Reality Check | ecoWURD | radio

Denise Abdul-Rahman, Regional Director for the NAACP’s Environment Justice Initiative in the Midwest and Plain States, joined ecoWURD on Reality Check with Charles Ellison to discuss how the NAACP has, in recent years, increased advocacy for environmental justice efforts and how that conversation has become more mainstream. She also discussed the need for persistent work towards the democratization of energy and pushing for more “community solar,” particularly in Black communities. There was also discussion of  “Affrilachia,” the cause of Black people who live and struggle in the Appalachians.

“Part of our plight as we look to change systems and infuse equity into them is looking at the history of the narrative of this work,” said Abdul-Rahman. “We look at Robert Bullard, Beverly Wright, Jacqui Patterson and others and how they’ve brought us to the point now where major influencers and policymakers are now presenting environmental justice as a major issue. It’s always been the people on the ground doing this work – but, if we have a bigger group of people joining in this work, we can expand the conversation and action. If we don’t have clean air, if we don’t have clean water, if we don’t have land to cultivate our food, we basically don’t have nothing. It’s an urgency of now to work on this issue.”

“I see community solar as a way for us to move into energy democracy. There are two frames in which we can do this: 1) tie this to the utilities grid and/or 2) for us to think of community-owned solar. Everyone should have access to energy, no one should be freezing in the cold or dying of heat stroke.”

What’s the current state of existing community solar programs at the moment? There are four states – Colorado, New York, Minnesota and Massachusetts that have implemented and are gradually rolling out statewide community solar programs, according to the Institute for Local Self-Reliance’s “National Community Solar Programs Tracker” 2021 Report …

According to ILSR’s national “States of Distributed Solar Report 2020” the first three quarters of 2020 saw the most new utility-scale solar ever installed in those respective quarters, as compared to previous years, despite the pandemic …