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environmental justice
Community Benefits Agreements Can Embed Justice in the Clean Energy Transition
In states that are leading the way, CBAs ensure that energy projects provide clean power and bring economic and social benefits to the communities most impacted.
Jan 11, 2025
The clean energy transition is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to build momentum for environmental justice.
As the transition accelerates, we face a choice: Will it reproduce the harms of the past fossil fuel-based energy system, or will it create a fairer, more just future where more people can access and benefit from accessible and affordable clean energy? For far too long, historically marginalized communities have been excluded from decisions about the challenges they face, and energy infrastructure is no exception.
Community Benefits Agreements (CBAs) are a tool for ensuring frontline communities receive real, tangible benefits from renewable energy projects.
States that embrace policies like CBAs are showing what’s possible: a future where energy solutions uplift communities rather than burden them.
CBAs are legally binding agreements between developers and communities that outline commitments such as local job creation, workforce training, or investments in public infrastructure. In states that are leading the way, CBAs ensure that energy projects provide clean power and bring economic and social benefits to the communities most impacted. From Michigan to California, states are showing what’s possible:
- In Michigan, developers pay host communities $2,000 per megawatt of energy capacity.
- In California, enforceable agreements with grassroots organizations ensure benefits flow directly to local people.
- In Maine, wind projects deliver long-term financial contributions to communities hosting the turbines.
These policies are not just about energy infrastructure; they represent a shift in power, creating systemic change for equity, accountability, and justice, giving those communities most affected by energy development a voice along with a share of benefits. These state successes show what's possible, but to scale these benefits nationwide, we need stronger federal and state policies working in tandem—like the Justice40 Initiative.
The federal Justice40 Initiative aims to allocate 40% of federal climate and energy investment benefits to communities that have long been overburdened by pollution and underinvestment. State policies require CBAs to build on this foundation, ensuring that energy projects are designed with and for communities that have historically been excluded from decision-making.
By centering racial justice in the clean energy transition, CBAs can:
- Deliver good-paying local jobs.
- Fund schools, public health, and infrastructure.
- Empower communities to shape the projects in their backyards.
Yet CBAs are only as strong as the policies that back them. Some developers will inevitably try to exploit loopholes, sidestep accountability, or push vague agreements that deliver little. In California, legally enforceable agreements with grassroots organizations ensure that the benefits of renewable energy projects flow directly to the local communities hosting them. To advance energy justice, CBAs must be enforceable (legally binding), transparent, and community-driven, and not just another box for developers to check.
We are at a turning point. State governments have a chance to lead by mandating strong, enforceable CBAs and ensuring communities are part of the decision-making process. This isn’t just about clean energy—it’s about repairing harm, investing in people, and building a just energy future.
The clean energy transition can be more than reducing emissions—it can be a powerful pathway to justice, equity, and community empowerment. States that embrace policies like CBAs are showing what’s possible: a future where energy solutions uplift communities rather than burden them.
By centering racial justice in the clean energy transition, CBAs can deliver tangible benefits that create lasting change:
- Good-paying local jobs that boost economic opportunity.
- Funding for schools, public health, and infrastructure to address long-standing inequities.
- Empowered communities that have a say in shaping projects in their own backyards.
CBAs ensure that historically excluded communities move from being merely hosts of energy infrastructure to being active partners and beneficiaries of the clean energy revolution.
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The Earthquake Environmental Justice Advocates Aren’t Talking About
The environmental movement from within the belly of the beast must recognize that it needs to be part of the growing anti-war movement and push for the U.S. to take its hands off Syria.
Jan 04, 2025
On December 15, many people in Syria felt the earthquake. Seismic scales registered above 3.0 on the Richter scale and could be felt at least 500 miles away. Natural disasters usually have the attention of people around the world. When earthquakes happen, humanitarian workers and supplies are sent to help out. After hurricanes, organizations release statements responding to the urgency of the climate crisis and hypothetical transitions away from fossil fuels.
In Syria, what happened on December 15 wasn’t an earthquake—it was a massive airstrike that Israel carried out in Syria. This ongoing bombardment is reciprocally destructive to daily life and the environment as it continues to push the climate crisis further through jarring fossil fuel consumption.
But where are the environmental organizations? Many organizations that would typically release these statements after “natural” disasters have been silent. Except this was not a natural disaster—and the countries that would typically send “humanitarian aid” are the ones that caused this quake to happen. This deliberate mass destruction came shortly after the U.S. dropped dozens of bombs in just a few hours after the fall of former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
The U.S. has carried out this disastrous project through the extraction of oil in the ground for the sake of extracting more oil from the ground.
The bewildering longtime silence of environmental organizations when it comes to U.S. militarism is not representative of any genuine commitment to climate justice. The most heavily weighted factors in their silence may be a blissful ignorance from the normalization of a whitewashed “environmentalism,” or the fear of repression and financial repercussions of taking popular anti-war stances. Regardless, the murderous result is antithetical to everything they profess.
A June 2024 United Nations report on the environmental impact of the genocide in Gaza highlighted the catastrophic impacts of Israel’s incessant bombing on the ecosystem, water quality, air quality, and soil in Gaza. Genocide doesn’t just cause ecocide, isn’t just parallel to ecocide, but is also a result of ecocide. Ecocide is a tactic of genocide. The long-term damage to every ecological foundation in Gaza makes it harder and harder to sustain life. Life can’t be sustained without agriculture or without clean drinking water. And now, the U.S. and Israel are attempting to repeat this cycle of destruction in Syria, just as they have started to in Lebanon.
Regardless of how hard the imperialism and war economy of Western powers try to create a lavish life for its beneficiaries at the expense of everyone else, it is fundamentally impossible to sustain life for anyone when war-making tools continue to devastate the planet. The grim irony is that the war economy eats its own makers.
The first 120 days of the genocide in Gaza alone produced more emissions than 26 countries combined. Every new base that is established across the globe contaminates the soil that it occupies, harming the ecosystem and the valuable biodiversity that is critical for sustaining life. As it builds bases over occupied land globally, the military literally steamrolls over survival.
Now, the U.S. and Israel are taking advantage of a destabilized Syria to eat away at the nation’s territory to gain more standing in a dangerous escalation against Iran. This is the newest development in a decades-long conquest for dominance in the oil industry that environmental organizations have long campaigned shifts away from. The U.S. has carried out this disastrous project through the extraction of oil in the ground for the sake of extracting more oil from the ground, destroying homes, families, and nations in the process, all while stumbling into the possibility of planetary destruction via climate collapse, nuclear winter, or both.
U.S.-made Israeli bombs have killed multiple civilians in Yemen in the past weeks. Meanwhile, the “cease-fire” reached in Lebanon continues to be breached as toxic bombs rain down on the people of the country daily, while fossil fuels are unleashed in the sky, which has already led to island nations that toxic U.S. bases occupy becoming inhabitable.
Since Assad’s fall, Israel has claimed more land in Syria than all of Gaza. The more that Israel and its allies encroach on this land, the more emboldened the U.S.-Israeli regime becomes in its terrorism throughout the region and the more it risks our global future. The short- and long-term survival of the people of Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Iran, and Yemen are increasingly threatened due to ecological devastation while they fight to prevent U.S.-made bombs from continuing to destroy their homes every single day. Is their disposability so blinding that these NGOs sacrifice themselves? The longer we escalate, the more emissions will be released from this catastrophe and the longer that crucial biodiversity and Indigenous caretaking will be destroyed.
So, amid this war that is causing complete ecological and planetary devastation, where is the mainstream climate movement? When the U.S. military is the largest institutional polluter in the world, consuming 4.6 billion gallons of fuel annually (77-80% of all U.S. government energy consumption), how can its deadliest campaign in years be ignored by those who seek to protect the planet? When the bombs the U.S. manufactures register on the Richter scale, how is that not a threat to the environment? How is nuclear winter not a threat to agricultural global survival? How can the groups that claim to care about our well-being not stand against a deadly bombing campaign in Syria and possible war with Iran or Russia?
The anti-war movement from within the U.S. is at its strongest in decades. The majority of Americans want a cease-fire in Gaza. The environmental movement from within the belly of the beast must recognize that it needs to be part of this anti-war movement and push for the U.S. to take its hands off Syria. It must raise the public’s consciousness of the dangers of war with Iran. When we think about existential threats to the planet, environmental organizations should be looking at the ecological devastation that Israel and the U.S. are causing and ask themselves why they haven’t done or said a damn thing about the elephant in the room.
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After COP29, the World Is Losing Faith in the UN Climate Process
Developed countries intentionally or unintentionally let dejection work its way through the conference for several reasons, the most obvious being that their home constituencies are turning against climate and environmental justice.
Dec 21, 2024
The United Nations Climate Summit (COP29), held in Baku, Azerbaijan last month, apparently lived up to its moniker: “The Finance COP.” Two weeks of semantic quibbling finally yielded an agreement that would triple climate finance to $300 billion a year by 2035. Developing countries were calling for $1.3 trillion instead, which would have been more than four times the amount agreed. Many pooh-poohed the promised $300 billion as “too little, too distant.” Even if one ignores “the too little part,” it is hard to overlook the redeeming of the pledge way off into the future, a fact that was obscured due to the linguistic jumble of U.N.-speak, legalese, and bureaucratese in the document.
Given that it won’t be realized for 11 years, the agreement raises a number of rhetorical questions. Will nature and its fury be put on pause till 2035? Will climate action (emissions reduction) and adaptation (to climate change) continue at no cost or on the cheap? Will the climate stop changing? Despite its appearance to the contrary, the tripling of climate finance was a pretend effort to leave Baku with a semblance of seriousness. Yet the U.N. Executive Secretary for Climate Change was unsure if the agreed finance would be delivered as promised. He grandly hailed the agreement as an “insurance policy for humanity,” but equally skeptically cautioned that an “insurance policy only works if premiums are paid in full and on time.”
In reality, agreements like climate finance or Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) are no different than New Year Resolutions that are only honored in intended or unintended breaches. What make the climate finance agreement even less resolute are three aspects.
The world’s largest and wealthiest nations seem to have concluded that they don’t need the rest of the world or their NDCs to reduce emissions.
First, it is neither obligatory nor enforceable. Pledges have been made on the part of developed countries like the European Union, the United States, and Japan—whose respective leaders ironically chose to abstain from the summit—that “agreed to help raise $300 billion a year by 2035.” They didn’t take it upon themselves to pay the promised amount but rather pledged to “help raise $300 billion,” which is akin to crowdfunding the whole effort.
Second, COP29 cast its central objective as the New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG), i.e., each developed country will pledge a specific amount of contribution to climate finance. No such quantification was agreed. All that was agreed was that developed countries would “help raise $300 billion a year by 2035.” Fundraising is not a quantified financial commitment.
Third, and above all, there was no agreement on what will count as climate finance: public finance, private finance, bank loans, philanthropy, investment, or all of it? These lacunae leave so big a hole in the climate finance agreement that it can let through even a Category-5 storm. Some delegates call the agreement a bad deal. Others cry foul that the only deal worse than no deal is a bad deal.
All parties to the agreement, thus, returned home unhappy. Developed countries were sticking together to keep their current commitment of $100 billion unchanged. Developing countries insisted on raising it to $1.3 trillion effective now. Hosts of COP29 were overrunning the conference schedule to get a deal acceptable to both developed and developing countries. Civil society organizations were dismissing the agreement as “a bad deal,” even a “joke.” As a result, everyone left the conference dejected.
Developed countries intentionally or unintentionally let this dejection work its way through the conference for several reasons, the most obvious being that their home constituencies are turning against climate and environmental justice. Western societies’ rightward lurch has left their governments unwilling and unable to make any commitment to finance climate action. It is no coincidence that leaders of major European nations such as Germany and France and even that of the European Union chose to sit out the Conference.
The leaders of the five-member BRICS were also no shows. Leaders of five of the G7 countries opted out of the Conference. Canada’s leader flew instead to Florida to spend a day with the U.S. president-elect to discuss reviving suspended oil and gas pipeline projects. Leaders of 13 of the G20 countries, a cluster of the world’s largest and wealthiest economies, too, voted with feet. The abstaining leaders’ nations represent “the World’s 13 Top Polluters.” For these reasons, the prime minister of Papua New Guinea called COP29 a “total waste of time” and pulled out of the conference. The president of Argentina, who called the climate crisis a “socialist lie,” pulled his country out of the conference altogether, a move that many fear threatens the viability of the Paris climate pact. The science-denying Argentine leader might have withdrawn from the summit in what historian Timothy Snyder calls “anticipatory obedience” to U.S. President-elect Donald Trump. Trump stands by his commitment to pull the United States out of the Paris climate pact and stop contributing to climate finance, just as he did during his first term.
The Paris climate pact is even more threatened by the G20 nations’ aversion to the U.N. process on climate change. The G20 held a pow-wow of its own in Brazil at the same time as the U.N. climate summit. The Brazilian leader, who is an ardent champion of climate justice, skipped COP29 “due to head injury,” but he happily made himself available to host and fete leaders of the world’s 20 largest economies at exactly the same time as the Baku summit was underway. The agenda at the G20 summit was dominated by economic growth that to most scientists and environmentalists is at the heart of climate change. In fact, the G20 summit stole the march on COP29. Even the U.N. secretary general, who was the official host of the Baku summit, left in the middle of the proceedings to fly to Brazil to attend the G20 summit instead.
The world’s largest and wealthiest nations seem to have concluded that they don’t need the rest of the world or their NDCs to reduce emissions. G20 countries account for 80% of the world’s emissions, while the least developed countries just 4% of them. If G20 nations decide to transition away from fossil fuel energy, it will dramatically reduce atmospheric carbon’s impact on soaring temperatures. In this picture, the rest of the 180 countries and their emissions hardly matter. It’s what environmental sociologist William Freudenburg called disproportionality: A handful of powerful actors account for the disproportionate amount of industrial pollution. The world’s largest and wealthiest economies have the financial means, technological resources, and alternative paths away from fossilized fuels.
The Club of Rome, a business group that jolted the world with its classic report on Limits to Growth in 1972, wrote an open letter expressing its dismay at what it calls the failed process of COPs and voiced a call for urgent reforms. Among the signatories were such luminaries as the former President of Ireland Mary Robinson, former U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon, and former U.N. Executive Secretary for Climate Change Christiana Figueres. This lack of confidence in U.N. processes is another bad omen for future U.N. climate summits and more importantly the Paris climate pact, especially once the Trump administration is seated in Washington early next year.
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