DOE Tips Can Influence Biden on Climate and Environmental Justice – Friday, April 23, 2021 – www.eenews.net
The Department of Energy’s headquarters in Washington is pictured. Francis Chung / E&E News
President Biden’s election for two senior positions in the Department of Energy yesterday could bring top environmental justice voices to the driver’s seat to advance the president’s climate change agenda.
Biden appointed Asmeret Asefaw Berhe, professor of soil geochemistry at the University of California at Merced, and an outspoken voice on equity, to head the DOE’s Office of Science, which manages 10 of the department’s 17 national laboratories (E&E News PM, April 22)).
If confirmed, Berhe would head an office that manages many of the department’s collaborations with university researchers, making it a major hub for clean energy innovation. Your nomination could also advance the Office of Science’s extensive research on biology and earth systems, which is providing information on international climate models and advances in biofuels.
As a researcher, Berhe has investigated in his work how the soil interacts with other earth systems, among other things through the storage of carbon dioxide from the air.
This is an atypical background for a candidate for the Office of Science, as the physicists, computer scientists or nanotechnologists usually ran the office. The office is the country’s largest funder of basic research in the natural sciences.
Asmeret Asefaw Berhe. Aabhtt / Wikipedia
Former DOE officials and energy innovation analysts said their background underscores the government’s focus on climate change in agencies and offices.
The Office of Science funds “major climate models and biological research relevant to energy and climate, such as bioenergy,” wrote Cherry Murray, former director of the office and current professor of technology and public policy at Harvard University, in an email.
“Berhe’s appointment as a soil scientist is relevant to this part of the portfolio and clearly shows that the administration is focused on the climate,” she added.
Berhe’s background could also give the office a stronger profile for environmental justice than it has in the past, analysts say.
Berhe was born and raised in Asmara, Eritrea. She wrote her master’s thesis at Michigan State University on how land mines cause land degradation. She is a past chair of the UC Merced Committee on Diversity and Justice and has published articles in journals on racism and the lack of diversity in science, technology, engineering, and math.
In a statement from Time Magazine last year, she said the climate change community should address “historical inequalities” with access to resources and adopt adaptation strategies based on indigenous knowledge.
She also noticed that the earth’s soil stores four times more CO2 than the atmosphere.
“Connecting the climate, soil systems, and the future of global food production requires that we simultaneously address climate change and the remediation of degraded soils,” she wrote.
Yet soils are often overlooked as a carbon sink, “in part because of the lack of diversity in the climate change community,” argued Berhe. Prioritizing the administration, she wrote, could enable a third of the emissions reductions needed to tackle the climate crisis.
“I would say she’s not just a soil scientist, but a climate researcher,” said Jetta Wong, president of JLW Advising and a senior fellow in the clean energy innovation program at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.
In the Office of Science, Wong added, “She will be in the middle of the conversation about biological sequestration, which is essential if we are to meet the climate goals that our president has set for us.”
Berhe did not respond to requests from E&E News at the time of going to press.
Biden’s office will also play a role in assessing how much money to spend on finding a fusion reactor – a potential source of unlimited carbon-free electricity for the second half of the century. The merger target has gained momentum, but still faces steep research hurdles. Under former President Trump, the office sponsored expert reports calling for the development of a pilot fusion reactor by 2040 in hopes of demonstrating whether commercial reactors could be affordable for utility companies. The question, according to the DOE academic advisors, calls for an expensive new research agenda at a time when advanced fission reactor developers are also pushing for DOE to support their billion-dollar pilot plants.
The election for Berhe comes as the Biden administration tries to speed up work at an office whose funding was earmarked for cuts by the Trump White House. Murray, the bureau’s former director, said in 2017 that scientists were “concerned” about whether their research would be targeted (Greenwire, Feb. 1, 2017).
“This is a moment like no other”
The White House also announced yesterday that it has appointed Shalanda Baker as Director of the Bureau for Economic Impact and Diversity and Frank Rose as Deputy Chief Administrator for National Nuclear Safety.
Baker, DOE’s first assistant director on energy justice in the Office for Economic Impact and Diversity, spoke at the launch of the University of California’s Climate Justice Center yesterday, urging attendees to engage with residents of poor, black, and Hispanic communities, often alongside Power plants live – and usually charge more from their electricity salaries.
Shalanda Baker. Northeastern University
“In many ways, the energy system is implicated in the structural violence routinely experienced by people of color in this country,” she said, noting that communities are not always at the table when decisions are made about where to place electrical installations . Studies show that residents of color communities often pay more of their salaries for utilities, she said.
Biden has directed federal agencies to spend 40% of their sustainability investments on disadvantaged communities.
“This is a moment unlike any other in recent memory and perhaps generations,” she said. “We have the opportunity to transform our entire energy system in the service of justice and justice.”
Baker was most recently Professor of Law, Public Order, and Urban Affairs at Northeastern University. She led and co-founded the Energy Justice Initiative, which provides technical and political support to help communities fight climate change. She also authored Revolutionary Power: An Activist’s Guide to the Energy Transition, which was released earlier this year.
She included some criticism of DOE in her book, writing that the department released a roadmap in 2012 that guided the approach to energy in the community but did not “focus on the concerns of those who care most about clean energy can benefit in the community: marginalized. ” Communities that have historically been affected by fossil fuel development. “
The reporter Peter Behr contributed to this.
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