The executive director of the Brooklyn-based community development organization UPROSE, Elizabeth Yeampierre, took part in preventing just this kind of wealth transfer in 2019, when her organization helped fight off an attempt by real estate developers to rezone an industrial waterfront area in Brooklyn for high-end retail, tech offices and hotels.
Can Biden’s Justice40 plan deliver a fairer environment for people of color?
Elizabeth Yeampierre, who is on the steering committee for NYRenews, a New York-based environmental justice coalition, said she was surprised the administration didn’t contact the groups.
PEAKER Act of 2021 calls for 10% energy storage ITC to replace dirty peaker plants
The legislation is endorsed by 12 groups including: New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, New York City Environmental Justice Alliance, WE ACT, South Bronx Unite, UPROSE, American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE), Sunrun, Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), Sierra Club, Union of Concerned Scientists, Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), National Wildlife Federation (NWF).
The Particular Psychology of Destroying a Planet
In Sunset Park, Brooklyn, community leaders, including Elizabeth Yeampierre, of uprose, were part of a push toward a new clean-energy model for the waterfront, through the development of an offshore wind project. Now, such a project will be built by the Norwegian oil company Equinor. As Inside Climate News reports, the waterfront’s “73 acres of cracked concrete and rusting fences will be cleared away and replaced with the modern port that will anchor the burgeoning offshore wind industry. Crumbling bulkheads will be shored up to support 200-foot cranes. The decrepit piers, which look out over Lower Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty, will be reinforced to hold turbine blades as long as football fields.”
Climate and Community Investment Act: Two perspectives
“These jobs in the report we are releasing are in a variety of sectors: construction, renewable energy, agriculture, public schools, the care economy, efficiency, maintenance, professional services and transportation,” explained Elizabeth Yeampierre of UPROSE.
A Just Transition? On Brooklyn’s Waterfront, Oil Companies and Community Activists Join Together to Create an Offshore Wind Project—and Jobs
He learned about the project through a community group he’s involved with, called UPROSE, which has fought to clean up the neighborhood’s dirty industries and bring in green development instead. The organization is currently fighting an effort to build a new gas power plant that would replace two of three oil- and gas-fired “peaker” plants that line the waterfront and fire up when electricity demand surges.
Biden’s new moonshot: An offshore wind industry to rival Europe’s
Environmental advocates, of course, are applauding the suddenly promising future for offshore wind. That includes New York City-based environmental justice groups who see a planned wind turbine assembly facility at the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal as a means to boost racial diversity in offshore wind jobs. “The history of New York City was written at the water’s edge,” Elizabeth Yeampierre and Angela Adrar, two prominent figures in grassroots environmental advocacy, wrote in an op-ed. “How we leverage our waterfront at this inflection point will define our era’s response to the dual crises of growing climate disruption and mounting inequality.”
SCOTUS revs up biofuels fight
But not everyone agrees with that upbeat assessment. Elizabeth Yeampierre, executive director of sustainability advocacy group UPROSE, lamented the Biden administration’s focus on “false solutions and techno-fixes” such as carbon capture and sequestration and deforestation carbon offset projects. And Yeampierre also said the administration’s focus on aiming to deliver 40 percent of the benefits rather than 40 percent of the investments in its "Justice40" Initiative is problematic.
Strong US infrastructure bill needed to move climate goals forward: experts
Environmental justice is an important part of addressing climate change, which cannot leave out communities that are on the front lines of climate change impacts like sea level rise, said Elizabeth Yeampierre, executive director at New York based community organization UPROSE.
"I don't want to be put in the back of the climate bus," she said.
Climate bill would tax carbon in New York
“In the era of COVID-19 and climate change, Black, brown and Indigenous communities have been the most adversely impacted by the public health and economic crisis,” Elizabeth Yeampierre, executive director of the Brooklyn-based organization Uprose, told lawmakers at the hearing. About two dozen people testified in support of the bill, including representatives of New York Renews, Environmental Advocates NY, United University Professions, and a litany of community advocacy groups from cities across the state. “It is these same communities who suffer first and worst from recurrent extreme weather disasters,” Yeampierre said. Passing the bill means at least 150,000 more jobs could be created over the next decade to benefit such people, according to the Communications Workers of America District 1.
30 Ways to Live More Sustainably—and Fight Climate Change in the Process
Elizabeth Yeampierre, co-chair of the Climate Justice Alliance and the executive director of Uprose, a Brooklyn-based grassroots organization, encourages people to “organize literally on the block.” Figure out how you and your neighbors can tackle the climate crisis together. Yeampierre offers up examples like building a stormwater management system, painting all the rooftops white to reflect back sunlight into the atmosphere, and connecting all your backyards to share food in the event of extreme weather.
A climate justice activist warns of 'climate apartheid' if big companies ignore grassroots ideas
Climate activist Elizabeth Yeampierre shared why grassroots ideas are important (video above).
Solutions really need to be centered on racial justice and equity. “Yeampierre Said. “ Climate change is demanding a different kind of citizenry, a different kind of interaction between people if we’re going to win this together
The Climate Debates: Can Carbon Removal Bring Us to Net Zero?
Joining Rolling Stone for this debate are Elizabeth Yeampierre and Julio Friedmann. Yeampierre is the executive director of UPROSE, Brooklyn’s oldest Latino community-based organization. She is an internationally recognized Puerto Rican attorney and co-chair of the Climate Justice Alliance. You can follow her at Twitter @yeampierre.
Fossil Fuel Phase Out Must Begin Where the Industry Has Hurt People the Most
“Inequities in our dated energy system are rooted in the continued investments in fossil fuels at the expense of the health of our most vulnerable communities,” Elizabeth Yeampierre, executive director of UPROSE, a multiracial Brooklyn-based community development organization focused on bringing about a just transition for residents, said in a statement. “We must move funds to frontline communities for clean energy projects and stop fossil fuel developers from perpetuating conventional investments in dirty energy and injustice,” Yeampierre said, noting the ongoing effort of power company NRG to add yet another natural gas burning peaker to its fleet in Astoria, known as “asthma alley.”
Biden urged to use clean energy benefits more to fight inequality
Elizabeth Yeampierre, executive director of UPROSE, a New York-based climate justice group, said this divergence of views showed that the administration was not doing enough to consult on-the-ground groups fighting these issues.
“There has to be a flip in the way we’re thought of, and we need to be thought of and engaged as partners, meaningfully engaged in decision making,” Yeampierre said.
“If the federal government follows the lead of frontline communities that are literally transforming the landscape, we should be able to move as quickly as climate change is moving.”
Eric Adams releases plan to turn NYC into wind power hub
In January, the first step of Adams’ plan — the wind turbine plant in the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal — was announced after years of advocacy by Borough President Adams. Adams today proposed adding an additional manufacturing site at Arthur Kill in Staten Island, as well as job sites in the Navy Yard and at the Red Hook Container Terminal. He also proposed creating a state-of-the-art wind power jobs training center in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, and acknowledged the work of UPROSE and other community leaders there for their years of work pushing plans for green jobs and a working port for local residents to work at.
Dream of Connected NYC Greenway Re-Envisioned as Path to COVID Recovery
“They’re not just bike paths, they can be a place where someone is playing dominoes, or just sitting or doing Double Dutch,” said Elizabeth Yeampierre, executive director of UPROSE, an environmental justice group based in Sunset Park, which has a section of greenway in Bush Terminal Park. “The idea really is to expand the amount of open space that’s available to
Front-line communities are vital for Biden's 40 percent climate justice pledge
UPROSE is a multiracial grassroots group that for years has advocated turning Brooklyn’s old industrial waterfront into a new hub for green jobs — without pricing residents out of the neighborhood. Now, the state of New York is matching $200 million in private-sector investment to transform the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal into a wind turbine assembly and maintenance plant supporting over 1,000 local clean-energy jobs.
Towards Justice, Equity, and Design
Yeampierre began by focusing on the difference between climate change and climate justice. While the climate change movement has always focused on reducing carbon, the climate justice movement is more intersectional and led by frontline communities most impacted by carbon co-pollutants, vulnerable to recurrent extreme weather events, and least responsible for contributing to climate change. She noted how health disparities, caused by fossil-fuel driven development, have made the same communities at high risk for COVID-19, and the pandemic has renewed the importance of fighting for the right to breathe.
Biden’s $2tn infrastructure plan aims to ‘finally address climate crisis as a nation'
Communities of color, which often suffer the brunt of the climate crisis, helped elect Biden and “it’s time to make sure that our government delivers a real recovery that recognizes the harsh reality our communities continue to face on the ground,” according to Elizabeth Yeampierre, co-chair of the Climate Justice Alliance. “We’ve had enough excuses, enough delays.”