Expert Panel Weighs in on the Biden Infrastructure Plan

On Wednesday, July 28 the Dartmouth Energy Collaborative hosted a mini-symposium, "Clean Energy Infrastructure is Human Infrastructure," featuring a distinguished panel of experts from across disciplines to "dig in" to the Biden Administration's massive infrastructure proposal. As Amanda Graham, Irving Institute Academic Director explained, "We chose the title of today's event to call out the fact that infrastructure means more than roads and bridges and railways and power grids... it also includes people, the people who build and maintain those physical systems, and the people who are directly and indirectly affected by them."

The panel, which included experts on policy, labor, and equity and environmental justice, was moderated by two Irving Institute Advisory Board Members, Aimee Barnes '04, Founder and CEO of Hua Nani Partners and Dan Reicher '78, partner at the Climate Adaptive Infrastructure Fund and Senior Scholar at the Stanford Woods Institute. 

The panelists offered multi-faceted perspectives on the challenges and opportunities presented by the new infrastructure bill and the possibilities that such a massive investment could bring in terms of jobs, climate mitigation, and racial and socio-economic equity. 

For Sam Ricketts of the Center for American Progress, the need for action is urgent. "Climate change is here," he said. "Environmental injustice has been here. We're seeing people suffer the harms... These impacts demand a human response in the form of lawmaking and legislating and they demand pretty bold solutions." Ricketts is encouraged by a sea change in the legislative approach to these problems, however. "The solution set legislators are contemplating in the current proposal is different than it has been before in important and intersectional ways." He pointed to similar debates a decade ago which focused on making pollution more expensive. Today, he said, legislators are framing solutions to climate change in a more human-centric way, making investments in communities. 

For Peggy Shepard, Co-founder and Executive Director of WE ACT for Environmental Justice, the benefits of a human-centered infrastructure plan which explicitly seeks to remediate the past harms of a racially discriminatory system cannot be overstated. Shepard highlighted the long legacy of redlining, the practice of denying home loans to people in communities deemed 'risky' due to majority Black populations that was common in many urban areas in the first half of the 20th century.  Redlining led to wholesale disinvestment in non-white communities, poor planning that has created 'urban heat islands' in low-income and non-white neighborhoods through lack of trees and green space, and the siting of industry and energy generation plants that directly contribute to unhealthy air quality. "We find the death and illness from the effects of climate change are expected to rise even further; we know that in New York City, for instance 50% of the premature deaths from extreme heat are African Americans." For Shepard, an initiative like the Biden Administration's Justice 40 plan, which seeks to deliver 40 percent of the overall benefits from federal investments in climate and clean energy to disadvantaged communities, could not only improve the health and economic vitality of these communities, but help restore the cultural legacy of places that have suffered from underinvestment and decline.

Erin Mayfield, the new Hodgson Family Assistant Professor of Engineering at Dartmouth's Thayer School of Engineering, expanded on the inequitable impact of our infrastructure system. "Nearly 50% of greenhouse gas emissions are from large energy and industrial facilities and are emitted within communities where a majority share of people are either low income or non-white." That being said, this "also suggests that there are unprecedented opportunities to amend a lot of the existing and persistent public health and labor inequities through public and private investment in infrastructure and also thoughtful siting and planning of new infrastructure." Mayfield acknowledged that transitioning from a fossil-fuel-based energy infrastructure to renewable systems can create localized economic shocks, but observed

that such transitions can be carefully planned to offset job losses in regional industries like coal by creating new jobs in industries like solar and wind. "We could also preferentially site infrastructure in areas that have historically not had substantial employment opportunities" if these communities want to host this type of infrastructure. 

Jeanette Pablo, Resident Senior Fellow at the Clean Air Task Force, stressed the vastness of the response required to meet the current moment, saying, "to address climate change on the scale necessary to avoid the most serious impacts, we will need a massive, even unprecedented transformation in the way we produce and use energy. It's going to require the engaged support of every nation and every individual. It is not small." Yet there are barriers to this transformation. One example Pablo gave was a recent public webinar held by the Nuclear Regulatory Council. Because many of the people attending lived in areas without high-speed internet or lacked access to smart devices, the only way to participate in this meeting, which focused on issues relevant to their community, was by phone. This made it impossible for the audience members to view the informational slides presented during the meeting. So, for Pablo, other aspects of infrastructure investment, such as broadband access, are necessary to engage all communities in the enormous task of transitioning our energy infrastructure systems. 

All the participants agreed that this is a critical time to act bodly and decisively to ensure that the energy transition and the infrastructure that supports it benefit society as a whole.

You can view the event in full here.