Jay Rosenbek and Lynn Frazier Guest columnists to The Gainesville Sun

The League of Women Voters of Alachua County supported the Gainesville City Commission’s 2018 commitment to 100% renewable energy and its 2019 Proclamation of a Climate Emergency. League members, like others in the community, recognized the potential health, economic, quality of life, and social and environmental justice benefits of a rapid transition from fossil to renewable energy.

Despite apparent resistance to a Utility Advisory Board plan for the transition, a significant step toward renewables began in 2020 when the City Commission approved a power purchase agreement with Origis Energy to provide Gainesville Regional Utilities with clean energy from a 50 MW solar array proposed for a site just south of the Archer city limit.

Unfortunately, even this modest proposal attracted fierce opposition primarily from some citizens near the proposed site and from some town of Archer residents. Included among the reasons for their opposition are fears of traffic, water, air and noise pollution; and what some characterized as the racist dumping of a solar array in their historic, rural, agricultural neighborhood.

It did not have to be this way and blaming NIMBYism, ignorance of science and vindicative outsiders is not helpful to future efforts to bring utility scale solar power to Gainesville and Alachua County. This project divided our community and ultimately was rejected because leaders and community advocates, perhaps blinded by what can seem like a moral imperative to adopt renewables, forgot that successful responses to climate change must rest on the principles of environmental justice.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, these principles are “fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income with respect to the development, implementation and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies.”

Powered by these principles the transition toward renewable energy could have begun with an invitation to people representing the area’s neighborhoods, faith communities, businesses, non-profits, environmental and other advocacy groups, governmental and educational units, and others to come together and do the hard work of planning the transition.

Because most of these people would have expertise and interests in areas other than energy and utilities and because they would become spokespersons for the transition in their communities, early meetings could have been devoted to education.

That education could have included a description of the potential mix of biomass, solar and other sources of power necessary to reach the community’s 100% renewable goal and, more specifically, the ideal combination of rooftop, industrial and utility-size solar essential to the mix.

It could also have included the dividends of transitioning to renewable energy, including impact on utility bills, benefits to water and air quality, to growth and prosperity, and to health and happiness.

Education, of course, would been the easy part. Harder, but critical to success, would have been opening the discussion to group members’ ideas, suggestions, fears and misgivings at every stage of planning and implementation.

Of course, education, listening and accommodation might have failed, but the present approach of going to the neighbors of proposed utility-scale solar after the power purchase agreement had been signed and asking what can be done to make the inevitable acceptable almost guarantees failure, or at best, a Pyrrhic victory.

If our community is to unite, prosper, and abandon fossil fuels advocates of solar energy — including the League of Women Voters of Alachua County, which supported the proposed solar installation — must abandon the assumption that they are automatically on the side of the angels.

Lynn Frazier is president of League of Women Voters of Alachua County and Jay Rosenbek is co-chair of the group's Natural Resources Committee.

As published by The Gainesville Sun, July 30, 2021
See the original article here: https://www.gainesville.com/story/opinion/2021/07/30/jay-rosenbek-and-lynn-frazier-successful-responses-climate-change-must-rest-principles-environmental/5376750001/