President Joe Biden came to the White House almost four years ago promising to build his climate agenda around equity.
He’ll leave in January with some successes, like ramping up community investment and cracking down on pollution dumped in poor, Black and Brown neighborhoods. But environmental justice advocates say the Biden administration’s support for technologies that capture and store carbon dioxide has been a blind spot that detracts from the president’s overall legacy.
Maria Lopez-Nuñez of the Ironbound Community Corp. in Newark, New Jersey, said the administration’s environmental justice record was a study in contradictions.
“They’ve done a very poor job with carbon management, and this is the first time we’ve seen environmental justice-specific dollars hit the ground, and that it’s making a big difference in the lives of a lot of people across the country,” said Lopez-Nuñez, who serves on the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council. “I can praise the administration for [community investments], but I have to hold them accountable for the lack of community engagement around experimental technologies and the preference for industry.”
The federal government is sprinting to obligate funds under Biden’s signature climate and infrastructure laws. That includes funding for projects that suck carbon out of the air or capture it at smokestacks. The 2021 infrastructure package provided $12 billion for carbon capture and storage and direct air capture (DAC) through 2026, while the 2022 climate law expanded valuable tax credits for those technologies.
But as it labors to spend carbon management dollars, the administration is also grappling with entrenched opposition by many environmental justice advocates. They say the technologies are experimental and could flood low-income communities with more public health and environmental problems than benefits.
The White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council (WHEJAC) — a high-level advisory body created by the Biden administration — has raised concerns about federal climate dollars supporting the proliferation of industrial carbon capture and removal facilities in disadvantaged communities.
“This investment in ‘experimentation’ of technology that lacks sufficient research of both its safety and efficacy further creates barriers of distrust between impacted communities, particularly those who have been historically and currently disenfranchised, and the respective government agencies,” the group wrote last year in a letter to White House Council on Environmental Quality Chair Brenda Mallory.
The Department of Energy, which administers carbon management grants, loans and loan guarantees, has tried to shore up support for carbon capture and direct air capture by sponsoring a slew of public meetings near communities where projects are planned.
DOE also took public comment before finalizing a set of responsible carbon management principles this summer aimed at mitigating potential harms and maximizing community benefits.
But WHEJAC has delivered two sets of recommendations to the White House that went well beyond DOE’s recommendations, calling on federal agencies to end support for industrial carbon management — or at least give communities veto power over projects in their midst. The advisory body also demanded a more detailed and public accounting of a project’s risks than the department has required.
Environmental justice advocates say it’s unclear how their input is being incorporated as DOE begins to disburse its climate and infrastructure law largess.
“I think you’d have to ask the government, right?” said Peggy Shepard, WHEJAC co-chair and executive director of WE ACT for Environmental Justice, when asked whether the administration was incorporating the WHEJAC’s recommendations.
“There’s no way I’m going to know unless the CEQ says we have implemented these two recommendations that you made, and they’ve not said that,” said Shepard, who serves on WHEJAC’s carbon management working group.
Outreach backfires
Jennifer Hadayia, executive director of the Houston Air Alliance, said an alphabet soup of DOE offices sent staff to the Gulf Coast so frequently to hold public meetings that she’d begun to lose track.
“It’s like you need an org chart of DOE to understand every single one of these events that keep happening,” she said. ”They are zero to 60 miles an hour, full steam ahead, on every one of their projects.”
Next month, DOE is funding a series of workshops in three Texas communities where carbon capture projects are planned. Public engagement is also continuing for two DOE-funded direct air capture (DAC) hubs planned for Kleberg County, Texas, and West Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana. Both projects have already received $50 million in infrastructure grants to fund the early phases of their development.
Hadayia, who said she has serious reservations about industrial carbon management, provided input ahead of next month’s meeting in Houston Ship Channel. But her fellow planning committee members were proponents of the technologies, and Hadayia said she felt her concerns were sidelined.
That’s a common complaint from environmental justice advocates who take part in the administration’s carbon management advisory bodies. The White House Council on Environmental Quality set up two task forces early last year to advise on carbon capture and storage (CCS) permitting policy. They first met in May for two days to establish subcommittees and work plans.
“It’s going to be very difficult for us to to get all the health protection measures that we want,” said Matt Holmes of California Environmental Justice Coalition, who serves on the task force dedicated to CCS permitting on federal lands.
“It feels very much lopsided,” said Holmes. “There’s a couple dozen members, and there’s four of us that I would identify as real environmental justice fighters.”
CEQ told POLITICO’s E&E News that the 2020 law that created the task forces also specified the membership make-up, which includes representatives from industry, sub-national governments and tribes. CEQ has handed over the task forces’ administration to DOE.
Paige Powell of the Texas-based nonprofit Commission Shift attended the May meeting with executive director Virginia Palacios, a member of the nonfederal lands task force. Powell noted that the panel’s stated mission was the “efficient, orderly and responsible development of carbon capture, utilization and sequestration” at an increased scale.
She said that mandate and the relatively sparse environmental justice presence on the panels indicate that safeguards and community consent won’t be a top priority.
“A lot of those concerns were really just — I don’t want to say, dismissed — but the task force leaders were like, ‘Our mission is to increase the speed at which CCS infrastructure is deployed in an efficient and orderly way,’” she said.
DOE chose the chairs of the two task forces: Tara Righetti, a professor of subsurface property law and energy regulation at the University of Wyoming, and Carbon Direct chief scientist Julio Friedmann, a strong proponent of carbon management technologies.
Righetti told E&E News that the panels couldn’t ignore Congress’ mandate: to find opportunities to expedite the permitting needed to take carbon out of the atmosphere.
“But it’s very important that we consider the needs and concerns and interests of communities when making decisions about how these projects are sited and developed,” said Righetti, who stressed she was speaking for herself and not the task force.
Righetti said there was also a reluctance to duplicate WHEJAC’s work on environmental justice. Still, she said, the permitting task forces will consider some of the same issues as they relate to CCUS permitting.
An agenda from the May meeting shows that Catherine Coleman Flowers, founder of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice, spoke about community engagement on the first day as part of a larger panel. There was also a panel devoted to community engagement on the second day that featured speakers from the National Wildlife Federation, a labor organization and Oxy, Occidental Petroleum’s carbon management subsidiary.
‘Really pissed’
The WHEJAC’s first set of recommendations on carbon management last November were highly critical, both of the technologies and of DOE policy. The administration has yet to to formally respond to them, but it is required to do so in a report to Congress by this November.
The top recommendation was that the administration “halt” all programs associated with carbon capture, direct air capture and hydrogen co-firing — technologies that received billions of dollars under the climate and infrastructure laws that are already flowing to projects.
WHEJAC also called for agencies not to count any of these programs toward Justice40, the Biden administration’s pledge that 40 percent of program benefits will go to underserved communities. DOE, however, still counts them toward the initiative.
In an email, DOE said that it “provided an overview of activities the agency has been undertaking to address the recommendations” during WHEJAC’s public meeting in June.
“DOE regularly meets with community groups to discuss carbon management topics and has produced a number of resources to help stakeholders and the public understand the scope and risk assessment approaches for deploying carbon management,” DOE said, adding that it “aims to encourage two-way communication” and “develop a mutual understanding” of the concerns raised by environmental justice advocates.
But members of WHEJAC’s carbon management working group say DOE did not welcome their initial round of carbon management recommendations last year.
“They were really pissed, for lack of a euphemism,” said LaTricea Adams, president of Young, Gifted and Green. Adams and Lopez-Nuñez co-chair the carbon management working group.
Adams and other working group members said DOE — unlike other agencies — seemed to pick and choose which recommendations it would respond to.
“It got ugly in that meeting because I said you selected things that were going to make you feel comfortable, and you shied away from stuff that didn’t,” said Adams.
CEQ said WHEJAC’s recommendations informed the creation of DOE’s Carbon Management Projects (CONNECT) Toolkit and the recently finalized Responsible Carbon Management Initiative Principles, as well as EPA’s updated Class VI Permit Tracker Dashboard.
Working group members also reported that DOE asked for numerous opportunities to “clarify” issues about the technologies that WHEJAC members raised in their first set of recommendations. That indicated to them the agency’s intent to convince them to drop their opposition to industrial carbon management.
EPA provided E&E News with slides summarizing the second set of recommendations that the full WHEJAC approved in June 2023. They call for more transparency from DOE and its grant recipients — with WHEJAC indicating it had had to file Freedom of Information Act requests for some information.
The WHEJAC’s second set of recommendations include a “community right of refusal” for any carbon management or hydrogen projects. DOE did not include an effective community veto as part of this summer’s carbon management “principles,” though some public comments urged it to do so.
The advisory panel also demands that all carbon management and hydrogen projects provide a comprehensive and public accounting of potential environmental and social risks — including cumulative impacts on any overburdened communities in their vicinity. It pushes the two CCS permitting task forces — and DOE — to “meaningfully engage” with environmental justice groups and add more EJ members.
WHEJAC also recommends that EPA avoid using either carbon capture or hydrogen co-firing as the benchmark technology for its upcoming greenhouse gas rules for existing gas-fired power plants. The standards for new gas and existing coal-fired power plants finalized in April were based on CCS.
