Attorney who posed as Latina resigns and faces community accountability

Puerto Rican women who interacted with Bannan over the years told Prism they are now revisiting interactions they had with the attorney in which they ignored their intuition and brushed off uncomfortable exchanges to give her the benefit of the doubt as a fellow Puerto Rican woman. This was the experience of Elizabeth Yeampierre, a powerhouse in the climate justice movement.

As the co-chair of the Climate Justice Alliance and the executive director of UPROSE, Brooklyn’s oldest Latino community-based organization, Yeampierre is an internationally recognized attorney and environmental and climate justice leader. But this did not stop Bannan from being condescending toward Yeampierre, treating her more like a competitor than a colleague when they appeared on panels together after Hurricane Maria.

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Uprose, a Brooklyn-based grassroots environmental justice organization that has long advocated for the state to use the industrial waterfront in Sunset Park as a hub for clean energy, celebrated the news. “This is a climate justice victory — this is what the industrial waterfront of the future looks like,” said Elizabeth Yeampierre, executive director of Uprose, in a statement.

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‘This is good news part for a community that has been dealing with a loss of income, that’s on the brink of despair,” said Elizabeth Yeampierre, the executive director of the environmentalist group Uprose. “It’s really good news that there are going to be jobs. These victories are very important.”

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While we’re on the theme of taking on Philistines, Geoff Dembicki, at the Canadian publication the Tyee, gives the best account I’ve read of how upstart Brooklyn community groups managed to fight off plans for luxury development and preserve the South Brooklyn waterfront as an industrial space “where people could earn decent salaries building the wind turbines, solar panels and low-carbon technology necessary for a Green New Deal.” Dembicki quotes Elizabeth Yeampierre, one of the heroes of the fight: “We would say it isn’t David and Goliath. It was David and five Goliaths.”

Big spenders

The report was done for the PEAK Coalition, which is fighting to shut down high-emitting plants in New York City and supports the Climate and Community Investment Act to charge large polluters for emissions to fund the state’s transition off fossil fuels.

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For Yeampierre of UPROSE, the most successful partnerships have been ones in which businesses joined local initiatives and shared the same political and environmental goals as the community. According to Yeampierre, UPROSE has had excellent relationships with some companies and terrible relationships with others. The excellent relationships have been with businesses that seek input from UPROSE on climate adaptation and embrace UPROSE’s best practices for environmental justice and community resiliency.

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CJWG member Elizabeth Yeampierre, the director of the Brooklyn-based grassroots organization UPROSE, explained that marginalized communities in New York didn’t need help understanding the pollution problem. Over 1.2 million New Yorkers live within one mile of a power plant, a disproportionate number of whom are low-income people of color.

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Since UPROSE launched the Sun­set Park Cli­mate Jus­tice Cen­ter in 2012 to pro­mote com­mu­ni­ty resilience and cli­mate adap­ta­tion, Yeampierre says white-led cli­mate groups have hin­dered the jus­tice-cen­tered solu­tions UPROSE has worked toward. So when a wave of white-led envi­ron­men­tal groups like the Sier­ra Club, Nat­ur­al Resources Defense Coun­cil, and 350​.org pro­claimed sol­i­dar­i­ty with Black Lives Mat­ter, Yeampierre was circumspect.

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The activist group UPROSE, which helped to defeat the Industry City rezoning that would have accommodated big-box retail, hotels and tech companies next to the port proposal site, says the Equinor proposal builds for a sustainable future. 

"The vision is what we call a just transition, is exactly the manifestation of things we've been talking about," says UPROSE Executive Director Elizabeth Yeampierre. “To take the spaces, particularly industrial spaces, and repurpose them to address climate adaptation, mitigation and resilience."

The city has committed $57 million to upgrade the site. If the state approves the project, the state Energy Research and Development Authority would chip in $200 million, matched by private money. A decision is expected next month.

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“It is an environmental justice community with three peaker plants, the Gowanus Expressway, two solid waste management plants, and a community that is at risk of extreme and recurrent weather events,” said Elizabeth Yeampierre, the director of the environmentalist group UPROSE. “In an industrial area, we need to be building for climate adaptation, mitigation, and resilience.”

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For Yeampierre of UPROSE, the most successful partnerships have been ones in which businesses joined local initiatives and shared the same political and environmental goals as the community. According to Yeampierre, UPROSE has had excellent relationships with some companies and terrible relationships with others. The excellent relationships have been with businesses that seek input from UPROSE on climate adaptation and embrace UPROSE’s best practices for environmental justice and community resiliency.

Yeampierre cited two successful partnerships. Sims Recycling Solutions worked with UPROSE from the beginning to become a carbon-neutral state-of-the-art facility that would serve community needs but not be an eyesore or polluting facility on the industrial waterfront.

Additionally, UPROSE has received support from Patagonia since 2011. In this mutually beneficial relationship, Patagonia also provides financial support for UPROSE’s environmental work. UPROSE has helped Patagonia have an office culture in which its employees join in UPROSE’s grass-roots organizing. As Yeampierre said, "Sometimes businesses don't see themselves as part of the community, and see our community as a front for wealth for them." She encouraged private businesses to view the community they operate in not as a resource but as a partner.

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“It is an environmental justice community with three peaker plants, the Gowanus Expressway, two solid waste management plants, and a community that is at risk of extreme and recurrent weather events,” said Elizabeth Yeampierre, the director of the environmentalist group UPROSE. “In an industrial area, we need to be building for climate adaptation, mitigation, and resilience.”

The funding would add to the $57 million that Mayor Bill de Blasio promised the terminal in his State of the City address earlier this year. The city funds would go to offshore wind staging, installation, and maintenance efforts. 

The terminal, which is the largest industrial waterfront in the city, is the only site under consideration that wouldn’t require extensive reconstruction in order to accommodate the large vessels and huge assembly area of a wind turbine assembly plant, according to UPROSE.

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The proponents, the best-known of which is the local environmental organization UPROSE, believe the plan would generate many green industry jobs and help the state get to a zero-carbon future.

Elizabeth Yeampierre, executive director of UPROSE, stated that offshore wind is a necessary part of implementing a frontline-led Green New Deal and Green Resilient Infrastructure District in Sunset Park.

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“Sunset Park has three peaker power plants, and for decades our lungs have been the reluctant hosts of toxic emissions from the polluting fossil fuel economy,” she said. “We are calling on NYSERDA to move funding to Sunset Park’s South Brooklyn Marine Terminal to transform our industrial waterfront into a regional clean energy hub.”

She added that funding for offshore wind at SBMT will support implementation of New York’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act.

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“This is a piece of a larger vision” for the waterfront, said Elizabeth Yeampierre, executive director of the Sunset Park climate justice organization UPROSE, standing at the intersection of 39th Street and 1st Avenue, near the terminal.

The Sunset Park location is the “only site” in the state suitable for the assembly and transport of offshore wind turbines, according to UPROSE organizer Ting Ting Fu.

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UPROSE’s solar co-op aims to harness this democratizing potential of solar radiation for the benefit of the community in Sunset Park. Net metering laws allow solar co-ops to feed power back into the grid, running utility electric meters backward and generating income for the community. In addition, the solar co-op will be linked to an UPROSE-initiated jobs program that will train half of the people installing the solar array. It is a concrete realization of the radical calls for climate reparations enshrined in New York State’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, which mandates 100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2040 with a third of all state investments and jobs in climate and clean energy going to communities most vulnerable to climate change or most threatened by the transition away from fossil fuels.

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“We are in the situation that we are in right now because of master plans coming out of Europe that have been responsible for extraction [of resources], enslavement and colonialism,” says Elizabeth Yeampierre, executive director of the New York City–based climate-justice organizing group Uprose. For her, the Masterplanet idea is “brimming with hubris” and an “outdated approach” to solving the climate crisis.

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"There is no better time to address pollution and inequities of NYC's energy system," UPROSE Executive Director Elizabeth Yeampierre said in a statement. The Latino community-based organization promotes sustainability and resiliency in Brooklyn's Sunset Park neighborhood.

With Industry City rezoning proposal dead, what’s next for Sunset Park waterfront?

One popular plan by the environmentalist group Uprose would transform the waterfront into environmentally-friendly manufacturing. The Grid plan, which has been in the works for several years, would attract clean energy manufacturers and incentivize existing factories to create environmentally-friendly infrastructure — pushing forward the city’s climate change goals, one expert said.

“[It] will realize tens of thousands of clean energy jobs, and these jobs are all part of building and moving our economy away from an economy dependent on fossil fuels,” said Uprose’s Summer Sandoval. 

Under the proposal, more than half of Industry City would be slated for industrial uses, with limited retail and office space used only to support the complex’s factories.

In order to realize this plan — which has been created with extensive community input, according to Sandoval — the city would have to rezone the waterfront, with carve outs and specific uses spelled out in the zoning text, she said.

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“This is sending a message to elected officials and developers that development can no longer look like this,” said Elizabeth Yeampierre, executive director at UPROSE, a local environmental justice group that fought the plans.

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“While NYC can certainly use 7,000 new jobs, even those numbers seem to bely current economic reports,” urban planner Eve Baron stated in her submitted testimony. Similarly, argued the Sunset Park community group UPROSE, “Industry City is claiming to create 7,000 new jobs based on outdated and pre-COVID analyses.”