Climate Change activists gathered to participate in a Fire Drill Fridays climate change protest in Washington, D.C. on Friday, December 6, 2019. (Photo: Aurora Samperio/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
In the fight against climate change, there is often a false assumption that we are all equally responsible for environmental devastation and that individual lifestyle changes alone are enough to avert ecological collapse.
In reality, the wealthiest 1 percent of people are responsible for more than double the emissions of the poorest 50 percent, and just 100 corporations are responsible for 71 percent of total global emissions.
We must rethink the energy infrastructure itself, forefronting those who have been most harmed by climate change and the energy industry: people of color, Black folks, Indigenous communities, and low-income people.
We are not going to recycle our way out of disaster. Collective action and drastic, sweeping policy changes are necessary to reverse the course we're on.
In her new book, Revolutionary Power: An Activist's Guide to the Energy Transition, professor of law and climate equity researcher Shalanda H. Baker emphasizes this need for urgency in combating climate change. But she also argues that, while replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy may extend Earth's habitable life, simply swapping out one kind of power for another will not end the underlying problem of environmental injustice.
To do that, Baker contends, we must rethink the energy infrastructure itself, forefronting those who have been most harmed by climate change and the energy industry: people of color, Black folks, Indigenous communities, and low-income people.
In late January, the U.S. Department of Energy announced that Baker will serve as the organization's first Deputy Director for Energy Justice, a position created by President Joe Biden to address systemic climate injustice. Her book amply sheds light on why that is a good idea.
Part personal narrative, part activist's guidebook, Revolutionary Power promotes what Baker calls a "justice first" approach to averting climate disaster. As she writes in the introduction, "We did not collectively share in the creation of this devastation, and we will not share equally in its impacts."
This idea undergirds the entire book. Interweaving her own lived experiences with case studies from around the United States, Baker illustrates the ways in which we are already feeling the effects of climate change unequally. She points to obvious examples like 2017 Hurricanes Maria and Harvey, which disproportionately impacted poor communities of color, and the 2018 California Camp Fire caused by Pacific Gas and Electric's dilapidated equipment, which burned the working class town of Paradise (where my grandmother lived) to the ground.
She also identifies instances of environmental oppression including "sacrifice zones." In oil-rich Port Arthur, Texas, for example, cancer is much more common than in other parts of the country, with a 2017 NAACP report indicating the cancer mortality rate for Black residents of the town is nearly 40 percent higher than the state average. Toxic waste dumps and oil pipelines are also frequently located near Indigenous lands, leaving Native people sick and their land, polluted.
As the 2016 documentary Blood on the Mountain explored, the West Virginia coal mining industry has literally blasted the tops of mountains, sickening white working class communities with black lung disease and poisoning their water. The list goes on.
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In the fight against climate change, there is often a false assumption that we are all equally responsible for environmental devastation and that individual lifestyle changes alone are enough to avert ecological collapse.
In reality, the wealthiest 1 percent of people are responsible for more than double the emissions of the poorest 50 percent, and just 100 corporations are responsible for 71 percent of total global emissions.
We must rethink the energy infrastructure itself, forefronting those who have been most harmed by climate change and the energy industry: people of color, Black folks, Indigenous communities, and low-income people.
We are not going to recycle our way out of disaster. Collective action and drastic, sweeping policy changes are necessary to reverse the course we're on.
In her new book, Revolutionary Power: An Activist's Guide to the Energy Transition, professor of law and climate equity researcher Shalanda H. Baker emphasizes this need for urgency in combating climate change. But she also argues that, while replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy may extend Earth's habitable life, simply swapping out one kind of power for another will not end the underlying problem of environmental injustice.
To do that, Baker contends, we must rethink the energy infrastructure itself, forefronting those who have been most harmed by climate change and the energy industry: people of color, Black folks, Indigenous communities, and low-income people.
In late January, the U.S. Department of Energy announced that Baker will serve as the organization's first Deputy Director for Energy Justice, a position created by President Joe Biden to address systemic climate injustice. Her book amply sheds light on why that is a good idea.
Part personal narrative, part activist's guidebook, Revolutionary Power promotes what Baker calls a "justice first" approach to averting climate disaster. As she writes in the introduction, "We did not collectively share in the creation of this devastation, and we will not share equally in its impacts."
This idea undergirds the entire book. Interweaving her own lived experiences with case studies from around the United States, Baker illustrates the ways in which we are already feeling the effects of climate change unequally. She points to obvious examples like 2017 Hurricanes Maria and Harvey, which disproportionately impacted poor communities of color, and the 2018 California Camp Fire caused by Pacific Gas and Electric's dilapidated equipment, which burned the working class town of Paradise (where my grandmother lived) to the ground.
She also identifies instances of environmental oppression including "sacrifice zones." In oil-rich Port Arthur, Texas, for example, cancer is much more common than in other parts of the country, with a 2017 NAACP report indicating the cancer mortality rate for Black residents of the town is nearly 40 percent higher than the state average. Toxic waste dumps and oil pipelines are also frequently located near Indigenous lands, leaving Native people sick and their land, polluted.
As the 2016 documentary Blood on the Mountain explored, the West Virginia coal mining industry has literally blasted the tops of mountains, sickening white working class communities with black lung disease and poisoning their water. The list goes on.
In the fight against climate change, there is often a false assumption that we are all equally responsible for environmental devastation and that individual lifestyle changes alone are enough to avert ecological collapse.
In reality, the wealthiest 1 percent of people are responsible for more than double the emissions of the poorest 50 percent, and just 100 corporations are responsible for 71 percent of total global emissions.
We must rethink the energy infrastructure itself, forefronting those who have been most harmed by climate change and the energy industry: people of color, Black folks, Indigenous communities, and low-income people.
We are not going to recycle our way out of disaster. Collective action and drastic, sweeping policy changes are necessary to reverse the course we're on.
In her new book, Revolutionary Power: An Activist's Guide to the Energy Transition, professor of law and climate equity researcher Shalanda H. Baker emphasizes this need for urgency in combating climate change. But she also argues that, while replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy may extend Earth's habitable life, simply swapping out one kind of power for another will not end the underlying problem of environmental injustice.
To do that, Baker contends, we must rethink the energy infrastructure itself, forefronting those who have been most harmed by climate change and the energy industry: people of color, Black folks, Indigenous communities, and low-income people.
In late January, the U.S. Department of Energy announced that Baker will serve as the organization's first Deputy Director for Energy Justice, a position created by President Joe Biden to address systemic climate injustice. Her book amply sheds light on why that is a good idea.
Part personal narrative, part activist's guidebook, Revolutionary Power promotes what Baker calls a "justice first" approach to averting climate disaster. As she writes in the introduction, "We did not collectively share in the creation of this devastation, and we will not share equally in its impacts."
This idea undergirds the entire book. Interweaving her own lived experiences with case studies from around the United States, Baker illustrates the ways in which we are already feeling the effects of climate change unequally. She points to obvious examples like 2017 Hurricanes Maria and Harvey, which disproportionately impacted poor communities of color, and the 2018 California Camp Fire caused by Pacific Gas and Electric's dilapidated equipment, which burned the working class town of Paradise (where my grandmother lived) to the ground.
She also identifies instances of environmental oppression including "sacrifice zones." In oil-rich Port Arthur, Texas, for example, cancer is much more common than in other parts of the country, with a 2017 NAACP report indicating the cancer mortality rate for Black residents of the town is nearly 40 percent higher than the state average. Toxic waste dumps and oil pipelines are also frequently located near Indigenous lands, leaving Native people sick and their land, polluted.
As the 2016 documentary Blood on the Mountain explored, the West Virginia coal mining industry has literally blasted the tops of mountains, sickening white working class communities with black lung disease and poisoning their water. The list goes on.