Communities of color are using this year’s Black History Month to advocate for health and wellness, including calling attention to environmental justice and equity.

Those who live in predominantly Black or African American communities suffer greater risk of premature death from particle air pollution than those who live in predominantly white communities.

Cathryn McGill, executive director of the New Mexico Black Leadership Council, said when states craft policies related to environmental issues, Black and brown communities need to be at the table, especially as they relate to health.

“If we start to say, what are the underlying themes and conditions and why Black children are being diagnosed with autism more often, or that we have infant mortality issues in certain areas,” McGill outlined.

A new study from Nature Climate Change found in less than 30 years, U.S. flood risk will increase by 26%, a risk projected to disproportionately impact Black communities, particularly along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts.

McGill argued climate change needs to be a “big tent” conversation to ensure all people, regardless of race and ethnicity, get equal protection.

“One thing that we can do right now in the Black communities is to create infrastructure,” McGill emphasized. “So that when issues come up we have the ability to address them, and we have the ability to mobilize our communities.”

President Joe Biden’s more than one trillion-dollar Build Back Better spending package is cited as a step toward reducing health disparities in communities of color. The package includes new funding for improving energy efficiency in affordable housing and boosting tax credits for renewable-energy generation serving low-income communities.

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California only got a “D” grade on this year’s Environmental Scorecard, a report card put out each year since 1973 by the nonprofit California Environmental Voters.

The low score mostly comes from inaction on the many climate bills that stalled in the state Senate, even though Democrats have a supermajority. Mary Creasman, CEO of California Environmental Voters, said many Democratic lawmakers talk a good game but then vote to delay climate action.

“We actually have the solution and the technology,” said Creasman, “and all of those things are actually job creators too, and will advance our economy. What we don’t have is the political will to do it at the rate and scale that science tells us we have to.”

Opponents of climate-action bills often cite the costs to business. But the report blames inaction on the influence of fossil-fuel companies – finding that 52% of Democrats and 96% of Republicans accepted campaign cash from oil interests.

The scorecard says Gov. Gavin Newsom made pro-climate decisions 82% of the time. Overall, state Democrats earned a score of 80%, while Republicans got a score of 15%.

Assemblyman Steve Bennett – D-Ventura – said it’s been tough to get colleagues to devote sufficient resources to decarbonize buildings and transportation, switch to renewables or modernize our grid and energy storage.

“Politicians don’t get popular by asking people to make sacrifices today to solve a problem that’s going to come in 15 or 20 years down the road,” said Bennett. “And that’s why we’ve been so slow in taking action on climate change.”

Former Assemblyman David Chiu, now City Attorney for San Francisco, said there is hope – if Californians work together.

“There is enough wind off the coast of California to power the entire grid with clean power while creating great jobs for tens of thousands of workers,” said Chiu. “But there is so much work we need to continue to do to advance clean-energy solutions.”

You can look up your representative’s score and read the entire report at envirovoters.org/scorecard.

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After Vladimir Putin ordered Russian troops into Ukraine, the Colorado Public Employees’ Retirement Association (PERA) withdrew $7.2 million from a Russian bank, and now, climate activists are calling on PERA to divest all of its Russian oil and gas holdings.

Devon Reynolds, a PERA member and graduate student at the University of Colorado-Boulder, said the fund currently has more than $8 million dollars invested in at least five Russian oil and gas companies.

“Moving assets out of Russian companies is being done because it’s wrong to profit off of humanitarian horrors,” Reynolds asserted. “And in the same way, moving money out of oil and gas is right because billions of people will be affected by climate change.”

The group Fossil Free PERA submitted a formal appeal this week, calling for the fund to remove all Russian oil and gas investments from its $61 billion portfolio.

A PERA spokesperson said the fund is reviewing and preparing to implement federal sanction mandates. The call for divestment comes on the heels of last week’s report by leading climate scientists warning the window for avoiding the worst impacts of a warming planet is closing.

Reynolds pointed out PERA also has a fiduciary obligation to divest in order to protect the retirement assets of its members. Scientists have said most of the world’s known fossil-fuel reserves must stay in the ground in order to avoid the most catastrophic impacts of climate change.

Reynolds noted the future of oil and gas stock values, priced in part on bringing those reserves to market, are becoming increasingly tenuous.

“If those assets become stranded, those stocks will lose value, and the investments of people’s retirements will also plummet,” Reynolds projected. “Especially long-term investments like what you see in public pension funds.”

Over $800 million in U.S. Pension Funds are currently invested in Russian oil and gas operations, according to new data from the environmental group Stand.

So far, more than 140 pension funds globally have divested from fossil fuels. It’s estimated PERA has $1.5 billion invested in more than 300 oil, gas and coal companies.

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Nevada stands to get $38 million over five years to build out electric-vehicle (EV) charging networks from the Biden administration’s newly released EV funding plan, part of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.

The Department of Motor Vehicles said Nevada now has more than 17,000 registered electric vehicles.

Marie Steele, vice president for electrification and energy services at NV Energy, said its customer surveys predict a big jump in the years to come.

“Twenty-five percent of our customers say that their next vehicle will be electric and another 25% are neutral,” Steele reported. “Certainly the number is growing, and we’re anticipating that more is going to be online soon.”

She added Nevada’s Electric Highway program is well on its way to placing an EV charging station every 50 miles, especially on I-15 and I-80. And NV Energy is offering a $2,500 rebate to help low-income families buy an electric vehicle.

Christi Cabrera, policy and advocacy director for the Nevada Conservation League, noted Nevada’s new vehicle emissions standards will go into effect in 2025.

“Last October, we passed the clean-car standards,” Cabrera recounted. “Nevada will be getting more electric vehicles on our lots.”

By statute, Nevada must prioritize low-income areas, rural areas and tribal lands when placing new EV charging stations.

Larissa Koehler, senior energy attorney for the Environmental Defense Fund, said those communities will also benefit as more zero-emissions trucks and buses hit the road.

“It’ll be critically important, most notably in disadvantaged communities that are really disproportionately impacted by truck and bus pollution, to make sure that we’re prioritizing those communities and making sure that the benefits of electric vehicles are seen,” Koehler remarked.

A recent analysis from the Environmental Defense Fund found we could prevent 57,000 premature deaths nationwide and eliminate 4.7 billion metric tons of pollution by 2050, if we switch over to zero-emission freight trucks and buses by 2040 in urban areas, and by 2035 in urban and community areas.

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