A Lasting Equity Legacy
Until recently, it wasn’t popular to talk about energy justice. Although many policymakers and advocates recognized the urgency of dismantling fossil fuel systems and shifting to renewable energy, few within the mainstream climate movement paid attention to the needs of communities most harmed by the fossil-fuel economy.
That’s a dynamic far too familiar to Shalanda Baker, a law professor, energy justice scholar, and former director of the Office of Energy Justice and Equity at the Department of Energy under President Biden. Over three and a half years, Baker was the lead architect of the Justice40 initiative, a first-of-its kind program to direct 40 percent of the benefits of climate investments to disadvantaged communities. The program was the centerpiece of the administration’s environmental justice agenda and part of the greatest shift in history toward incorporating equity in federal climate policy.
It was also a watershed moment for Baker, who had warned against replicating the harms and injustices of the fossil fuel industry for most of her career. For many years, even in the environmental field, “Folks weren’t thinking about equity around climate,” Baker says today. “They were more concerned with tackling the climate crisis, and the best path to do that was through large-scale clean energy projects.”
Building huge solar and wind farms might seem like a straightforward way to replace oil, gas, and coal. But as a law professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and later at Northeastern University in Boston, Baker’s work with Indigenous and rural communities in Hawaii and Mexico displaced by large-scale clean energy projects revealed to her how pursuing climate solutions at the expense of people leads to “the same violence and economic exclusion in the clean energy economy that exists within the fossil fuel economy,” Baker writes in her 2021 book Revolutionary Power: An Activist’s Guide to the Energy Transition.
Baker calls this limited approach “climate change fundamentalism.” Simply swapping in clean energy ignores the reality that our most pervasive social injustices are intimately tied to and caused by the existing energy system. Polluting energy facilities are disproportionately sited in low-income communities and communities of color, resulting in far greater rates of cancer and respiratory diseases than the national average. Those groups also face higher energy burdens, meaning that more of their income goes toward utilities, and are hit hardest by climate change-fueled disasters.
For those reasons and more, Baker argues in her book, energy policy is a matter of civil rights. Climate change requires a complete retooling of the energy system, and “positions those without power—namely Brown and Black people, low-income communities, and communities of color—to become both architects and beneficiaries” of that system, she writes. Whether centering the input of communities to create energy projects, securing clean energy jobs for workers, or expanding access to locally owned solar, policies should “take into consideration past harms and burdens of the energy system” and “involve those most impacted” in their design.
Without knowing it, Baker’s years of research and advocacy were preparing her for the chance to put those ideas into action through federal policy. In the winter of 2020, she received a call asking her to lead Justice40. During her tenure, she would end up overseeing tens of billions of dollars in funding for federal climate programs, spearheading an energy justice office that tripled in size, and leading the charge to embed equity into DOE’s mission and work.
Baker grew up in Austin, Texas, and attended the Air Force Academy. As “a Black, queer, young woman,” she entered the military during the height of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy that banned openly LGBTQ people from serving in the military, she writes in Revolutionary Power. She later attended law school at Northeastern University. After a stint in project finance law, Baker bought a one-way ticket to the city of Oaxaca in southern Mexico “with the only sure thing being that I would work with someone, somewhere, against injustice,” she recounts in her book.
There, her passion for energy justice was sparked while hearing Indigenous activists from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec share their struggles against large-scale wind development. “An electric current moved through my spine,” she writes. “I knew, in that moment, that this tension—between Indigenous rights and clean energy, between the rush to avert catastrophic climate change and social justice—would form the foundation of my work as an activist and scholar.”
Baker’s learnings eventually followed her to a law professorship at University of Hawaii at Manoa, where she founded an energy justice program and spent years engaging with communities as the state charted a path to 100 percent renewable energy by 2045. Conversations about energy policy and development often focused on high electricity prices and the issue of land, Baker says, given the archipelago’s history of colonization and displacement of Indigenous communities.
Baker continued to see those same tensions play out around the world. As a Fulbright research scholar in Mexico, Baker hosted workshops with communities impacted by wind and solar projects. She explored these issues on a national level as a law professor at Northeastern, where she co-founded the Initiative for Energy Justice, a group that supports frontline organizers and policymakers.
But it was only while writing her book that she realized just how much her own upbringing was rooted in these issues. “The more I wrote, the more I realized, ‘Oh, my dad and my lineage are a part of this country’s environmental justice story,’” she says. Baker’s father grew up in Port Arthur, Texas, a low-income, majority Black and Latinx community on the Gulf Coast, where much of the country’s oil, gas, and petrochemical infrastructure is sited. “It is a true sacrifice zone,” Baker writes in Revolutionary Power. High exposure to toxic emissions and other hazards have led to soaring rates of cancer, asthma, and other chronic diseases. “Like his mother and his eldest brother, my father died way too young of heart disease. Like his father and brothers, and so many Americans, he made a good living in the energy industry,” Baker said during her Senate confirmation hearing in 2021.
Baker’s mother, meanwhile, raised her in a single-parent household with a civil service income that disqualified them from public assistance but made it difficult to afford energy bills. “Like one in three American households, 52.2 percent of Black American households, and 61.5 percent of Native American households, we used the oven to warm our apartment,” Baker told the Senate. “In the summers, my sister and I spent days on end in the public library to keep cool.”
“I was nervous to write about my family,” Baker remembers. “But then I started to see the connection to the data” and realized that these are widespread, structural issues, she says. “For me, it was this light bulb moment. This is why I’m doing this work.”
In January 2021, Baker was a day-one DOE political appointee as deputy director for energy justice. On Earth Day of that year, President Biden nominated her as director of the department’s Office of Economic Impact and Diversity, which Baker later renamed as the Office of Energy Justice and Equity upon confirmation. She also served as Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm’s advisor on equity throughout her time in office.
Much of Baker’s work centered around leading the Justice40 initiative, created through an executive order issued by Biden during his first week in office. The directive required agencies to ensure 40 percent of benefits from federal investments in climate, clean energy, transportation, housing, pollution reduction, and infrastructure flowed to underserved communities. Programs under Justice40 received a huge boost in funding from the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. As of November 2023, 518 programs across 19 agencies were covered under the Justice40 initiative.
“The first year was breakneck,” Baker describes today. Her job involved not only leading Justice40 efforts, but also incorporating equity into the work of a largely technology- and research-focused agency. That required educating thousands of DOE employees on energy and environmental justice issues. It also entailed addressing those challenges within the agency itself: In September 2022, DOE released its first diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility strategy, outlining the agency’s steps toward creating a more equitable workplace.
Baker built up a team of dedicated employees to support those efforts. She also established the agency’s first policy frameworks to expand access to benefits under the Justice40 initiative, including its first-ever equity action plans, which mapped out how to collect data on and increase funding to underrepresented groups.
The agency also created a framework for community benefits plans, documents that applicants for DOE funding must submit in order to receive money. Plans outline how companies will engage with stakeholders to deliver 40 percent of overall benefits to communities, in line with the Justice40 initiative. DOE also launched a Regional Energy Democracy Initiative in the Gulf South, which provided funding and created hubs for local organizations to receive assistance with negotiating community benefits plans.
TODAY, Baker shares mixed feelings about the outcomes of her time at the agency. On one hand, the department achieved a transformative paradigm shift. “The Department of Energy became the federal leader on Justice40 and demonstrated how you embed justice into policy,” Baker says. “By the end of it, I would say every single office at the department was engaged in justice and equity in some way.”
On the other hand, “40 percent was never going to be enough” to remedy the centuries of slave labor, immigrant labor, and exploitation of communities that form the bedrock of the country’s energy system, says Baker. When she first entered office, she had hoped to carry out the ideas introduced in her book, such as community-owned energy assets and locally led projects. But federal energy development policies are designed to promote industrial projects and mostly benefit corporate players, she says.
“I was asked to make industrial policy work for communities of color, low-income communities, and other impacted groups including rural white frontline communities,” she says. “In some ways, it was battling a 400-year-old problem because industrial policy and economic development in this country have always been exploitative.” Community benefits plans, for example, were one of the best policies “we could do within the constraints of the system we had,” she says. “But it was never enough.”
Last September, Baker returned to academia, this time to the University of Michigan as their inaugural vice provost for sustainability and climate action and a tenured faculty member. She’s now tackling the “new puzzle” of finding ways for universities to engage communities and translate academic work to climate action.
Meanwhile, President Trump has quickly worked to dismantle the Biden administration’s progress on climate and equity. On his first day in office, Trump revoked dozens of Biden’s executive orders, ending the Justice40 initiative and other federal environmental justice programs. As of the Forum’s conversation with Baker in late January, half of the Office of Energy Justice and Equity staff had been placed on administrative leave as a result of those orders.
Despite the new administration’s efforts, some of her office’s work will survive the backlash, Baker says. Community benefits plans under already finalized contracts, for example, will be difficult to claw back. But more importantly, policies that prioritized communities have already reshaped the clean energy industry and attitudes around the transition, Baker says today.
“We moved industry and how they think about development,” she says. “Communities now know that if they’re not engaged, if they’re not getting benefits from this transition, then they should protest. They should demand more from their states and from private industry, and they should be at the table—because they deserve a seat.”
PROFILE Shalanda Baker, who ran President Biden’s Justice40 Initiative at the Energy Department, which funneled billions to disadvantaged communities, says the now disbanded program permanently changed the culture and conversation over race, climate change, and energy policy.
