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Public Health, Safety, and Community Resilience

We have a fair body of evidence showing that the transformations we’re talking about will, for the workers and communities, have huge health and economic benefits.

—Linda Rudolph, Public Health Institute¹

One of the workshop’s first simultaneous sessions focused on the interplay between climate change and community health. Michael Méndez, University of California, Irvine, introduced panelists Garvin Heath, National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL); Linda Rudolph, Public Health Institute; and Jason Beckfield, Harvard University. Speakers offered opening remarks before engaging in a wide-ranging discussion of the challenges and opportunities involved in incorporating public health perspectives in decarbonization efforts, and noted the following:

• Studies have demonstrated that it is possible for decarbonization measures to simultaneously reduce emissions, improve resilience, improve public health, and reduce environmental justice disparities.
• Achieving a just transformation of communities, people, work, industry, and government requires an emphasis on equitable benefits for workers and for communities who bear the greatest climate burdens.

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¹ Linda Rudolph, Public Health Institute, presentation to the workshop on July 26, 2022.

• People-first approaches that are attentive to community priorities and seek locally relevant solutions can help to elevate health as a key component of energy transitions and inform impactful and equitable decarbonization strategies.

LESSONS FROM LA100

The city of Los Angeles, California, has embarked on an ambitious plan to transition the city to 100 percent renewable electricity by 2045. Heath discussed LA100,² a study conducted by NREL in partnership with the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) to assess the pathways toward achieving that goal. For the study, researchers evaluated the technical feasibility of various approaches as well as their implications for public health and environmental justice. Despite significant challenges, including the geographic constraints imposed by the city’s position between mountains and ocean and its high current pollution levels, the study identified pathways that could result in significant gains for air quality through the electrification of the power sector and its loads from light-duty vehicles, buses, residential and commercial buildings, and ports, among other measures. “We demonstrated in this study how a global megacity could achieve aggressive decarbonization goals while also achieving billions of dollars of environmental health co-benefits and reducing environmental justice disparities,” said Heath. One challenge, Heath noted, was that researchers sought to predict future environmental justice impacts, but existing empirical tools are largely designed to assess environmental justice impacts retrospectively, suggesting a need for better prospective environmental justice assessment tools.

FOCUSING ON WORKERS

Rudolph described working many years ago with workers in the oil industry who face negative impacts from occupational exposures and from energy transitions. She stressed that the loss of jobs and industries in a community can itself have adverse health impacts. “We all know that economic well-being and security is a truly fundamental determinant of health and a precursor to health and well-being,” said Rudolph. In addition, even “clean” energy technologies do not necessarily equate to clean and healthy working conditions. Some green economy jobs can be just as dangerous or low-wage as fossil fuel jobs, especially overseas where workers who supply necessary raw materials for products such

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² National Renewable Energy Laboratory, 2021, “LA100: The Los Angeles 100% Renewable Energy Study,” March, https://maps.nrel.gov/la100/la100-study/report.

as electric-vehicle batteries often work in harsh conditions. Therefore, she emphasized that creating a just transition will require collaboration among labor, civil rights, and environmental justice movements to ensure that workers have safeguards that prioritize climate, health, and equity, and empowerment. Achieving this level of collaboration requires meaningful community and worker engagement in decision-making to link the energy transition with a transition to a more equitable society.

ADDRESSING SOCIAL BARRIERS TO DECARBONIZATION

While many people tend to focus on technological or financial barriers to decarbonization, Beckfield argued that social barriers are often more important. Through his work studying decarbonization on the U.S. Gulf Coast, he found that factors such as environmental racism, a sense of resentment between urban and rural areas, political polarization, and the feeling of disrespect experienced in many communities can drive distrust, disengagement, and stasis. As a result of income inequality and other forms of inequity, many communities lack social cohesion or a sense of shared fate.

To attend to these issues in the quest to accelerate decarbonization, Beckfield offered several suggestions. First, he said it is important to gain a pragmatic understanding of how people define their own problems and priorities. To make solutions more relevant to local communities, he suggested focusing on regionalized social solutions and undertaking an ethnographic study to localize national projects such as those being pursued at national laboratories. He added that cohort-specific labor market policies could increase overall effectiveness of labor policies by attending to the different needs of workers in different age groups. To strengthen research in this area, he suggested undertaking a comprehensive study of how people relate to energy systems, accounting for cumulative health impacts from the energy transition, and bringing the impacts and implications of political conflict and unequal power resources into the analytical frame, rather than treating it as separate. Finally, he suggested focusing on scenarios that do not involve a national carbon price, which he asserted is unlikely to be adopted.

DISCUSSION

Building on the speakers’ comments, Nancy Krieger, Harvard University, served as discussant for a panel discussion examining approaches to better understand the potential health benefits and harms of the coming energy transition. To open the discussion, Krieger posited that rather than a “transition,” decarbonization will be a “transformation” that will

revolutionize global relationships, especially between people and work, and create health benefits not only for a person’s entire life span but also for future generations. Success will require learning from past projects, engaging people, understanding their problems, and including their input in the transformation. To accomplish this, she said that it is crucial for scientists to look beyond their own perspectives and work with many other groups with a vested interest in creating a healthy, equitable, and just society.

Thinking on Different Scales

Panelists discussed the different scales at which the social dimensions of decarbonization may be understood. Noting his agreement that “transformation” is a helpful framework that encapsulates how radical the impacts of decarbonization will be, Beckfield said that the geographic scale is critical, because the U.S. energy system is heterogeneous, and different parts of the country have very different needs.

Giving greater emphasis to the health impacts of decarbonization can help to put cost scales into perspective. Heath said that transition costs often seem large, but monetizing accrued health benefits would expand the definition of cost (and benefit) to include the expected social and health improvements for current and future generations. Rudolph added that these improvements are already well documented. If done right, she said, “we have a fair body of evidence showing that the transformations we’re talking about will, for the workers and communities, have huge health and economic benefits.”

As for the time scale, Rudolph stated that government is generally very slow to act, but the transformational policy and systems changes under discussion must happen at a radically faster pace. She suggested that highlighting beneficial health and equity impacts, perhaps by adding formal requirements for comprehensive health and equity analyses during decision-making, could help to speed action. She added that those analyses should emphasize benefits and risks to workers and communities whose health and economic well-being have often been ignored by the fossil fuel industry.

Carlos Martín, Brookings Institution and Harvard University, asked how to balance the tension between the need to move quickly to mitigate future climate effects and rectify past injustices, and the time it takes to conduct responsible long-term assessment, modeling, and public engagement. Rudolph acknowledged that it is challenging to pursue studies, community engagement, and decision-making simultaneously, but it is essentially the only option we have. Fortunately, more resources are being developed to help guide effective community-engaged efforts. Building

on this point, Beckfield suggested that scientists could study models from other countries that have undergone energy transitions, draw from the work of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, and adapt models for community engagement from other disciplines, such as Louisiana’s Strategic Adaptations for Future Environments (LA SAFE).^3,4

Accounting for Health Benefits

Prompted by a question from Méndez, speakers discussed the importance of including more wide-ranging health benefit analyses in decarbonization planning, along with approaches for achieving this. Rudolph stressed that climate change is a health emergency and that community health must be considered as an integral part of the solution; including health benefit analyses in decarbonization planning is critical to identifying strategies that can simultaneously reduce emissions, improve health, and advance environmental justice. On the flip side, failing to adequately account for health in policymaking could deprioritize solutions with health co-benefits, leading to missed opportunities, and even bring unforeseen health risks, especially to communities that already bear significant environmental and health burdens from climate change. For example, she noted that transportation transitions have mostly focused on switching personal vehicles from gas to electric, but buses and heavy-duty vehicles⁵ may be more pertinent considerations in many climate-impacted communities. Heath added that the LA100 effort identified the electrification of light-duty vehicles and buses as critical to decarbonization. Rudolph also cautioned that there has been little analysis of potential health risks from carbon capture and sequestration technologies, which she said also have the disadvantage of being expensive, unproven, and potentially likely to perpetuate the use of carbon-based fuels.

Heath agreed that integrating and quantifying health benefits within energy transition studies is critical, although he acknowledged that doing so adds to the challenges of study design. He suggested that more

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³ Environmental Protection Agency, 2022, “White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council,” https://www.epa.gov/environmentaljustice/white-house-environmental-justice-advisory-council.

⁴ Foundation for Louisiana, 2019, “Louisiana’s Strategic Adaptations for Future Environments (LA SAFE),” https://lasafe.la.gov.

⁵ Light-, medium-, and heavy-duty are classifications used to distinguish between different types of vehicles, generally based on size, weight, and purpose. Light-duty covers passenger cars, sport utility vehicles, and most pick-up trucks; medium- and heavy-duty covers larger vehicles such as delivery vans, buses, and tractor trailers. For more information, see Federal Highway Administration, 2020, “Figure 21: Law Enforcement Vehicle Identification Guide,” U.S. Department of Transportation, https://ops.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/fhwahop10014/long_f21.htm.

accessible tools, such as air quality models with reduced complexity, will enable more scientists to quantify health benefits. Building on this point, Beckfield said that incorporating health benefits is challenging in a world that prefers single causes over simultaneous or long-term drivers. In addition, he said there is generally not enough data on the relationship between energy jobs and health, a gap that points to a clear research need. However, on the plus side, incorporating health benefits can lead to better public engagement than climate alone; health problems have motivated environmental justice communities to find novel solutions to toxic exposures and led to surprising collaborations with industry and policymakers. “Environmental justice communities are not passive receptacles of toxic pollution—there’s a lot of creativity on the ground that I think could be incorporated,” said Beckfield.

Krieger further emphasized the importance of collaboration. Connecting the dots between research, people, and multiple environmental exposures can lead to a more coordinated understanding of harms and benefits across life spans and generations. To do this, she suggested it will also be necessary to tackle disinformation, anti-regulatory sentiment, and the notion that we must always make a choice between jobs and health. Rudolph agreed and suggested that, with funding, the public health community could create a well-resourced media campaign that explicitly calls out the health risks of fossil fuels and the disinformation campaigns of the fossil fuel industry, akin to the model of anti-tobacco public health campaigns, and reframes the climate debate away from the idea that addressing environmental problems must come at the expense of jobs.

Given that the United States is such a heterogenous country with regard to geography, resources, and community composition, Clark Miller, Arizona State University, asked panelists to comment on which modeling and quantitative approaches to risk and benefits analyses might be most effective and accurate. Heath recommended agent-based modeling, which is a method within complex system science that can differentiate among communities using social and technical factors for individuals and organizations. From a different standpoint, Beckfield encouraged complementing modeling with a more social, people-first perspective. Narratives can sometimes be more valuable than modeling because they help identify the processes and motivations behind key decisions. Rudolph agreed, adding that narratives have brought insight to transitions beyond energy, such as how forests are managed or food is supplied. Scaling up inclusive conversations requires resources, but drawing out the key drivers from a people-first perspective can help to identify pathways to healthy transformations. “We don’t have to do each analysis over in every city; we need to figure out how to take what we learn and move to the next point on our trajectory toward transforming these systems,” said Rudolph.