Afterwards, Baker sat down with us for a dialog about the right way to distribute the advantages of recent applied sciences and tackle neighborhood considerations round new initiatives.
This dialog has been edited for readability and size.
In your session, you talked just a little bit about these conditions the place local weather change and inequality intersect. Might you give some examples of clear instances the place we will obtain progress on addressing local weather change and inequality on the similar time?
I like to consider the [low-income] tax credit score program—it is a 20% extra tax credit score for investments in photo voltaic, wind, and clear vitality.
I am actually excited that my workplace leads that program as this system administrator in partnership with Treasury. And over the past 9 months or so, we’ve designed a program that we expect will truly transfer the needle for low-income households, so that they’re going to get entry to photo voltaic and wind by both neighborhood vitality, rooftop photo voltaic, or small-scale wind.
That entry clearly helps to struggle the local weather disaster whereas additionally, if we’re profitable, bringing down the general value of vitality for these people and really bringing true financial advantages to these communities.
We take into consideration a number of clear vitality applied sciences as being good for communities—like, having extra entry to low cost energy is clearly factor. However there are additionally issues just like the hydrogen hubs or carbon removing, the place there could be environmental impacts, particularly for initiatives that also contain fossil fuels. How is your workplace navigating that and addressing these considerations?
Your query jogs my memory of the Seventies, which was the high-water mark for environmental legal guidelines and laws making it to the books, with the Clear Air Act and the Clear Water Act. All of those new legal guidelines defending our air and water have been helpful for a lot of, many, many communities across the nation. However communities of colour, specifically, have been saying: “We’re not seeing the good thing about these legal guidelines.”
