Berkeley Talks

In Berkeley Talks episode 228, Tony Reames, a professor of environmental justice at the University of Michigan, discusses how the U.S. energy system has persistently harmed marginalized communities, a result of legacies of government-sanctioned policies, like redlining, land theft and resource extraction. He goes on to emphasize the need for intentional efforts to undo these harms. “When we think about energy justice, the goal is to achieve equity in both the social and economic participation in our energy system,” says Reames, who served as deputy director for energy justice at the U.S. Department of Energy during the Biden-Harris administration.In 2015, he says, some 14% of U.S. households couldn’t afford their energy bills, and 21% had to decide between buying food and medicine or paying their energy bills. Eleven percent were keeping their homes at an unhealthy temperature, either too hot or too cold, because they couldn’t afford energy or they couldn’t repair their HVAC system. Higher proportions of