A panel of women discussed promoting equitable access to clean energy and a sustainable environment Thursday at the annual summer meeting of New England Women in Energy and the Environment (NEWIEE). More than 200 women gathered in cyberspace for the event.

“Of course, I regret that we can’t meet in person as in prior years, but it’s wonderful to have so many participants at today’s discussion of an important topic,” said NEWIEE President Jacquie Ashmore, director of Boston University’s Institute for Sustainable Energy.

“A year ago, the NEWIEE board of directors chose increasing racial diversity in the NEWIEE community, and ultimately in the New England energy and environment industries more broadly, as our top priority,” Ashmore said. “Today, almost two months after the murder of George Floyd, NEWIEE has redoubled its commitment to addressing systemic racism and its impacts in our community.”

Following is some of what we heard at the event.

Turning Point

“I actually think the last several months will prove to be a turning point in our efforts around climate justice and environmental justice, and indeed, in the overall thrust and trajectory of the climate and clean-energy movement,” said FirstLight Power CEO Alicia Barton, who previously served as CEO of the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority and the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center.

The intersection of the COVID-19 pandemic, calls for racial justice and the ongoing climate crisis have laid bare the inequalities that result and continue to result in unfair and unjust outcomes for many people, Barton said.

“Now is the time to say that enough is enough,” she said.

Besides reforming the criminal justice system, Barton recommended that the region reconsider its approach to energy and environmental policy.

“Environmental justice, racial justice and equitable access to clean energy are topics that have been ancillary to the overall conversation rather than a driver of the conversation, but I do think that with recent events and because of conversations like the one we’re having today, that is changing and will change going forward,” Barton said.

What’s at stake in this conversation? she asked.

“First, we have known for a long time that pollution is not equitably distributed in the United States,” Barton said. “African-Americans, although they’re a minority of the U.S. population, are 75% more likely than white Americans to live in a community that’s adjacent to sources of pollution.”

Second, air pollution directly increases a person’s likelihood of getting severely sick or dying from COVID-19, she said.

“A recent study out of Harvard found that someone who lived in an area of high particulate matter pollution is 15% more likely to die from COVID-19 than an individual who has not been exposed historically to that pollution,” Barton said. “Our energy choices are creating lethally unfair outcomes for many Americans, and we have to do better moving forward.”

Barton noted that New York’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA) passed last July “was the first major climate bill in the country to put climate, justice and environmental justice front and center. It requires under the law that at least 35% of the benefits of state investments in climate solutions go directly to disadvantaged communities.”

She said she was pleased to see her former colleagues at NYSERDA issue the biggest clean energy solicitation in U.S. history on July 21.

“If you didn’t notice, [as] part of that effort, the request for proposals specifically requires bidders to prioritize job-creation opportunities for disadvantaged populations. That’s really transformative and something that should be replicated elsewhere,” Barton said. (See related story, NY Announces 4 GW in Clean Energy RFPs.)

She also said that NYSERDA for several years has been including local content and labor provisions in the state’s renewable energy contracts, such as requiring developers to pay workers the prevailing wage. (See New York Plans for Wind Energy, Related Jobs.)

The CLCPA set a target of 6,000 MW of solar by 2025, “and earlier this year, the Public Service Commission approved NYSERDA’s request to increase funding for low-income access to solar and disadvantaged community access to solar 20-fold from what we had done historically,” Barton said.

The NY-Sun initiative was part of the Clean Energy Fund created by the commission in 2016, which established utility collections from ratepayers to support the overall $960 million funding requirement. (See NYPSC Launches Grid Study, Extends Solar Funding.)

Environmental Warriors

Nancy Seidman, senior adviser at the Regulatory Assistance Project, introduced and moderated the panel. Seidman was a co-author of a study released in April, “Energy Infrastructure: Sources of Inequities and Policy Solutions for Improving Community Health and Wellbeing.”

“The report documents current inequities in our energy infrastructure: processes, structures and policies that affect low-income and communities of color, including tribes, with a focus on rural areas,” Seidman said.

For example, the report looks at arrearage-management programs to prevent cutoffs in utility service, which is especially important because of job losses from the coronavirus pandemic, she said.

“The timing for releasing our report was good in some respects,” Seidman said. “With COVID and the social unrest of the past few months, I and likely you have all been confronting how inequitable the U.S. really is.”

Mariella Puerto is co-director for climate at the Barr Foundation in Boston, which grants $95 million per year to programs in the arts, climate and education.

“The choices I’ve made have been grounded in equity and justice from the beginning, which was a combination of my love of nature and the environment while I was growing up in Malaysia,” Puerto said.

Training as a police cadet in the rainforests of Malaysia left her awestruck at the jungle’s intense beauty. And a childhood friend’s death from exposure to pesticides pushed her to protect the environment, she said.

“This really opened my eyes to the dangers of toxic chemicals and environmental injustices,” Puerto said. “I knew early on that I wanted to be an environmental warrior, fighting for people and the planet.”

Shalanda Baker, professor of law, public policy and urban affairs at the Northeastern University School of Law and co-director of the Initiative for Energy Justice, is author of “Revolutionary Power: An Activist’s Guide to the Energy Transition,” to be published in January by Island Press.

Baker works with other people of color to make sure that energy policy honors equity and social justice.

“In many ways, we are beginning to repeat the mistakes of the fossil fuel system in transitioning to clean energy,” Baker said.

In Oaxaca, Mexico, for example, Baker met indigenous peoples fighting against large-scale wind energy. The more she learned about those struggles, the more she realized that people were facing displacement, unfair contracts and unemployment from renewable energy development.

Later, while teaching law at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, “I had a front-row seat to that state’s energy transition. The state had just adopted a 100% renewable portfolio standard [and] was experimenting with community solar. We had maxed out rooftop solar in the state with the highest penetration rates in the country at 17%, and whenever I raised the question of equity or including voices of folks in the community in the energy policy conversation, I got looked at like I had two heads,” Baker said.

She brought the conversation back home by referring to New England having a number of leaders on the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy scorecard for states.

“Massachusetts [is] No. 1 on energy efficiency, but I guess the dirty little secret about the Massachusetts efficiency programs is that there’s a lot of room for improvement on serving low- and moderate-income renters, as well as people who are not English speakers,” Baker said. “There’s a whole swath of the population that we are not serving.”

Shubhada Kambli, sustainability coordinator at the city of Hartford’s Office of Sustainability, agreed with Baker, saying, “Our community is majority black and brown, with about 30% of residents in poverty. We have energy burdens in some households of about 33%, which means, basically, that some of our residents are paying up to a third of their household income towards energy bills. … For reference, you may know that above 12% is considered high.”

The Hartford city government looks at climate action in terms of social benefits, Kambli said.

She cited the Connecticut Green Bank as a leader in innovation. She also touted PosiGen Solar, which operates in Connecticut, New Jersey and Louisiana. “They are specifically focused on increasing access to solar in low- and moderate-income communities, and they have eliminated the credit score as a gatekeeping tool to determine what types of participants should be partnered with in solar development,” Kambli said.