Across the United States, too many communities of color lack access to reliable and affordable energy. Facing the dual problems of inadequate infrastructure serving their neighborhoods and being more likely to live in older, less energy-efficient housing on average, low-earning Black and Latino families are forced to spend higher shares of their smaller incomes on energy compared to wealthier and better-connected neighborhoods around them. As a consequence, they face painfully high energy bills and experience energy insecurity at double the level of white households. This burden is a woeful legacy of poverty, discrimination, and underinvestment in poor urban neighborhoods.
This legacy also includes aging energy and transportation systems like coal-fired power plants and highways that release disproportionate concentrations of harmful local pollution in disadvantaged communities, exacerbating health issues that compound with widespread financial and energy poverty. The clean energy transition offers a historic opportunity to relieve these burdens by replacing older and dirtier resources with new technologies and expanding electricity grids, transit systems, and dense urban housing to meet growing needs. Unfortunately, this opportunity has not yet been taken.
Instead, the green left has pursued a transition strategy that exposes vulnerable communities to higher, less predictable prices while obstructing reforms that would enable faster and wider deployment of clean energy projects. In the name of environmental justice and climate urgency, activists and decisionmakers have urged the abolition of all fossil fuels and used procedural barriers to obstruct new fossil infrastructure. But as explored in this paper, the strategy of procedural obstruction backfires when it adds interminable delays to clean energy projects and prolongs the life of coal- and oil-fired power plants.
Energy prices emerge from a complex mix of geography, markets, and policy choices, which are hard to isolate. This report focuses on Boston and the regional grid of New England more broadly as an initial case study of the special energy burdens of low-income communities. Connected to the rest of the continental U.S. by the state of New York, elected leaders and green activists have combined to lock Boston and New England into a status quo energy system that cuts off access to renewable energy sources like wind, solar, and hydropower as well as domestic natural gas capacity. By opposing local substation upgrades, transmission lines for hydropower imports from Quebec, and pipelines bringing Appalachian shale gas across Pennsylvania and New York, politically powerful elites in one of America’s most progressive regions are using federal laws like the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the Clean Water Act, and state laws like the Massachusetts Environmental Policy Act (MEPA) to subject their lower-income neighbors to unnecessary price volatility and prolonging reliance on coal and oil. When global gas markets are disrupted, as in the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, this import dependence exposes isolated New England to severe price spikes. To make up for the winter power shortfall, Boston and its surrounding areas are forced to use dirtier and more expensive energy resources, burning diesel and imported gas to power the grid and heating homes with fuel oil.
The cost of these spikes does not fall evenly on all New England communities. This paper tracks community impact using the metric of energy burden, or average monthly residential energy costs divided by median household income for a given location, to identify which people and places are hit hardest. According to data from the Census compiled by the Department of Energy’s LEAD (Low-income Energy Affordability Data) tool, the rate of energy burden in a given Boston census tract rises in clear proportion to the share of households identifying as Black. This paper includes an appendix with data for the energy burden in every district represented by a member of the Congressional Black Caucus for further examination. Future reports will examine energy burdens in other communities, starting with a study of congressional districts with significant Latino populations.
The statistical relationship between Black population share and higher energy burdens holds true for Black communities across the country. LEAD’s data definitively show that census tracts with high shares of Black households are more likely to experience higher energy burdens than their neighboring tracts even across states with wide variation in energy infrastructure, resource mix, and housing types in a remarkably strong pattern. These are the results when utopian demands of green activists and environmental groups for a rapid phase-out of fossil fuels — which still supply 83 percent of America’s primary energy and vary in carbon intensity — take precedence over local families’ struggles to pay their electricity and heat bills.
Boston is exemplary, but not unique. National activist groups like the Sierra Club, 350.org, and the Center for Biological Diversity argue for the same policies regionally in New England as they do in policy debates across the country. This includes not just state and local fights over individual projects but also federal policy discussions in Washington, where they sent a joint letter to then-Majority Leader Senator Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) opposing federal energy permitting reforms in June 2024. If these activist approaches continue to dominate the Democratic party’s environmental justice and climate policy conversations, low-income voters who do not share their priorities may continue their exodus from the party.
The main challenge facing Democrats is to build broader public support for a more pragmatic energy transition. To win a new hearing among working-class voters, Democrats must discard the utopian visions of Green New Dealers and their failed strategy of trying to scare working-class voters into supporting the premature abolition of fossil fuels. As PPI polling shows, most working-class voters are neither abolitionists nor climate deniers, with 54% majority support for a combination of old and new resources, including nuclear, wind, solar, geothermal, and natural gas, to power our growing economy while reducing greenhouse gases.
On the other extreme, Trump’s so-called “energy dominance” agenda would devastate U.S. clean energy industries and dismantle crucial methane mitigation programs that incentivize oil and gas producers to prevent waste. Such an abrupt shift would not only cede ground to Chinese clean technology producers in global markets, counter to stated administration goals on trade and manufacturing, but would also hurt consumers by depriving them of access to the cheapest and cleanest resources available.
Instead, policymakers should embrace a pragmatic environmental justice vision that brings down costs and emissions by enabling wide and rapid deployment of clean energy technologies and the infrastructure needed to support them. This infrastructure push would include relieving regulatory bottlenecks on clean electricity development, transmission and distribution grid upgrades. It would also include the natural gas pipeline and generation capacity needed to support them, enabling the connection of significantly more clean energy resources to consumers and helping to bring down costs.
Pairing this shift with bolstered subsidies for low-income households and introducing innovative frameworks for community engagement hosted at newly established Community Energy Hubs (see PPI Policy Recommendations below) would ensure that disadvantaged Black households would stand to gain improved access, lower costs, and a more concrete sense that the energy transition is working for them. On top of changes to the federal energy policy landscape, state and local policies that remove barriers not just to the development of clean energy infrastructure but also restrictions on dense housing, mass transit, and multimodal streets would help ensure that Black communities that face concentrated poverty and generations of infrastructural discrimination are not left exposed to the elements by inadequate insulation, higher utility bills on lower incomes, or lack of policy support.
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