EJ laws, those to a certain extent get incorporated into all the federal clean air and clean water permits. And so I would like to CSS is state be moving moving forward on this front because right now we don't really, we don't have that lever in state law. Well, that's a that's such saved because a couple of questions that really do talk about the levels of law. And David Carter, who fears is a new counsel, Kelly, councilmen. I will read all of this question. But but essentially is asking, are we trying to address environmental justice at the wrong level of government? He points out that a lot of problems are related to local zoning as gatekeepers. And that in terms of addressing this problem slot, should we look more at the local level rather than federal or state? Particularly as asked throughout the society of Lulu's. Anyway, has a bell that we actually have a very good example in, nor it really wasn't in each case. But they wanted to cite a natural gas power plant on our campus. And members of the community really organized and put pressure on the local level. Now these, So I think, you know, you want to look at all of these these levers, whether it's at the municipal level, the zoning level. At the state level and the federal level, there can be what's known as preemption on some things on so that higher levels of government may have primacy over local sightings. But all of those are, are, are useful. And I think we shouldn't just focus on, on the federal level, but the state and the locals also valuable. So so thanks David for that question. Yeah, I would agree. And me having looked at this from the federal perspective, a lot of times the frustration is, is that people either seek remedy in federal courts or some sort of reconciliation or satisfaction with their federal elected official. And many times it's beyond the jurisdiction of the federal government or it's an overlapping jurisdiction, as we talked about earlier in the cases the state has primacy. So as someone was a state elected official is you're looking for ways that you can better serve your constituency. It is thinking about how you can impact things at that local and city planning level. How you can impact from a zoning perspective. How when you're doing things like tax incentives and inviting different kinds of businesses to make sure that we spread the wealth and her around. Because we tend at the local level to want to dedicate certain types of activities to certain kinds of neighborhoods. So things that should be happening at the local level is from a planning and organization perspective, not citing things and just one neighborhood, demographic. And so thinking about it from a city's zoning space as opposed to federal government. But I agree with Jeremy. At this point in time, we need to be looking at at all levels because there's different things that you can do that should be happening at every level of government. Just on the local level. There's not that much activity. And so in the city of New York, if you get, if you have several people who are engaged on an issue, you can you may be able to make something happen. So I spent three years on the city's planning commission than I was on the green building work group and the Sustainability Committee. So as an individual, you can have probably a lot more influence than you think on your, on your local community. Many of these issues are related to a question Steven asset and this is kind of at the intersection of law, policy, politics, and technology. I, Yes. But he states many fossil fuel power plants are located in low income communities. Residents get little benefit, suffer from the air and water degradation. And alternative model is community solar, where solar provides them AS lower cost and unreliable power. The community as part of the governance and as I say and distributing benefits. Can you comment on the community solar model for low-income communities to address energy, environmental justice. And then he says, We tried to get a bill through the Delaware legislature that defined and encourage community solar, but fail. Jamie sounds like an advocate. This test just transition a little bit. Yeah, I think there's two aspects here. 11 of the advantages of community solar is that it allows more people to participate and to have the benefits of solar. So not everyone owns a house. Not everyone can afford to put panels on your house. And so one of the bands at community solars that allows it allows individuals to own small, small portions. And so it has some justice Bennett there. I would also say, I do a lot of work done on wind and I'm hoping to do some work on solar and EVs. And, and we do know that nu o goals, whether it's panels on your house or community solar or large wind turbines, displace fossil fuel generation. And it roughly display. It changes over time. But it's roughly about half call half natural gas. Now, because of the continued shift to natural gas, it might be more natural gas than, than coal or but siting, wind, inciting solar is, has it justice implications? Precisely for the reasons you mentioned Steve, and that it results in turning off that not only, you know, so even shutting down but turning down, not running plants as often. And so it's just another reason. And I would think that more emphasis should be put on the human health benefits in the EJ benefits of renewables. And maybe that will allow us to get out of our, our climate conundrum. Because it's really very large portions of, of Americans support renewables. We get, we looked at, we did a study and we saw that people who live near wind turbines, even in Wyoming, would rather live near their wind project in neuro coal plants. People understand that living near these large power plants is not desirable. And so the, I think the energy transition, it is going to be a real important aspect. It's unfortunate that we're not moving more quickly. And hopefully we will we will in the near future. Yeah, I think I agree there should be a greater focus on health and human impacts, but we also think about transition because sometimes when you took an ad from a policy perspective, because I think we well covered in a law is that. People are located near these power plants. They suffer the health effects of it, but sometimes as a source of employment in these neighborhoods where there's a lot, a lot of financial flows. And so really doing an analysis of what is the financially economic benefit and how do we appropriately transition these people from not only living near these structures, but also for not being dependent on them for subsistence. So that brains and other pieces of this is like training people in how to do maintenance and operation on some of the clean energy technologies that we're talking about, which opens up another abundance of opportunities in these neighborhoods. So I would say not only the human health aspect of it, but let's also look at it from the point of view of economic inclusion. We transition these things out in the neighborhood, but also build that kind of agency, an interest in the neighborhood as well. So it's present, it's healthier for the neighborhood, but it's also offer some level of financial state sustainability as well. But one of the beauties of either a carbon tax or tradable permits is we with money? And one of the things that we can do with that money is to address the the and ensure we have addressed transition so that as Monica mentioned, There's retraining. There there's transition for communities that are economically dependent on these facilities and, or on coal mining. So we don't want to leave people behind, we want to move everybody forward. And so one of the, again, the beauty of having an income source that also moves us along the transition is that we can make sure that no one is left behind. So we're just about at the end of our time. I'd like to thank our speakers, mock Cassandras and Jeremy spire style for this interesting and enlightening talk. I think these last comments really began to get it The didn't begin but, but really emphasize how environmental justice issues are related to the, to the values that this speaker series is promoting. Particularly issues of equity and anti racism. And so I thank you very much for, for your participation and clear your contributions. I'm now going to turn this back over to Linda over B, who will preview our forthcoming speakers. Thank you so much. This was very interesting and informative presentation. Lots for us think about and ways that we can make changes. So we're moving now from environmental racism to health. And we notice here there's definitely a connection. There are Partnership for healthy communities is going to share structural racism as a fundamental cause of health inequities in Delaware, and that will be on November 12th. So thank you again for being a part of this presentation and we look forward to seeing you in future presentations where we will discuss ways that we can become more of an anti-racist institution. Thank you.
Environmental and energy (in)justice in 2020
From Liza MacFadyen November 16, 2020
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