[00:00:18] Speaker A: Welcome to Uptown Chats, a podcast where we share stories about environmental justice by and for everyday people. I'm your co host, Jarren, and I'm.
[00:00:26] Speaker B: Your other co host, Lonnie.
[00:00:27] Speaker A: And today we're excited to kick off the first episode in our mini series called wrong direction. Over the next three months, we'll be exploring the landscape of federal energy policy, including things like carbon capture and storage, and how they're working against the goals of climate and environmental justice. But before we get to that, Loni, can you read WEAC's mission statement?
[00:00:49] Speaker B: Absolutely. WEAC's mission is to build healthy communities by ensuring that people of color and or low income residents participate meaningfully in the creation of sound and fair environmental health and protection policies, policies and practices.
[00:01:01] Speaker A: Thank you. So, as I mentioned before, today we're going to start exploring what's going on with energy policy here in the United States, specifically at the federal level.
[00:01:10] Speaker B: Yeah, you may remember our previous episode on Energy justice with Stephen Rowntree from vote Solar, who gave us the phrase no drills, no bills.
[00:01:19] Speaker A: No drills, no bills, baby.
[00:01:21] Speaker B: Which is shorthand for getting off of fossil fuels. That's the no drills. And then having public owned utilities, which is the no bills part. And we talked a lot about that in the context of New York, but we're zooming out just a little bit to take a look at what's going on at the federal level.
[00:01:34] Speaker A: Yeah, there's a lot going on right now when it comes to energy policy in the United States. We got hydrogen, carbon capture and storage, or ccs, and even liquefied natural gas or Lng, which is always a mouthful. So, honestly, it can be pretty hard to make sense of all the stuff that's going on.
[00:01:51] Speaker B: Yeah, we work in this space every day, and we also barely know what's going on.
[00:01:55] Speaker A: Yes, all the acronyms, all the Alphabet soup, all the different colors of hydrogen. Don't even get me started.
[00:02:00] Speaker B: All the different agencies.
[00:02:01] Speaker A: Yes, all that. Over the next few months, this series is going to explore the impacts of the current us energy policy on individuals and environmental justice communities with the help of some very special guests. And our topics, again, will be hydrogen, carbon capture and storage, and liquefied natural gas, as well as cumulative impacts, which is really the sum of how all those things are impacting environmental justice communities.
[00:02:26] Speaker B: But today we have our first guest of the series, Anastasia Gordon, who's WEAC's federal policy director. She gives us a high level overview of the energy policy landscape at the federal level and how policy and spending decisions impact environmental justice communities, especially investments being made in untested and problematic energy systems.
[00:02:43] Speaker A: Absolutely. So I'm super excited. I feel like we've got a lot of interesting content to cover, and our interview with Anastasia is really great. So why don't we go ahead and jump right into that interview?
[00:02:53] Speaker B: Let's go.
[00:03:01] Speaker A: All right. Thank you so much for joining us, Anastasia. We're so happy to have you as our very first guest for this mini series, the wrong direction mini series. So before we get too far in, can you just give us a quick introduction for our listeners?
[00:03:13] Speaker C: Sure, no problem. Hi, everyone. I'm Anastasia Gordon. I'm the federal policy director within the federal policy office. That's a mouthful at react for environmental justice. As the federal policy director, I lead our team, our policy team around policy and legislation and regulatory actions around the power and transportation sector. So essentially ensuring that environmental policy around transportation and building electrification.
Energy is advanced in a way that incorporates environmental justice. So we're talking about clean energy, clean transportation, moving buildings towards electrification, as well as non fossil fuel appliances.
[00:04:06] Speaker A: Very important work. I cannot say that enough.
[00:04:09] Speaker B: I feel like every staff person that we have come through and try to explain what they do. It's always an interesting thing because there's so much that's going on in all of our portfolios of work. But I think you did a great job so far. I think you did the best so far.
[00:04:21] Speaker A: It was explaining just to kick us off. I think this will kind of set the stage for a lot of questions that we have for you. But can you just tell us at a high level what's going on in federal energy policy right now, just from your perspective, what are you seeing as kind of in the works?
[00:04:38] Speaker C: Yeah, definitely.
So luckily, we have a president currently who's made bold commitments towards climate action and also environmental justice commitments. So that's great. But at the same time, the administration has been approving projects like the Willow Project for oil drilling in Alaska and things of that nature. That seems very counterintuitive to tackling the climate crisis and environmental justice. So we're seeing things like more oil production, more natural gas being exported from our ports in the Gulf, but yet we're also seeing big investments in clean energy because of the inflation reduction acts and the bipartisan infrastructure bills that were passed in the previous years. So it's a kind of what people are calling an all of above approach, but in reality, their actions towards reducing climate emissions run counterintuitive to actually tackling the climate crisis because you can't have investments in clean energy. But at the same time, oil production and natural gas production is being ramped up. At the same time, it just does not work out. So we're also seeing a lot of dependence on what we're calling false climate solutions, essentially, technologies, techniques, methods that are meant to mitigate the climate crisis, but also they can have really serious health and safety impacts on communities on the front lines. So, for instance, carbon capture and storage. And as much as it's capturing carbon, the infrastructure that's needed for the transportation of that captured carbon and the geological storage of that carbon all have impacts. You know, carbon leaks. Storing carbon could also create earthquakes and things of that nature. Release of carbon causes asphyxiation, for instance. And we're not talking about risks that are equally distributed. We're talking about people, low income, black and brown tribal communities, who already deal with so many different forms of pollution and polluting infrastructure that have to deal with the realities of more risk that comes from these climate solutions that the administration is leaning on. So that's at a broad level, kind of what I've been seeing in the federal energy space.
[00:07:47] Speaker B: Yeah, definitely a lot going on there in the federal energy space as well. And I think a lot of the work that you do, there's, there's a lot involved there. There's politics, there's spending, there's agencies that are involved. Can you give us a little bit of a high level, kind of like an overview of who the key players are? I know I hear lots of terms like doe, ferc. I still don't know what FERC is or does, and I, for whatever reason, refuse to look it up. And then you have, or what that actually stands for, and then you have, like, two big, major spending bills that kind of has spurred some of this. So can you kind of go over a little bit of that landscape?
[00:08:19] Speaker C: Yes, definitely.
I'll take the easiest for me first, because that's the agency that I've been working on primarily with a cohort of great EJ folks looking to impact the EPA regulatory processes. So EPA, Environmental Protection Agency, pretty straightforward. Their mandate is to protect the environment, protect the health and well being of people.
The Environmental Protection Agency, they've been in a process of updating some rulemakings, partly because of the craziness that happened in the Trump administration and him rolling back some of key, some of the key environmental protections, like the Clean Air act, for instance, NEPA provisions, the National Environment Policy act. Then we have DOE, Department of Energy, also very straightforward. The Department of Energy, I would say, has now for the first time putting in place programs that were funded by the IRA and the infrastructure bill. Essentially, DOE is a demonstration research agency, primarily. So this, this moment where they have to get programs up and running is new to them. So they have some of the clean energy projects and grants that are coming out from those bills. For instance, home energy rebates. Actually, New York was the first one to launch that, and that came out of the IRA. And then lastly, your FERC that LJ does not want to look up. Well, FERC is really, you know, the lesser known entity here. It's an independent agency. It stands for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. They essentially, they regulate the interstate transmission of gas and electricity and oil. They also regulate liquefied natural gas. So LNG, as I mentioned before, they regulate the terminals and as well as natural gas pipelines. So you could imagine. You could imagine how they have such a big influence on the energy landscape of this nation, but yet not many people know of it. And so for weak, we've been really emphasizing that, again, they take into account some of the environmental justice considerations, climate impacts, as well as the impact of exporting liquefied natural gas to foreign countries and how that impacts domestic rate payers. So they also really control transmission. And we need more transmission for our movement towards renewable energy.
Without transmission and the transmission we need, we have a really outdated system across this country, then we really can't benefit from clean energy. We can't get clean energy on the grid, powering our homes, especially for black and brown communities that deserve access to clean energy. And we don't want the build out of transmission lines to also compound harms. You know, we already host so many polluting infrastructures, so we need to make sure that the build out of transmission, while facilitating the clean energy transition, does not impact. It's done in a just and equitable way, I would say. So.
Big overview. I hope I got all of it in there. But that's EPA, FERC and Doe.
[00:12:22] Speaker A: I feel like you nailed it.
Like Lonnie, always forget what Ferc stands for. And even trying to understand, like, all the things that they work on so, so much and, and all those, all the Alphabet soup that is the federal agencies that are working in this space. So I appreciate that. And I feel like you really set us up well in talking about the three different topics. The three. Three of the major topics that we'll be discussing in this mini series, which is Lng, liquefied natural gas, carbon capture and storage, or ccs, and also hydrogen in which we'll be talking about all the 30 things separately, kind of give us a little bit of a snapshot of why some of those energy sources are maybe challenging, problematic, counterintuitive to what we're trying to do in terms of addressing environmental justice and climate justice. And just for clarity's sake, I know you kind of mentioned it a little bit, but transmission, we're talking about those big power, those power lines essentially. Right. That are moving electricity from one place to another. Right? Correct.
And you already kind of touched on this a little bit. But just to get into it a little bit more, can you help us unpack why and how these decisions about supporting Lng, carbon capture and hydrogen, etcetera, why does that matter to the average person, like someone who is a homeowner or a renter and thinking about their energy bill and that sort of thing, how are these decisions maybe relevant to them and also to just environmental justice in general? You know, what are some of, like, I guess the really high level, again, trying to keep a high level. We'll get into more of the specifics in some of our later episodes. But just at a high level, why does it matter to folks on the ground these decisions at the federal level?
[00:14:05] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, really good question. And that's the issue with the federal landscape. It's like, how does it trickle down to the everyday person? Well, I hope I do it justice. So I think the way I'll approach this is look at the agency and then see how it would impact the everyday person, environmental justice communities in particular. So let's look at FERC. Like I said, FERC has never denied an LNG project based on environmental justice. And so that's why we're seeing, of course, also because of just historical discriminatory policies as well. We're seeing that these export terminals, new and proposed, new and expanded proposed projects are all going to again compound other polluting infrastructure on people in the Gulf. Like I mentioned, Texas, Louisiana, they're just getting a proliferation of fossil fuel infrastructure that are impacting them.
Louisiana has the cancer alley on a very real basis, the decisions to export gas.
While it is that we're helping our european counterparts, while it is that where getting a source of income, it contributes to GDP, it also compounds, as I mentioned, the health risks of cancer, the risk of explosions and gas leaks and all of those things in communities that are already being impacted by many different sorts of polluting infrastructure.
On a very real level, their decisions to say, yes, let's, you know, let's greenlight this project, we'll continue to overburden our communities down in the south. And of course, if we talk about pipelines and, you know, frac gas, that's a whole other different story, too. Like, it's not just in the south, it impacts everyone.
And then we're talking about transition, the transition to clean energy. In FERC, they have the ability to, again, green lights, interstate transmission lines, how we get our electricity. They have the ability to influence whether clean energy, solar, wind gets to the grid and gets to the places that are needed, especially for black and brown people who have been harmed by fossil fuel pollution. For those folks who need the benefits of the clean energy transition, our inability to get it on board in the grid fast enough is an issue. We don't benefit from the low cost benefits, more affordable energy. We don't benefit from the clean air benefits of renewable energy. If it takes so long for transmission to be built up and modernized. And so FERC has the authority to do that.
[00:17:40] Speaker A: Great. Yeah. Essentially what I'm hearing is that as we continue at the federal level, there's continued support for these energy sources like lng and carbon capture and hydrogen and whatnot.
It's going to perpetuate the burden of on environmental justice communities and just kind of in some ways distract from what we're trying to do, which is advance more clean energy, renewable energy, that sort of thing. And at the end of the day, it's not good. Not good for people, energy bills or for their health. It sounds like that's kind of in a nutshell, what's going on, right?
[00:18:16] Speaker C: Absolutely.
[00:18:17] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:18:18] Speaker B: And I think it's really interesting. I like that you frame this in a way that people can kind of understand that, how federal policy and what's going on in DC really does affect everyone. But when you kind of drill down, as you were talking, it made me think of, like, all of these decisions for particularly environmental justice and disadvantaged communities and low income communities, the decisions that are made at these higher levels are relatively dire. Right. You know, when it comes to improving health and safety or the transition to renewables, it seems like, again, environmental justice communities are really impacted by the decisions that are made at these levels by these various different agencies as well.
[00:18:58] Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely.
The administration and the agencies, they make these policies and regulations that are well intentioned.
We want to improve our clean air regulations so that underground we get better air health improvements. We want all these things. We want to tackle the climate crisis.
We want to improve energy efficiency and move towards building electrification and EV's and all these different things. They're all well intentioned. But at the end of the day, if they. Without the consultation of EJ groups, without. Without thinking of those unintended consequences, we will just see a perpetuation of the status quo, which is EJ communities just get the end of the stick, the brunt of well intentioned environmental policies and practices, and they never benefit from it or partially benefit from it.
[00:20:11] Speaker B: Yeah, I think we've been alluding to this as we've been talking to you, but there seems to be different paths that the federal government and agencies can take when it comes to the climate crisis and when it comes to energy. And we have this series that talks about the wrong direction. So can you talk a little bit about some of your fears and some of WEAC's kind of understanding a position of what is a wrong direction and what is that looking like right now in the political landscape?
[00:20:45] Speaker C: A lot of our work, and I kind of alluded to this just now, we're seeing key legislation, we're seeing once in a generation spending bills. We're seeing agencies really putting out rules that could facilitate the clean energy transition. Like I mentioned, FERC and their transmission reforms. We're seeing technologies being funded, investments in ccs and hydrogen and all these different things. Tax credits, like I said, well intentioned. But also we're seeing them being done without consultation of EJ groups. We're seeing a very poor analysis of the environmental justice impacts and the climate impacts. When they want to green light an LNG export terminal, or want to set a standard based on a ccs or coal firing natural gas with hydrogen. And had they done that, we would have seen, what people normally say, a win win situation. But we haven't seen that the energy in our push towards climate mitigation, in our push towards legislation and regulation that improves, that reduces emissions from power plants and transportation and all these different things, they're not considering that they could be perpetuating our reliance on fossil fuels. They're going to be cited in communities that are already bearing the burden of power plants and highways and all these different infrastructure that are causing, on an everyday basis, people to lose their lives, people to have asthma and lung issues and all these different things. We're seeing, as I mentioned earlier, too, we're seeing, in as much as they're doing that. On the flip side, we're seeing record levels of oil production and leasing, which runs very counterintuitive to the climate goals that we've set as a nation, both at home and internationally. When we think about the UN Convention on Climate Change and an environmental justice commitments when Biden came into power in his executive Order 140 set, this Justice 40 initiative which says or dictates that 40% of all clean energy benefits go towards disadvantaged communities. And them making decisions on ccs and green lighting, oil and natural gas runs, as I said, runs counter intuitive to those aims and those ambitious goals that he set when he came into place. And so that's the wrong direction we're seeing.
[00:24:06] Speaker A: Right before, you know, before we wrap up here, any last thoughts, comments around this landscape of energy, environmental justice at the federal level that you think people should know about going into this series as we start to talk more about these false solutions and this wrong direction campaign?
[00:24:24] Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. I think as you delve into the different, you know, the LNG, the hydrogen and whatnot, really pay attention to how, you know, decisions that are happening in these agencies, how they can really trickle down and impact the lives of environmental justice communities. I hope people listening in really start to be more mindful of the rules that are coming out. The decisions. They all have open meetings, they all have public comment sessions, and stay tuned to what's happening and the communication that we put out as a federal team from react, because we try and engage folks on the ground, we try and engage our EJ partners a lot around this work. So that they're hearing, these agencies are hearing from us more. And the more they hear from us is the more that they will think twice about citing a terminal in an already overburdened community. Maybe they'll think twice about how they approach implementing clean air standards and greenhouse gas standards. If they consider the cumulative impacts, if they consider the impacts on environmental justice communities, maybe they'll choose renewable energy versus ccs to reduce their greenhouse gases. So just encouraging folks to, in as much as it's so high level and it's so far removed, the decisions and the technologies and the money flowing down into different, different technologies really impacts us on the ground. So stay tuned, get involved, follow, react, shame that plug.
[00:26:23] Speaker B: Absolutely. I always have to have the plug for react in the work that we're doing as well. But I really appreciate this, Anastasia. I feel like I learned a lot, and I think it's really important for sometimes people just to kind of get a higher level sense of a base knowledge of what's going on, because it can be intimidating to kind of go into this space and start talking about federal policies. And now that we all know what FerC is, we can all be a little bit more informed as we get.
[00:26:51] Speaker A: Involved thank you so much, Anastasia. Thanks for listening. Don't forget, this is just the first episode in our wrong direction mini series. Tune in later this month for the next episode in the series where we'll be talking about hydrogen, green, blue, purple, all the colors of hydrogen, and that episode will be available on June 24.
[00:27:10] Speaker B: If you liked this episode, make sure to rate and review the show on whatever platform you listen on. If you have thoughts about the show, we encourage you to reach out to us with your thoughts and
[email protected].
[00:27:20] Speaker A: Dot don't be a stranger and check out we act on Facebook at weact four EJ that's w e a C T f o R E J on Instagram, X and YouTubej that's w e a C t number four, eJ. And check out our website, weac.org, for more information about environmental justice.
Until next time.
