Racism by Scientific American Editors

Racism by Scientific American Editors

Author:Scientific American Editors
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc
Published: 2020-11-17T00:00:00+00:00


Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley saw a golden opportunity to study imbalances in solar power deployment through their access to data from Google’s Project Sunroof—an initiative that maps solar rooftop panels seen in satellite images—and demographic data from the U.S. Census. They had an inkling of possible racial and ethnic disparities but initially thought other socioeconomic factors could help explain many of them. Yet their study results, published in January 2019 in Nature Sustainability, showed that even when controlling for income levels, neighborhoods with either black or Hispanic majority populations have installed fewer rooftop solar panels than neighborhoods with no clear racial or ethnic majority. White-majority neighborhoods, in stark contrast, have more rooftop solar installations than those without a clear majority. The researchers say these differences cannot be completely explained by either household income or home ownership levels (homeowners are more likely than renters to invest in permanent solar panels). “I was not surprised to see that race and ethnicity were important, but once we controlled for income I thought the effect would be reduced significantly,” says Daniel Kammen, director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley and a co-author on the study. “But alas, it was not.”



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