In a first of its kind move, the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management released an environmental justice plan for any energy development activities occurring offshore. This comes at a key time, as the U.S. transitions to a conservative President who has little to do with environmental justice principles, so kudos to the agency to accelerating this plan.

But after a review of the plan, all I can do is yawn. Every action seems copied from every other environmental justice plan I have reviewed in the past decade.

What is the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management?

The agency’s mission is to manage development of U.S. Outer Continental Shelf energy, mineral, and geological resources in an environmentally and economically responsible way. This amounts to a whooping 3.2 billion acres offshore the 50 U.S. states and five territories with civilian governments and significant acreage offshore other U.S. territories. The agency essentially has to approve and set policies for any renewable energy, oil, natural gas, and carbon dioxide sequestration project but will also need to get involved in the controversial practice of deep sea mining, if approved.

“We at BOEM envision inclusive, meaningful, and equitable opportunities for all communities to participate in the responsible management of our nation’s offshore energy, mineral, and geological resources. We commit to integrating the principles of environmental justice into our policies, programs, activities, and decision-making processes, and to providing BOEM staff with training and resources to engage in an accessible and transparent manner.” Environmental Justice Vision Statement

What Does Environmental Justice Have To Do With Ocean Energy?

The negative impacts of energy resource use disproportionately affect low income communities and communities of color in the US and globally. Heat waves, droughts and extreme weather are endangering people and ecosystems somewhere in the world almost every day. These extremes are exacerbated by climate change, driven primarily by increasing emissions of greenhouse gases that build up in the atmosphere and trap heat at the Earth’s surface.

Energy justice aims to improve the distribution of benefits and burdens related to energy development, and draws attention to potential vulnerabilities such as energy access and affordability of energy services

Many low income communities and communities with a historical connection to the coast, such as tribes are at risk from changes in ocean dynamics from climate change, impacts of oil spills, and impacts of infrastructure built along the shoreline to support ocean energy development. In addition, and especially for tribes, ocean energy development done poorly can impact access to cultural resources including fisheries and abalone.

Renewable energy must be deployed equitably, and this means not harming the same communities and minorities that have been disproportionately subject to environmental harm emanating from siting facilities that are detrimental to human health and communities. Without acquiring consent or participation from communities affected by the adverse effects of renewable energy, these communities will remain in a cycle of abuse that capitalizes on their poor health and cheap labor.

For example, as wind turbines grow in size, alongside their corresponding effects, it must be asked what impact these will have on the communities that are integrated into—forcefully or consensually. But, Ocean energy has the potential to address energy poverty and provide clean energy access to marginalized communities.

What does the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management Plan to Do?

Goal 1: Institutionalize environmental justice principles

They plan to hire an Environmental Justice Coordinator and additional staff, as needed, to help implement this Implementation Plan and coordinate environmental justice activities bureau-wide. This includes creating and tracking metrics for measuring environmental justice.

The goal is to increase staff awareness and understanding of environmental justice; the principle of Free, Prior, and Informed Consent; policies and directives, including the knowledge of communities with environmental justice concerns and state-based tools; and how they apply to their work.

Goal 2: Conduct robust, meaningful, and equitable outreach and engagement with communities and tribes

The agency plans to conduct a barrier analysis and value proposition to better understand the diverse challenges communities face and the benefits of engaging with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management meaningfully and equitably. Along with the environmental justice metrics they will develop guidance for outreach and engagement, create an engagement tracker to document engagements and communications with communities. The NEPA process is known for being long and inaccessible to the public. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management plans to assess points of public input opportunities at all stages of decision-making, including before NEPA processes, and determine all appropriate and feasible places for meaningful engagement with targeted outreach. But what needs to happen is a wholesale shift in how agencies conduct NEPA to be more inclusive and transparent.

Capacity and partnerships are important and will be a focus of Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. They will evaluate opportunities to provide technical and financial assistance to build capacity for participation in meaningful engagement. They will also build upon and develop new partnerships across government to better respond to community needs and questions, including requests for community benefit arrangements. What this all means is unclear without a specific budget allocation or database of partners.

Goal 3: Advance approaches to environmental justice planning, analysis, research, and engagement in collaboration with communities

In this goal, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management will work with communities to request thoughts on environmental justice topics to focus on and will advance new partnerships to improve decisionmaking.

Staff will develop guidance for implementation of the principles of FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable), CARE (Collective benefit, Authority, Responsibility, and Ethics), and TRUST (Transparency, Responsibility, User focus, Sustainability and Technology) for ethical considerations around Indigenous and community data.

Collaboration could include prioritizing traditional and local knowledge in procurement and research design, and promote direct hiring, honoraria, or sub-contracting that enhances participation. This could include looking at betters ways to support community capacity building financially. One of the challenges that federal agencies often face is their inability to pay stipends to community members. Often a third party can do this as a prime contractor but it requires innovative staff members. The agency can look to existing models from US EPA.

What’s Missing

Sadly this plan is a typical cookie cutter approach to environmental justice implementation and as written it reads as a strategic plan and not an implementation plan. Outside of hiring an environmental justice coordinator, nowhere does it mention specifics of what will be implemented, nor are there measurable outcomes.

For example, the US Environmental Protection Agency has put significant funding into community organizations that are working to advance environmental justice around climate change through their Thriving Communities Program. The Department of Energy has required developers to include Community Benefit Plans in their funding applications.

Mariah D. Caballero at Vanderbilt’s Community Research and Action Program proposes four key types of justice to address for ocean energy projects that can be considered.

Distributional justice aims to address the unequal allocation of risk, responsibility, and benefit to individuals or communities based on inequities such as income, race/ethnicity, and or Indigeneity. Developers might ask, where can we site a community solar project so that energy burden will be most reduced amongst disadvantaged populations?
Recognitional justice requires compassion and communication at its foundation. Without this type of justice we risk cultural domination, non-recognition, and disrespect.
Procedural justice involves the access to decision-making processes to foster equitable distribution of resources and meaningful recognition free of discrimination. Procedural justice can take many forms, but it often asks, how can information relevant to decision-making be made accessible to all individuals, and how can power differentials among decision-makers be dismantled?
Restorative justice is focused on the provision of reparations after harm has been done to society and/or nature. For ocean energy justice, restorative justice considers a project’s potential to pose harm to people or environments, and the costs associated with the consequences of those actions, before a project is pursued.

Community Benefits

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management notes that it does not have the authority to negotiate or enforce the particular provisions of a community benefit agreement with a developer. The agency did note that they required investments in a community benefit agreement as a bidding credit option for the California offshore wind lease sale. The agency should move forward with finding ways to require community benefit agreements in plans like the Department of Energy, whether through policy or funding mechanisms.

But it’s not like energy developers don’t know what a community benefits plan is. Public power utilities regularly consider community benefits when siting energy projects. Benefits might include jobs and job security, access to renewable energy, energy efficiency, grid resilience, and investments in infrastructure upgrades. The benefit can flow to community members, organizations, the public sector, project developers, and labor unions.

Project agreements are another tool to ensure accountability for new energy projects to deliver positive outcomes for specific communities or address environmental justice concerns. Project agreements can safeguard federal investments to create local opportunities in underserved and underinvested communities. They might include project labor agreements, community workforce agreements, community benefits agreements, and community benefits plans. The construction and real estate industries have used these types of agreements.

Commitment to Community Capacity

While the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management notes that they plan to explore funding mechanisms to support community capacity, they provide little details on how and when they will do this. Sister agencies and state agencies, like California, have taken efforts to create funding programs to pay community organizations to participate in decision making processes in their communities.

Providing the tools to help communities build the capacity necessary to play a more significant role in their local energy systems has proven to be an effective procedural approach for increasing community acceptance and utility of renewable energy projects. Supporting the active participation of Tribal and Indigenous groups to realize their beliefs of self-governance, sustainability, and sovereignty is integral to energy justice. Central to this transition is the coordination of policies, resources, and organizations to deconstruct current power regimes and increase local government participation.

No Recognition of the Impacted Communities

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s Environmental Justice plan does nothing to recognize the impacts of energy development on communities and tribes. To build community, we attach to place and what it means to us. Place disruption can happen when ocean energy projects alter what we view as place. For example, community members impacted by Hurricane Katrina left long-term impacts on employment, landscape, and risk, which greatly contributed to their ability to take part in restorative processes or trust government agencies and bureaucratic processes.

For example, some Indigenous groups in the Pacific Northwest believe that the intertidal is a space between spirit guardians of the upper world and underworld of the rivers and sea, allowing spirits to intermingle with the ebb and flow of the tide, the nexus between ocean and forest that people call home. Altering this space without co-production of the outcome breaks any trust with the communities.

A second issue is sourcing of materials to build infrastructure. This is an opportunity to consider supply chains and sourcing. For example, are you asking where the materials come from and if they are equitably sourced. Similarly are the materials being harvested from the ocean being extracted and processed equitably?

Lastly, a huge failure of the federal permitting processes has been limited focus on decommissioning. Because of this failure the U.S. has thousands of highly contaminated sites that were formerly mines, processing sites and mills, and manufacturing sites, many designated as Superfund sites. Historically, decommissioned energy projects in the US have caused considerable financial, environmental, and social damage to communities. In 2022 alone, the Biden administration allocated 725 million dollars in federal funds to restore abandoned coal mines, part of an 11.3 billion dollar investment plan in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

Decommissioning an ocean energy project like an offshore oil structure may pose several distributional impacts on livelihoods. For workers previously employed in operations and maintenance aspects of ocean energy projects, providing and investing in alternative opportunities is likely to be an integral component of the final stages of a project. Colorado’s Just Transition Office requires the submission of a workforce transition plan for the retirement of coal facilities at least six months before the decommissioning date, requiring estimates for the number of affected workers, positions retained, retiring workers, transfers, and those transitioning to new power generation facilities. The Partnerships for Opportunity and Workforce and Economic Revitalization (POWER) Initiative continues to invest in alternative opportunities for communities in the Appalachian Region that have been negatively impacted by the economic and labor shifts associated with energy transitions, namely coal.

While workforce development is important, the environmental impact and future cleanup of any ocean energy project is a critical gap that needs to be filled. The partial removal of offshore structures can be referred to as artificial reefing, which leaves the lower portion of a structure on the ocean floor to lessen the ecological disturbance that might otherwise occur when attempting to fully remove a structure.

Do Oil, Wind, and Environmental Justice Mix? The Department of Interior Thinks So.