The Environmental Justice Benefits of Increasing Solar Energy

Most people know that how we produce and consume energy is an environmental issue. But is it a moral issue?

Recently I was invited by Salem State's MassPIRG to talk about energy and climate change at their annual Kick-Off event. This year they are launching a campaign to convince Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker to commit the state to the goal of generating 20% of the state's energy from solar energy by 2025 and to also to pass a law lifting the caps on net metering (allowing excess energy produced by solar panels on residential and commercial buildings to "run the meter backward").

I decided to talk about the environmental justice benefits of solar energy.

Most of the electricity we use in Massachusetts is generated from the burning of natural gas - over 80% as of this year. This is a dramatic change in how Massachusetts used to generate most of its electricity only a decade ago. No doubt, this change is an improvement over reliance on other dirtier fuels, like coal and petroleum.

However, extracting natural gas, transporting it, and burning it all have significant environmental impacts. To the extent that we can replace natural gas with clean, renewable energies like solar energy, we can reduce or eliminate many of these environmental impacts.

But there is also a moral dimension to the issue of energy. Our reliance on natural gas is an environmental justice issue. The environmental benefits and burdens of natural gas are not distributed evenly or fairly. The benefits are simple: cheap, reliable electricity. These benefits are enjoyed by anyone who buys or sells electricity produced from natural gas. But the environmental burdens tend to be borne by other people, often people who are vulnerable and see less of the benefits: poor and marginalized communities, the very young and very old, people who are less healthy. Unlike the benefits, the burdens of natural gas fall on very specific places and very specific groups of people. So, there are environmental justice benefits to promoting cleaner forms of energy in Massachusetts, and these benefits happen at the local, regional, and even global level.

Local Scale EJ Issues

Within Massachusetts, there are about 57 large, fossil-fueled power plants throughout the state. Every year, they emit tens of thousands of tons of nitrogen oxides and sulfur oxides which are pollutants and components of smog and ground-level ozone, all of which are very bad for our health. They are especially bad for children, the very elderly, and people with asthma or other lung or heart diseases. But these power plants are not distributed evenly around the state. Rather, almost all of them are in or near lower income communities or communities of color - exactly the types of communities that are most vulnerable and least able to protect themselves. This is what we call a disproportionate burden or an environmental injustice. To the extent that we displace, or replace, these dirtier sources of energy with emissions-free sources, like solar energy, we reduce these disproportionate burdens.

Regional Scale EJ Issues

There are issues at the regional level as well. Although Massachusetts is very dependent on natural gas, Massachusetts produces no natural gas locally. All of our natural gas must be imported from other places. About 20% of our natural gas comes as liquefied natural gas (LNG) by ship from Algeria and Trinidad to a main terminal in Everett. The remaining 80% comes from wells in the southern US and off the coast of Nova Scotia in eastern Canada. The latter is transported by pipeline. In fact, within Massachusetts alone, there about 1,000 miles of interstate natural gas transmission pipelines. All of this natural gas infrastructure, from the wells to the pipelines to the ships and the terminals carry their own environmental risks and impacts. A lot of us are already quite aware of these impacts. The Northeast Energy Direct pipeline by Kinder Morgan, Inc. would bring in a proposed 180-mile pipeline, running from eastern New York to a transmission hub in the northeastern corner of Massachusetts. The pipeline would carry fracked gas from Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale Fields across northern Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire. There is a lot of regional opposition to this pipeline and the disruption and risk it would bring to the communities through which it would pass. However, there is even more concern nationally about the boom in fracking and the threats that this drilling technique poses for water quality and geological stability in the places where this drilling happens.

Global Scale EJ Issues

Globally our dependence on natural gas for electricity is significant as well. According to the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy, Massachusetts was the most energy efficient state in the US for the last 4 years, BUT Massachusetts residents still bear outsized responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions and the resulting climate change. At 10 metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO₂) per capita, we are more than twice as emissions intensive as the global average (4.8 metric tons per capita; although not as bad as US as whole - more than 3x!). About one fifth of our CO₂ emissions are due to electric power generation from fossil fuels in the state. This greenhouse gas (GHGs), as we know now, is the primary driver of global climate change. And we also know that the impacts of climate change fall hardest on the most vulnerable - poor and marginalized populations both here and abroad. As efficient as we are today, Americans bear a disproportionate responsibility for historic GHG emissions that are causing climate change today, and so we have larger than average moral responsibility to change our behavior and reduce our impact.

There is therefore both an environmental and a moral imperative to moving ourselves away from fossil fuels, like natural gas, and toward renewable energy sources, like solar energy.

Can a university, like a neighborhood, become gentrified?

Starting in fall 2015, Salem State will host (and rabidly patronize) a new Starbucks coffee shop on Central Campus. It will be situated in the building housing Salem State's newest residence hall, Viking Hall, which also opens its doors for the first time in fall 2015. We already had a Dunkin' Donuts on North Campus. But the contrast between the pre-existing Dunkin' Donuts and the newly arrived Starbucks seems like an uncanny parallel of larger changes.

It seems fitting that a Starbucks has landed where and when it has at Salem State. On Central Campus where the newest classroom buildings and dorms have been built, and indeed, in the newest building of them all - Viking Hall (go Vikings!). In addition to being the newest building, Viking Hall is also the first campus residence building to house a cafe. By contrast, Dunkin' Donuts sits within a building devoted primarily to classrooms and administrative offices - part of an older campus building and, maybe, an older orientation toward students and campus life.

Starbucks has also arrived at a curious transition point in Salem State's evolution. When Viking Hall fills with its 350 student residents, and when one adds this number to the number of students residing in other residence halls across the university, Salem State will house 40% of its full-time undergraduate student body. This number - 40% - marks a significant step in the direction of our President's stated goal of having 50% of our undergraduate students living on campus. It implies, at the very least, a significant move away from Salem State's long held identity as a commuter school (and all that implies). To be clear, Salem State is still mostly a commuter school, especially if you also count part-time students, graduate students, and non-matriculating students. But still. There is a lot of symbolism in this number, in this moment. And Starbucks is here to mark the occasion.

There is certainly a lot of class symbolism for both Dunkin' Donuts and Starbucks. The former is an old staple in New England, associated with blue collar, unpretentious simplicity. The latter, a relatively recent arrival from the 'left coast,' is associated with yuppies (do people still use this word?), non-fat soy lattes, and of course, pretentiousness.

A few years back, a student in my GIS class analyzed the distribution of Dunkin' Donuts and Starbucks coffee shops across the entirety of Massachusetts (over 1,000 stores in all!) and found - without much surprise - that Starbucks tended to be located in slightly wealthier communities than its native rival.

The other students nodded their heads knowingly at this revelation (somewhat smugly, I thought). What no one expected was that Starbucks also tended to be found in communities that are more racially diverse, while Dunkin' Donuts tended to be in communities that were whiter. Keep in mind that he only looked at where the stores are located, not who actually patronized them. But still. It seemed like a provocative finding. The apparent class distinction seemed to agree with their preconceptions (even though one does not discuss 'class' in polite company in America), but they did not know what to do with the race findings. Race is a confusing and uncomfortable topic for my students (as it is for most Americans).

Salem State's demographic trajectory seems to parallel that of Starbucks communities, seeming to confound easy interpretation. Since 2009, an increasing proportion of incoming students are first-time freshmen, rather than transfers (transfer students being roughly analogous to commuters). Over the same time period, the average GPA of our incoming students has gone up, from an average of 2.94 in 2009 (roughly a C+) to over 3.1 today (roughly a B-). And finally, the proportion of incoming students who identify as non-White has consistently gone up as well, from 21% in 2009 to over 30% today. Is this what gentrification looks like? I don't have data on the average wealth of incoming students, but I wonder. More importantly, gentrification implies displacement. If this is gentrification, who is being displaced?

Right before the fall 2015 semester began, I was on Central Campus for a meeting, and I bumped into a colleague I hadn't seen for a while. She now works in a different administrative department, helping students strategize on their finances so that they can afford to stay in school. As we stood in the shadow of the gleaming, new Viking Hall, and looked in through the blue-tinted windows of the soon-to-be-opened Starbucks at its base, she fumed. "What does this say to our students who are struggling to pay for school? Here I am, trying desperately to educate students about spending their money wisely, and then we put this in front of them. Imagine the pressure they're going to feel. It sends the wrong message."

After my meeting, I walked out with another colleague and we found ourselves once again in front of Viking Hall and its Starbucks. This colleague looked around admiringly, not only at Viking Hall and Starbucks, but at all the new buildings around it. "This campus is really looking beautiful now," he said. "The transformation is amazing. It's really changing the look of the school. It's like Salem State was this working class school, and now ..." "It's middle class," I finished for him. We laughed and then headed back to our offices on old North Campus.