Adams: April 2021 Media Brief Staff Picks

For this month’s artifacts, I wanted to follow up on developments in the story of the Texas power crisis. The crisis serves as a prime example of how structural racism has been baked into our energy infrastructure and emergency response. Understanding and speaking to these dynamics are important to the expressed goals of the Energy Rights Project. The demographic study of the communities who were impacted by outages provided excellent empirical data on the racial makeup of the communities who experienced the bulk of the state’s outages. The study shows (but does not explain) that communities of color were 4x as likely to experience an outage than predominantly white communities. Though this data confirms a racial bias in the emergency response practices of Texas grid regulators, further investigation is needed to better understand precisely where, how, and who is responsible for the way this racial bias is being materialized. The article on the unprecedented rates of carbon monoxide poisoning in Texas demonstrates the need for greater emergency preparedness at both the institutional and the individual level. Texas’ patchwork of legislation on carbon monoxide alarms creates a confusing landscape of protection that puts some residents (usually minorities and other marginalized communities) at higher risk of CO poisoning than others. In that sense, the article makes an effective case for statewide legislation that requires CO detection on all buildings. On top of that, the article also points to the need for organized efforts to educate the public about emergency preparedness, especially as it pertains to the common-yet-dangerous energy practices that can lead to carbon monoxide poisoning. Community workshops (like PGW’s in Philadelphia) could be important methods for raising this awareness and helping to make residents better prepared to safely endure energy disasters in the future.