Utility justice is a place we can build together

What should I do with my life? Over the years, conversations with my closest friends about our different attempts to answer this question have grown into discussions about the person we are now and the person we strive to become daily. Each time, the distance between the latter two is clarifying and shapes the practice of my daily commitments.

In the wake of the 2024 presidential election, ideas about how to navigate the future are being hotly contested, opinions abound, and this same fundamental question is arising daily with colleagues, friends, and family - both inside and outside the climate movement. The question is urgent, uncomfortable, upsetting even. For me and my closest friends, exploring it has also been freeing, an invitation to change our thinking and, then, our doing.

If you find yourself asking this question right now, I'm writing this thinking of you. To tell you about what I've been working on since 2015, what I've studied, who I've learned from, and, with a lot of humility, to ask you what you think about my ideas for the possible futures ahead of us. Thanks for reading.

What is the utility in utility justice? The definition for what makes any sort of service a utility (the shorthand for a public utility), began to be defined by the Supreme Court as the services provided by "businesses affected with public interest" in 1877.^[1] This grew into the definition we know now that includes all of the enterprises - both owned by the state and by private corporations - managing vital infrastructure we need to survive: water and sewage, electricity, phones, and the internet, especially. These utility infrastructure systems are embedded into our world physically, weaving our homes together, and all tightly linked to critical aspects of our response to climate crises.

Presently our social fabric feels particularly weak on a number of levels, and our infrastructure of millions of miles of pipes and wires mirrors this grim picture. The American Society of Civil Engineers graded us: the wealthiest country in the history of the world gets a C- on our physical, tangible infrastructure. In electricity, the poor conditions are distributed unevenly, impacting people hardest during crisis events, with hundreds being displaced or even killed, for example.

These failures fall on people differently. In Texas during the 2021 Winter Storm Uri, many deaths of disabled or medically vulnerable people were undercounted in official estimates. I've written about the inequality of our electricity system in depth before. This disparity is felt worst in catastrophes but is the standard design for utility policy, which uses the explicit threat to people's life and safety after utility shutoffs to guarantee corporate profits.

We should shore up these essential climate assets, and we should ensure everyone who wants networked utility access can have it. Beyond not being consistently dependable, these infrastructure systems are currently absent in many places. This absence isn't the stuff of quixotic off-grid fantasy; it makes people's lives harder in the places they call home. When there isn't piped water, as in places across rural America and on Indigenous reservations like the Navajo Nation, significant time and labor goes into hauling well water. When there isn't a working electricity grid, as in so many places where corporations have failed like in New Orleans, Detroit, or all of Texas or all of Maine (just to name a few examples), millions of people bear the brunt of this systemic failure.

Implementing the justice in utility justice is a fundamental key to rebuilding Americans' faith in democracy and in our clean energy future. The holes in our utility-infrastructure-as-social-fabric might have foretold the national mood overall ahead of the 2024 presidential election. In past blogs and sporadic posts on social media, I've recorded the then-current count of Americans who self-report feeling extreme energy insecurity. It wobbles between 40 and 60 million.^[2] Nathan Tankus made a strong case for viewing the election as a resounding judgment on our social safety net and, more precisely, the painful absence created by its removal over the last few years. During the pandemic, in the midst of one of the deepest crises of survival most of us have ever exerpienced, we started to also experience life in a country with less poverty because of direct government support and care. We could restart this effort as the climate crisis intensifies to show that our institutions can deliver.

It will take more than restarting these programs, although that would be a good place to begin. Under the laws governing utility systems under private ownership, one of the primary guarantees made to the owners is a continuous profit. To make a better future possible, we have to choose to leave behind this political arrangement that require there to be enormous populations of losers for the benefit of a few "winners." An unacceptable alternative for me is an energy transition that succeeds on the fossil part, but accepts millions or billions of human deaths as an acceptable cost on the way. Like philosopher and Georgetown professor Dr. Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, I think the state can most quickly materialize the sheer volume of resources needed to combat the interrelated crises of the decimation of intergenerational mobility, climate damage and human displacement, and the economic and political power of the fossil fuel industry.

The driving animus of my approach to climate policy isn't based in a question of whether or how we sufficiently address the climate crisis, it's who will survive as we do? Currently that answer is directly linked to a person's individual wealth. But I want the end of the mid-transition period to be marked by the successful transition away from the cause of the climate crisis, the fossil economy, with as many people flourishing as possible. Many of us working at the intersection of poverty and infrastructure all share this goal, but succeeding requires all of us changing our ideas about utilities, what it means to have them, and, more specifically, what it means to be structurally excluded from them.

Who and what ideas inspired my thinking about defining utility justice?

Water, electricity, and the internet. All of our utility systems enter the places we hold most precious and sacred, our homes.^[3] Thousands of miles of infrastructure, meticulously planned and built to meet us and make life in our modern society possible. In an interview about her book Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation for feminist magazine Jezebel, geographer and abolitionist Dr. Ruth Wilson Gilmore describes freedom as "a physical, tangible place". She's using the geographer's definition of place, and she says that freedom, then, is a set of real-life conditions that we can make happen.

Gilmore explains that this isn't a platitude, and specifies, “‘freedom is a place’ means we combine resources, ingenuity, and commitment to produce the conditions in which life is precious for all." We are far from freedom in a society with extreme police violence and the everyday, continuous structural violence I described above.^[4] But in my constant seeking of ways to get closer, believing it takes more raw people power to get there, Gilmore's proposal inspires me to think and act as part of an abolitionist movement in addition to being in a climate, energy, housing, or health movement. It helps orient my daily work. It helps me more concretely evaluate whether conditions I'm advancing make life precious for all or just some.

"'Freedom is a place' means we combine resources, ingenuity, and commitment to produce the conditions in which life is precious for all…"

~ Ruth Wilson Gilmore in Jezebel, June 21, 2022

It was in Táíwò's book Elite Capture that I was introduced to language that could describe a way forward. Putting Táíwò's analysis in conversation with Gilmore's, I began to think that creating the types of conditions Gilmore describes requires what Táíwò calls a constructive politics, "one that engages directly in the task of redistributing social resources and power." A constructive politics is a politics that doesn't merely build, but redistributes.

Within his writing that one journalist described as "a theory of everything", Táíwò also summarizes how activists and movement workers have been proposing a new way to consider the project of reparations, repairing the world, and repairing our relationships with one another. Táíwò highlights the work of the environmental justice movement, rapidly reducing our climate emissions, and connects it to the work of building new places. On an episode of For The Wild's podcast, Táíwò defines reparations as figuratively and physically, tangibly "building the kind of world we want to live in, building the just world." He says this will take aligning money, time, knowledge, with power, specifically who is involved in making decisions and how we make decision collectively.

"In general, a constructive politics is one that engages directly in the task of redistributing social resources and power…"

~ Olufemi O. Táíwò in Elite Capture

If freedom is a place that we can make as Gilmore illuminates for us, then Táíwò is offering that we can make freedom through climate investments that act as reparations. These reparative, restorative investments must eliminate the present conditions we are experiencing and shape the future conditions we will live in. In my view, this requires setting and pursuing completely different goals than the ones many people are busy implementing now, following past patterns of investment. If we're successful imagining infrastructure in this new way together, our collective choices about a new set of goals will have a profound and lasting impact on the construction of physical, tangible systems that will shape the places we live and our lives themselves for another 50-100 years.

With this teaching in mind, a clear focus for my own work of social and political struggle directed at large utility systems has emerged, tied to my own convictions about issues of feminism, queer liberation, and racial justice. So, I want to offer my evolving definition for utility justice in this time of increasing uncertainty.^[5] My hope is that sharing this can spark other conversations about this definition with you and others and, with the workers and communities we organize alongside, can help us find more points of unity across multiple sorts of activism together.

This definition draws from my practice as an energy advocate and an engineer applying my skills, perspective, and labor on questions of buildings science, energy efficiency, building electrification, low income program design, affordable housing, tenant rights, public financing, coalition development, systems change, philanthropic innovation, utility structures, and public power. I've worked for the past 7 years with others in front of public utility commissions, state legislatures, and philanthropic decision makers to make just a few of these conditions more possible, to interrupt the laws and policy designs that produce energy injustice. So from here on I'll be specific when I'm talking about energy utility systems and use 'utility systems' when I'm trying to make a broader point.

What are current conditions in this context of energy utility systems?

Many different pieces of relevant information to the energy utility system could go here. I'll highlight just a few. We know that fossil fuel emissions are driving the climate crisis, and we know that these emissions and their physical force on the planet's systems are increasing the rate of change in our environment. This is a global issue. All over the world, we are not just experiencing hotter days, we are seeing more of those hotter days, too. This has physical, tangible impacts, like infrastructure failing under too much stress, people suffering from heat exhaustion, sometimes fatally, and workers outside dying on the job from heat stroke.

These fossil fuel emissions are coming from many sources, including a major portion from the power plants of our energy utility systems that make electricity, the stuff we need to run more air conditioning in the summer, more heating in the winter, and the pumps that move water around for drinking, bathing, and cooking. These emissions from power plants create toxic indoor and outdoor air pollution. Using the environmental justice framing, the burden of illness and death caused by toxic pollution is the result of specific political and economic choices. It's a settled matter that these political and economic choices contribute to asthma, respiratory diseases, and shorter life expectancy, creating common cause with abolitionist analysis about making life more precious.

And most of the fossil fuel emissions from electricity generation are made to run the buildings we live, work, and play in. So, grid decarbonization and pollution elimination have arisen as a top priority for every environmental justice community, and building decarbonization has arisen as a twin, recognizing that we need to take the systems view of the climate crisis and its cause. In both cases, the energy utility system acts as a link. It is a link across space as it physically connects all of the power plants to our homes and buildings and factories. And it is a link across time as it continuously has created harmful outcomes that has affected real people and will continue to as long as the transition remains incomplete.

The reparative solution to this problem is decarbonization, the absence of fossil fuels in society, from our energy systems, and from our homes. I should note here the obvious: if we are successful, we will both make people's lives longer and healthier and we will create a permanent interruption to the profits of the fossil fuel industry. The first requires the second.

"Reparations…is building the kind of world we want to live in, building the just world."

~ Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò in For The Wild, January 6, 2021

Thinking about these conditions in this way can bring a heady, sometimes abstract conception of climate change into a physical, tangible place, as Gilmore encourages us to. The fossil fuel emissions that circulate in our global atmosphere come from power plants you can drive to, you can see, you can touch, and those power plants burn stuff that gets into our homes, into our lungs, and changes our lives. A public health educator I heard in an organizing meeting once described the differences in life expectancy statistics as the chances of "living long enough to see your first grandchild enter the world, or not." Whew.

The last set of conditions I'll mention here are about our homes. Climate justice is a housing justice project from this perspective, and we can ask questions about who has decision making power over their homes. We can ask: who owns and who rents their home? What is the racial breakdown of the people who have power and who do not? Of the people who do not, who is the most vulnerable to the harms caused by climate change? In disasters? Everyday? Of all of us, who has money, time, knowledge, or power to change those conditions? Now or in the future? Who is not even being included in this project of climate-justice-as-housing-justice because they've already been evicted? Imprisoned?

What is utility justice?

All of us working on utility law, policy, and operation can choose to change our work in order to create opportunities for collaboration with more progressive social movements not fewer. To that end, I want to offer a reparative definition for utility justice that relies on the expanded descriptions from Gilmore and Táíwò above.

Utility justice requires a specific set of goals for our public utility systems that redistribute power and resources, investing in the creation of new conditions for providing utility services at our homes in order to treat life as precious for all.

To make this specific to the energy utility system, I'll call back the earlier definitions I gave for decarbonization. Decarbonization of the grid and of our buildings is the twinned goal for our energy utility system today, and in sum is the absence of fossil fuels from our energy systems and from our homes. Gilmore says of prison abolition, "Abolition is about presence, not absence. It's about building life-affirming institutions."

What is decarbonization as a project oriented towards presence, not absence? Paring back some of the academic language that helped me think my way here, here is my simple offering of an abolitionist goal for decarbonization as a utility justice project.

Everyone has the electricity they need to live and flourish.

This statement is unconditional. It addresses the climate crisis unflinchingly without diminishing the equally grave crisis of poverty and historic and ongoing inequality. It accounts for the legacies of slavery and colonialism by offering an vision of a world remade completely differently. And in practice it has helped me more clearly define my work. It's helped me communicate more clearly in conversations with other organizers and comrades about our collective vision and the disagreements we might have about that vision. It's helped me identify more clearly who is and isn't ready to join a bigger movement that is building the just world.

For me, accomplishing utility justice would look like everyone living indoors, in a safe, healthy, energy efficient, and fossil free home, quickly. It would mean no one is living out of their cars, on sidewalks, under bridges, or in prisons. It would look like everyone enjoying electricity generated from renewable energy resources, like hydropower, wind, solar with batteries and materials justly sourced around the world. It would mean electricity wasn't provided with a threat of shutoffs, a threat that can give license for family police forces to separate children from their parents, that can give a landlord a legal reason to evict, that causes people to give up food and essential medicine, and a variety of other coping mechanisms.

Utility justice, like freedom, is a place we can build together.

For the space to develop and workshop these ideas with young people, I am indebted to my friends who invited me into their classrooms and to the students and teaching assistants who provided critical feedback. Most especially I thank Dr. Meg Mills-Novoa, who gave me repeated opportunities to workshop this at the University of California Berkeley over several years. I'm also grateful to Justin Schott at the University of Michigan; Dr. Michael Wara and Dr. Michael Mastrandrea at Stanford Law; and Dr. Emily Grubert at Notre Dame. These ideas were originally presented in a style of participatory learning I've learned in the environmental justice movement, and conversations in their classrooms over two years immensely shaped what I have written here to share with all of you. Thanks for reading.