Sunset Park environmental justice advocates had pressed for more than two decades to revive a declining industrial waterfront while sowing the seeds for projects that would serve their largely Latino and immigrant community as well as the environment.
“The possibility of bringing good paying jobs to our community and to also address climate change, for us, that’s everything,” said Elizabeth Yeampierre, executive director of the local group UPROSE. “That’s what we fight for. We fight for our people, for our abuelas, for our tias, every single day.”
Yeampierre says the environmental benefits and jobs more than justify the project.
“If we are going to envision a green re-industrialization or a waterfront that can serve a community’s Green New Deal needs, this is the project for that,” she said.
Yeampierre called the plant an essential piece of GRID — the Green Resilient Industrial District, a larger vision for the waterfront her group and others presented as an alternative to the recently scrapped proposal to expand Industry City, the nearby shopping, food and artisanal manufacturing complex.
And she touted the wind turbine project as a coup not just for Brooklyn and New York, but for struggling neighborhoods across the country looking to their futures.
“It shows to other cities what an industrial waterfront community can do to rectify the history, the legacy of environmental injustice, and to address the issue of climate change,” Yeampierre said.
Yeampierre said her group has already asked Equinor lots of tough questions, including how it’ll operate in a way that’s carbon neutral and what its supply chain looks like.
“We didn’t want the climate solution to become an environmental justice problem,” she said.
When it was clear the project would stimulate the local economy, have a regional impact and help the community, UPROSE decided to back it, she said. But Yeampierre still wants Equinor to prove itself to Sunset Park.
“At the end of the day, Equinor is still a corporation and so they have to show that they are a real community partner and that they are incorporating community concerns,” she said.