(dramatic music)
- The climate story has been called
the mother of all externalities.
It's the biggest threat,
it's the one that makes housing,
and the opioid crisis, and everything else
that deserves our attention look small,
because if we can't solve climate,
we are not gonna have the ability to solve everything else.
And if we don't solve climate for everyone,
not just make these clean energies available to the rich,
we don't solve climate
because we're gonna generate social unrest
as the climate gets more and more uninhabitable.
(gentle music)
My laboratory, the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Lab,
has a focus on decarbonizing our energy systems,
but increasingly we've been working on
doing this in a way that promotes social justice.
One of the big topics that we focused on
the last couple years was the story of solar power.
And overall, the story of solar is great success.
Solar prices have fallen,
we've seen this kind of global transition
where solar that we thought was a small part
of our potential future only a few decades ago,
now we can see being dominated by solar in the long term.
We've started to utilize larger and larger data sets,
partnering with Google and other companies
that have done inventories
of almost every roof in the United States,
and we've looked in detail
at who got that solar and who didn't.
And the story is depressing.
While we've done great in terms of deploying solar
in New Jersey and California,
it has gone preferentially to the more affluent communities.
Even when you control for income,
solar is 30% to 40% more common
in a white-majority community than Latino,
and it can be 60% or 70% more common
in a white community than an African-American community.
And of course, we all know that the best advertising
of any new product is your neighbors.
And so by not having those initial seeds,
it has really pushed this differential on racial lines,
even when there's no socioeconomic difference.
One of the features that's so important is having capital,
and that means that we tended to put solar first
in richer communities that had the money up-front
to invest in solar.
But the story goes further than that.
The next most common mechanism
to get solar on rooftops
is to take advantage of public mortgage programs.
But when we look at the use of FICO scores,
which is the primary means to identify
potential property owners,
those have also been used predatorily
to favor white potential landowners
than minority landowners,
and so what we're seeing is,
even our non-energy related programs
are also discriminating against minorities.
We now know a lot of ways to do a much better job.
On the one hand, we know not just to target homeowners,
because they tend to be more affluent,
we can target townhouses,
and we can target whole blocks,
and if one roof has better solar, we can install solar
for more of the community on one rooftop.
In our case, we're building something called the EcoBlock,
where we're tying together 40 homes in a larger network,
and they're gonna share the rooftop solar,
and share the storage, and even install their own
local sanitation system,
so that from the richest members
of the block to the poorest,
they can all share in that storage.
So that's one narrative which is emerging only now
that solar and storage are becoming expensive.
One of the things that keeps me going
is the number of new connections
between the energy projects I started on 30 years ago,
and bigger social questions.
So the more the climate problem looks large and complicated,
and hairy and hard-to-solve,
the more it starts to touch other parts of our story.
We're never gonna solve, for example, the climate problem
without solving the housing problem,
because the poorer you are,
the further you have to drive
to find a place you can afford to live.
One way to solve that is
to make our energy system more distributed,
to make our vehicles cleaner,
so that we make the clean energy economy
more and more equitable.
And that, at one level,
allows us to address the climate problem,
but on the other level allows us
to reach other parts of our social story,
the dynamic around our infrastructure.
And so while the climate story itself is very depressing
in terms of how little we've done
given how good the technology is,
the upside is that we're now at a point where
we can think about leapfrogging
to clean energy for all,
and we can leapfrog to electric vehicles for all.
We can focus in on these big questions for which,
we know they're part of the climate story,
but for a long time we thought of them as separate issues.
And so that's really how I keep myself excited,
and I hope to inspire the students,
because they can have such a large impact
by making clean energy their tool
in not only the climate fight,
but also the social justice fight.