Electric cars and solar panels dot the suburbs in Palo Alto, home to Stanford University and several tech companies. Greenery blends into the nearby buildings, homes, and businesses.
A few minutes away, East Palo Alto, like Palo Alto, is part of the Bay Area as well. However, there are less tech companies and greenery. There are more polluted sites and cases of respiratory disease.
Palo Alto. Atherton. San Francisco.
These are some of the richest cities in the Bay Area, an area known for its technological innovation and high cost of living. The tech innovation has extended to fighting climate change.
As climate change worsens, green tech, defined as technology aiming to reduce harmful environmental impacts, has emerged as a solution. Over a third of Time’s list of top green tech companies comes from the Bay Area.
Even though the Bay Area develops green tech innovations, not all residents benefit equally. Adjacent to those three cities, East Palo Alto, North Fair Oaks, and Bayview-Hunters Point are all areas suffering far higher levels of pollution.
In cities like East Palo Alto, low-income communities and people of color make up a larger proportion of the population. According to the City of East Palo Alto, due to the higher minority population living in the community, polluting factories freely established themselves in the city. Today, there are 150 registered polluted sites in the city resulting from the factories from decades ago, many of which no longer operate.
These differences in pollution are an example of climate inequality, an idea that the impacts of climate change are shaped by political, social, economic, and environmental factors in an area.
Climate and inequality in the Bay Area
At the surface level, the Bay Area is utilizing its technology to move towards a greener future as a whole. In reality, some areas are drastically ahead of others, leaving behind marginalized communities.
Although the physical distance between these cities is small, significant environmental gaps exist.
According to the San Francisco Environment Department, overall, the city of San Francisco alone has reduced citywide emissions by 48% since 1990. At the same time, the population has grown by 21%, and the local economy has grown by 199%.
Despite these achievements, data analysis examining carbon emissions in the Bay Area more closely finds that death rates resulting from pollution are more than 30% higher in some areas compared to others — the difference could mean being a few blocks away.
“It is a well-established principle in the study of the geography of hazardous environments that it’s almost always the poorest people who are the most exposed to the dangers of major climate events,” said Richard Walker, a former professor at the University of California, Berkeley, whose research included economic geography and environmental justice in Northern California.
According to Walker, as both a researcher and resident, he has observed flooding and sea level rise, heat waves, sewage systems, and mudslides around the Bay Area.
“In urban areas, you do get more working-class populations. For example, along the creeks at the foot of Sausal Creek or along Coyote Creek and San Jose. They often get the floodplains, and floodplains are a favorite place to put trailer parks,” Walker said.
Due to the Bay Area’s leadership in technology, the distribution of carbon-free and renewable energy sources is improving.
Local organizations such as Peninsula Clean Energy work to deliver carbon-free and renewable energy, known as clean energy, to all of San Mateo County. Using an opt-out program, where eligible residents are immediately registered, the organization ensures most people are on clean energy.
“All of our cities have persistent high participation rates ranging from 94% to 98% or 99%. Overall, there’s high participation across San Mateo County,” said Peninsula Clean Energy Associate Manager of Community Relations Vanessa Shin.
According to Shin, Peninsula Clean Energy has programs that allow more people to use their plan even though income may pose a challenge, and the organization is active in outreach.
“I think that’s also a big part of addressing climate inequality or inequity, making sure that you are getting out your information about your resources and support to as many people as possible and trying to address any barriers that might exist in terms of languages or digital access because our community is so diverse,” Shin said.
The organization supports other organizations as well.
“Right now, we have a grant program in which we provide funding to 16 different organizations, and they collaborate with us on doing outreach in many different languages,” Shin said.
Engaging the community
One of those organizations, Climate Resilient Communities, is an environmental justice grassroots nonprofit working to bridge the gap between better climates and communities.
According to their Resilient Leadership Program Manager Kamille Lang, the organization has the deepest connections in East Palo Alto, North Fair Oaks, and Belle Haven, a neighborhood in Menlo Park.
“All three of these communities and several others across the Bay Area are on the front lines of climate change, which means that they’re already seeing the impacts of climate change first and worse, and they’ve been historically left behind in the planning process,” Lang said.
Lang works with North Fair Oaks, an unincorporated area of San Mateo County, meaning climate policies that apply to San Mateo don’t necessarily apply to North Fair Oaks. Nearly 75% of the community is Hispanic, 50% are immigrants, and the median household income falls 32% lower than the county average.
“I work in North Fair Oaks because I was so drawn to that community from working with them when I was working for the County of San Mateo too. I host community meetings monthly in North Fair Oaks that are just to tell us what they’re concerned about, because I document everything,” Lang said.
According to Lang, the immigrant community members she works with often have a lack of understanding of how it’s safe to communicate with American government systems. This can lead to fears of deportation or eviction that prevent them from seeking help.
“Most of the folks of color that live in the communities that we serve are also low income and have to work multiple jobs to make it. So, when you have very limited income and very limited time to take care of yourself, you’re not necessarily thinking strategically about needing to grab sandbags before the next atmospheric river. You’re thinking about, ‘How do I get food on the table tonight? Do I have enough money for rent?’ There are different priorities,” Lang said.
Much of Lang’s work involves engaging the communities she works with and forging a path of trustful communication between people and the government.
“It’s kind of like this two-way street where I’m listening to how the government communicates and shares priorities about the programs and policies they make, and I also am listening to community concerns, and I get to bring it back and forth,” Lang said.
Lang uses the feedback she hears from residents to troubleshoot issues and share them with the county. For example, a recent text message to warn residents of flooding didn’t reach most of the residents Lang works with.
“I can bring it back to the county saying that 50% out of the 40 people that attend these monthly meetings didn’t get your text message alert that there was going to be a flood by the end of the week. And it’s not necessarily that your text message system doesn’t work. There are other things going on that folks don’t know about, like how to sign up or, if their phone number changes, how to update their phone number to get that text. And then there’s another layer, where for the folks that did receive the text, the text wasn’t translated into Spanish appropriately,” Lang said.
According to Lang, in order for her communication to work, she needs to build long-term connections with the community and become a “familiar face” for both the people and the county government.
“I’m never in the business of convincing someone. I’m always in the business of listening closely to what people are sharing,” Lang said.
A bigger problem to address
There are proposed solutions for the myriad of impacts resulting from climate change.
Of all the problems related to climate change Walker has seen affecting communities over the years, practical solutions exist for each, varying in difficulty to implement.
According to Walker, to address sea level rise, cities can build up sea walls or subsidize people to move to higher ground. To address heat waves, improve housing insulation. To manage water, move more water towards cities instead of agriculture.
Although the Bay Area has made strides toward shifting to green energy, that’s just one step.
“Cleaning up pollution is a much bigger issue than more electric cars and vehicles,” Walker said. “Some federal policies make planes more efficient and less dirty and automobiles better, but we’re still a long way from cleaning up pollution.”
Addressing the problem as a whole will take much more work than checking off a list of solutions. Technology alone doesn’t address deeper problems like redlining have long been a part of urbanization and are much harder to reverse, putting minority communities at the forefront of harmful pollution.
“People are forced to live near transportation corridors, ports, and the cleaning industry, and that’s just built into the whole housing market. So that takes something beyond what anybody is thinking about these days,” Walker said.
Lang also says part of the Bay Area’s tech innovation identity excites people and keeps them from paying attention to less obvious issues regarding local climate change.
“It’s easier to project that if we electrify Caltrain, we have this amount of reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, right? We can’t as easily say how we are going to clean up all the air so we can measure asthma rates,” Lang said.
Inspired by her childhood in Oakland and the memories she has of the Bay Area, Lang hopes that future generations don’t lose the environment she enjoyed to climate change.
However, despite how gloomy the topic can be, she remains hopeful for the next generation in the climate justice movement.
“We need everyone to be their own leader in this, which is really special, and it’s not qualified based on your age, your race, or your educational status,” Lang said. “We can all get involved in this and want to do something different when we come together and have one loud, united voice with all our concerns being shared.”
