From Energy Burden to Climate Justice: Centering Women on the Frontlines of the Crisis
by Galilea Ogaz, Poderosas Fellow
Growing up in rural North Carolina, the women around me: mothers, grandmothers, aunties, carried burdens that never made the news. One of the heaviest was the energy bill. That experience has a name: energy burden. Environmental justice communities in North Carolina face disproportionate rates of energy poverty and lack access to air conditioning, a growing threat in a warming climate. For women, who are most often the caregivers and household managers, this burden is deeply personal. When air and water become polluted, making elders and children sick and making safe food and water hard to obtain, it imposes significant stress and strain on women's daily lives, and mothers are ten times more likely than fathers to take time off work to care for sick children, placing them at greater risk of lost wages.
Coming to Charlotte for school at a PWI, I live surrounded by manicured lawns and well-resourced neighborhoods. But a short drive from campus tells a completely different story. The same city holds communities where communities of color and low-income communities are disproportionately affected by climate change and are less able to adapt or recover from its impacts. Black, Latine, and Indigenous women are disproportionately suffering from the fossil fuel industry, not by coincidence, but by design. The distance between my campus and those neighborhoods is not just geographical. It is the result of decades of deliberate disinvestment. That contrast is something I cannot unsee.
Women, especially those from marginalized communities, shoulder a disproportionate burden of the climate crisis, and 80% of those displaced by climate change globally are women. In North Carolina, from the rural counties I grew up in to the redlined west side of Charlotte, women of color are on the front lines of a crisis they did little to create. Women, in all of their diversity, must be at the center of climate and energy decision-making. I joined this fellowship because I've seen firsthand what it looks like when they are not, and I'm committed to changing that.
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