Hurricane Katrina is still what many of us picture when we think of an extreme weather event pummeling a city’s poorest residents. Katrina took 1,833 lives when it hit New Orleans in 2005 and displaced a million people, many of whom lacked the money to get out of harm’s way.
“Solving the Climate Crisis: Frontline Reports from the Race to Save the Earth” by John J. Berger. Seven Stories Press. Publication date: October 24, 2023
That vulnerability is not unusual: Floodwaters rose six feet deep along the coast of Puerto Rico in 2017, just thirty minutes after Hurricane Maria hit land with 155 mph winds. Most of the displaced there also were poor and lacked the resources to flee their homes or rebuild. Floods, storms, extreme heat, and dangerous air quality caused by climate change threaten low-income communities daily, especially in parts of cities where low-income people live and work.
Cities in the United States tend to be hotter by as much as 7 degrees Fahrenheit than the surrounding countryside. But during a heat wave, low-income neighborhoods with little shade can be 20 to 22 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than the leafier parts of town. In rural communities, wildfires—made more frequent and extreme due to climate change-induced drought and heat waves—cause dangerous air pollution, a serious health risk that climate disruption only compounds. Higher temperatures increase the rate of photochemical reactions in the atmosphere, which create ground-level ozone, a potent air pollutant. Poor air quality is also part of life near busy freeways, ports, or other polluting industrial sites. And many low-wage jobs, including manual labor, like harvesting crops, painting houses, or repairing roads—especially jobs where masks and protective clothing aren’t provided—put workers at risk for respiratory disease.
Climate disruption poses a greater threat to low-income communities for two other reasons. First, homes in these neighborhoods are likely to be structurally less resilient to natural disasters and to lack air-conditioning or proper insulation. Low-income people are also more likely than average to suffer from preexisting health conditions, which makes them more vulnerable to additional health challenges caused by heat, displacement, flooding, smoke, and disease vectors such as ticks and mosquitoes. Residents in disadvantaged communities suffer higher rates of cancer, asthma, heart disease, stroke, and systemic ailments (like diabetes), and are further challenged by having less access to medical care.
While low-income communities need more assistance to deal with the impacts of climate disruption, this population, across the nation, often gets less government help than the more affluent. It’s clear that more funding is needed to make sure that lower-income communities receive not just their statistically equal share of clean-energy dollars, but additional resources to mitigate the disproportionate climate impacts they face.
No one is more aware of this than Vien Truong, a leader in the environmental justice and climate-protection movements. Truong has spearheaded the passage of major state legislation that is funneling billions of dollars to low-income and disadvantaged communities for programs that reduce carbon emissions and improve local residents’ lives and health. She is an attorney, political activist, coalition builder, and nonprofit organization leader and a driving force behind climate legislation that benefits the communities most affected by climate change.
Truong sees environmental and climate policy “as a bridge to address other issues,” including economic inequality. She has devoted much of her career to advancing policies to create an equitable and inclusive green economy. The coalitions of community and social service organizations she helped create and lead are responsible for the drafting and passage of two landmark California statutes known as Senate Bill 535 and Senate Bill 1275. Both reduce carbon emissions and improve people’s lives and health; the former statute created the largest fund in the state’s history for California’s poorest and most polluted communities.
Truong is the youngest of eleven children whose family came to the United States as refugees from Vietnam. Her family first worked as migrant laborers, picking strawberries and snow peas in Oregon. Then they moved to California to work in garment sweatshops, from which they also brought piecework home. Truong grew up during the 1980s—the “crack years”—in a poor neighborhood of West Oakland between Twentieth and Twenty-Ninth Avenues, along International Boulevard, known for its high murder rate. Instead of lullabies, she went to sleep every night hearing gunshots and sirens, though she nonetheless sensed that this was not normal.
The neighborhood public schools she attended were also violent, with fighting in the classrooms and on school grounds. Community services were underfunded, leaving students with few opportunities. But, to make sure that at least one person in the family went to college, Truong’s older siblings tutored her. Seizing every advantage, she resolved not only to escape West Oakland, but also to create programs to help communities like hers end poverty and environmental pollution. “Throughout my life,” she said, “I always had the sense that things could be better in my community” . . . .
Once she became an attorney, she clerked for a federal judge and served on the staff of a California state senator before holding leadership posts at nonprofit organizations, such as the Dream Corps (now Dream.org) and the Greenlining Institute . . . .
More funding is needed to make sure that lower-income communities receive not just their statistically equal share of clean-energy dollars, but additional resources to mitigate the disproportionate climate impacts they face.
No matter what job title Truong held, however, her goal was always to improve the quality of life in disadvantaged communities, lower the cost of living there, and bring change through environmental policies. Working at the intersection of social and climate justice, she used her education and understanding of the law to create programs and policies to bring new investment to communities like the ones she grew up in.
At the Dream Corps, where she was president and chief executive officer, Truong worked for climate and criminal justice, successfully creating policies that “close prison doors and open doors of opportunity for all.” She was also the national director for Green for All, one of the Dream Corps’s social-impact initiatives. It was indeed a perfect fit: Green for All’s goal is to build a green economy while lifting people out of poverty.
“The two biggest problems facing our country—and the world—are runaway climate change and rising inequality,” Truong said. “We can’t fully solve one without addressing the other. If we eliminate racism and poverty but do nothing to address climate pollution, we’ll all be equal on a planet plagued by floods, drought, disease, and disasters. And we can’t win on climate unless we build a bigger and broader movement that meets the needs of the hardest-hit Americans. We’re working to turn the tide on both fronts.”
After holding a number of positions and founding her own law firm, Truong subsequently moved on and assumed her current post as director of global engagement and sustainability for Nike, where she oversees the sustainability practices of the world’s largest manufacturer of athletic footwear, apparel, and sports equipment and its supply chain. Her prior grassroots community-organizing efforts, which ultimately brought her to public attention, have by now influenced not only local but also state and national environmental and economic policies. She was also part of two presidential campaigns, helping to write the presidential platform for candidate Tom Steyer and serving as a member of the Biden-Harris campaign’s Clean Energy Advisory Council.
She is also a recipient of a White House Champions of Change Award for her work on climate equity. One of her passions has been to help direct clean tech investment to ethnic and minority communities. Her work may have played a role in convincing President Joe Biden to stipulate during his campaign that 40 percent of his proposed climate investments would go to programs benefiting disadvantaged communities.
When I first met Truong in 2015, she was directing the Greenlining Institute’s environmental equity program. Her goal was to simultaneously improve the quality of people’s lives and their environment. To Truong, this meant making homes more affordable, making transportation systems more efficient and reliable, and providing good jobs with career ladders. She saw the linkage between attaining environmental goals and community improvement. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions on roads and by factories reduces neighborhood pollution and helps reduce the cost of living, as more energy-efficient housing requires less energy, lowering emissions along with family energy bills.
In 2022, programs that Truong was instrumental in designing began providing free and low-cost energy efficiency and free and low-cost solar panels to low-income families. The low-income communities Truong worked with most are often close to roads with heavy traffic. One of the laws she helped write while at the Greenlining Institute, California Senate Bill 1275, provides money for electrifying trucks and buses. That, she says, is a huge issue in “impacted environmental justice communities . . . especially West Oakland.” Those communities are often more affordable in part because they’re located in hazardous areas with poor air quality near factories, oil refineries, coal power plants, ports, incinerators, and toxic waste sites. Sometimes they’re located in flood-prone coastal areas, yet residents may be unable to afford or obtain flood insurance. When rivers overflow into flood zones or rising seas flood toxic waste sites, low-income communities are disproportionately affected. “We have to figure out a way to start thinking of environmentalism as not just the John Muirs of the world, but beginning to see it as an equity and [environmental justice] issue,” Truong said.
“The programs that we want to get funded are the ones that have triple-bottom-line benefits,” she told me when I visited the Greenlining Institute. In her role there, she advocated for programs that created well-paying jobs with a career ladder, provided “the most bang for our buck in terms of reducing greenhouse gases,” and planted trees to help cool overheated, unshaded neighborhoods. She sees such programs as vehicles that could help address income inequality. “We have a bigger income divide now than for a long time, so we want to begin bridging that.”
By working on behalf of Green for All and the Greenlining Institute with community groups, legislators, and broad coalitions she helped build, Truong and her allies, in 2012, got a “Disadvantaged Communities Designation” provision added to SB 535, which sets aside 25 percent of the revenue from the state’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund for disadvantaged communities. Then, in 2014, they were instrumental in the drafting and passage of SB 1275.
The earmarked proceeds from the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which were later raised to 35 percent of revenues, are generated by carbon cap-and-trade allowance auctions. The revenues are then invested in low-income and disadvantaged communities; the money can be spent to improve public health, quality of life, and economic opportunity while reducing the fossil fuel pollution that causes climate change. As of 2021, SB 535, with its “polluter pays” pot of money, had directed $5.5 billion to low-income communities and communities of color to improve both the environment and people’s daily lives. “This is the biggest pot of money ever for environmental justice communities,” Truong said, “and it’s from big polluters, not taxpayers!”
These funds, she pointed out, went to programs such as free and low-cost energy efficiency and free and low-cost solar panels for low-income communities and families. You can see these investments play out in concrete ways for people, she said. “It’s getting money for electrifying the trucks and buses in impacted environmental justice communities, which is a huge issue in places like the Bay Area, Long Beach, [and] especially for West Oakland. It went to thousands and thousands of free trees in urban jungles and for affordable housing in transit-oriented development.”
One family in California’s Central Valley whom Truong’s work benefited previously had a $200 summer monthly energy bill. “Now it’s $1.50, because they have solar panels,” Truong said. “That’s real. That’s concrete, and that’s a significant savings.”
Truong, the daughter of migrant farmworkers, has also helped bring pilot van-sharing programs to rural farmworkers without drivers’ licenses through rural ride-sharing programs supported by SB 535.
“[Senate Bill 535] began looking at investments into our transit systems, our bus systems, our affordable housing, and those are things that low-income communities/people of color care deeply about,” Truong noted. “For us to have a national movement around climate change, we have to begin looking at climate changes as a way that addresses those fundamental community issues and [as] not divorced from [them].”
The other legislation Truong, for years, lobbied for and helped draft, SB 1275, known as the Charge Ahead California Initiative, accelerates the transformation of California’s vehicle fleet to electric vehicles and has a target of getting a million electric vehicles on California’s roads by 2033. “That includes passenger vehicles all the way to heavy-duty trucks and buses,” Truong said.
Since SB 1275 was passed, however, California has forged ahead and adopted the goal of putting five million zero-emission vehicles on the road by 2030. SB 1275 also has an interesting “retire-and-replace” program—a “cash-for-clunkers” provision—to help get polluting vehicles off the road. The law includes a financing program for low-income families to receive subsidies for the purchase of used electric cars, with some families able to acquire one for as little as $500. Since so much low-income housing is located near busy, polluted traffic arteries, the air pollution reduction that electric cars bring locally would be particularly welcome.
In terms of an overarching strategy to serve disadvantaged communities, Truong argues that people need to work together on specific issues that not only bring environmentalists together but also appeal more broadly to labor groups, educators, low-income communities of color, civil rights leaders, and health leaders. For her, the call to action needed to unite everyone is embodied in two questions: “What kind of world do you want to live in? What does it look like?” Truong continues, “Wouldn’t it be great if we [had a] world that had clean air, in which kids of all skin colors played together, and in which we all had access to a decent job and never had to go to a gas station again? Wouldn’t it be great if we didn’t have twice as many people dying from traffic pollution as from traffic accidents?”
Excerpted from Solving the Climate Crisis: Frontline Reports from the Race to Save the Earth by John J. Berger. Copyright © 2023. Published by Seven Stories Press. Used with permission.