In the aftermath of Flint’s water crisis, cities around the U.S. are reevaluating whether they could be next. But some people have more reason to be afraid than others.
As climate change becomes less a controversial subject and more established fact, the “green” movement is rightfully taking its place in the forefront, and green energy is at the forefront. For many the question now lies between what’s the better alternative to fossil fuels: Wind, solar, nuclear, or other. However, as more and more studies are showing, these answers aren’t making it back to the low-income people who need it the most.
Though research showed that lead poisoning in Flint kids increased from 2.4 to 4.9 percent after the switch to pumping from Flint River, those statistics jump even higher when looking at the poorest areas of the city. It’s part of something known as “the climate gap,” the disproportionate effect that climate change has on low-income people and people of color. That can manifest itself in a lot of different ways, as Jessica Sklarsky of The Shriver Brief noted back in 2009:
Pollution is disproportionately concentrated in low-income neighborhoods and increased temperatures speed its transformation into harmful ambient ozone that aggravates respiratory conditions such as asthma. Additionally, low-income individuals are less likely to have health insurance or access to medical care, likely worsening the health problems associated with exposure to pollution.Low-income communities are the most vulnerable to natural disasters. Because of climate change, these extreme weather events are expected to greatly increase in frequency and severity. Low-income people are much less likely to carry disaster insurance that would allow them to quickly rebound from the damages caused by such events.
And a lot of that has to do with the lack of accessible clean energy. Because adopting clean and green methods does not come free—or cheap. Those in poverty spend the highest portion of their income on necessities like water and heat, but see the fewest returns. On average, they are twice as likely to die in a heat wave, breathe dirtier air, and be exposed to infectious diseases. Though those with higher-income may be able to splurge on greener alternatives to fossil fuels and the like, low-income people cannot. And that leaves millions of people living in poverty to often resort to more dangerous energy methods, like solid fuel which the WHO says causes 1.6 million excess deaths a year, placing it as the fourth largest risk for death in developing countries.
More precisely, community residents don’t benefit from the low-cost wind energy, even though most Oaxacans are connected to the grid.And though this wound doesn’t need more salt, it gets some, because these communities can often be the ones who are sacrificing the most to bring clean energy to the world. Which, as Enisa reported this week, doesn’t even have much return on investment for low-income communities, who get minimal jobs, money, or electricity from local wind farms:
Companies like Walmart, Heineken, Cemex and Bimbo are tapping into the wind resource through power purchase agreements signed with wind developers and the Mexican Federal Electricity Commission, CFE. Plans are also in the works to add grid infrastructure that would allow the wind energy produced in Oaxaca to be exported to Texas in a cooperative venture between the U.S. Agency for International Development and CFE.…Other community concerns span from loss of productive farmland, to bird kills, to the disruption of groundwater flows caused by the cement foundations, to farmers giving up their livelihoods to rent land to wind farms at rates too low to make a living.Most wind companies pay Mexican landowners 0.25 to 1.53 percent of the gross income produced by the wind turbines — about US$90 per turbine per month. Landowners in the U.S and Europe, in contrast, receive 1 to 5 percent of gross income, according to a study by the government-createdCommission for Dialogue with the Indigenous Peoples of Mexico.More troubling are claims of land contracts negotiated in bad faith, of which there has been extensive reporting. Much of the land is communally held, and most indigenous landowners are illiterate and don’t speak Spanish, which leads to abuses.
And as Ensina notes in their article, this is far from an isolated incident. Similar complaints arise in low-income communities in Kenya, at their flagship wind farm and their geothermal energy development; Brazil; and eventhe U.S. Within California, the agricultural business is overwhelmingly minority workers—who are the first to see cuts to the industry and last to get organic crops themselves. Even North Carolina, whose regulators are suing the EPA to get federal water standards more in line with the state’s, has rural, minority, and low-income populations at risk for water contamination.
As legislators move forward and evaluate how to prevent another Flint disaster, it’d be good to keep in mind that often the effects are not always felt evenly. But maybe recovery could be.
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