Equity and Electricity: Race Gap in Household Energy Use, with Eva Lyubich

Resources Radio

This week, host Daniel Raimi talks with Eva Lyubich, a PhD student in the Economics Department at the University of California, Berkeley, and at the Energy Institute at Haas. Lyubich recently released a fascinating working paper on the gap in household energy spending between white and black households. Lyubich and Raimi discuss this new working paper: how big that race gap is, whether it’s changed over time, and what might account for its origin. The long-ranging conversation includes not just energy, but also the history of discriminatory housing policies in the United States. References and recommendations: "The Race Gap in Residential Energy Expenditures" by Eva Lyubich; https://haas.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/WP306.pdf "Drilled" podcast; https://www.criticalfrequency.org/drilled "Merchants of Doubt" by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway; https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/merchants-of-doubt-9781596916104/ "There’s Something in the Water" by Ingrid Waldron; https://fernwoodpublishing.ca/book/there8217s-something-in-the-water "There’s Something in the Water" documentary; https://www.netflix.com/title/81206890 "The Case for Reparations" by Ta-Nehisi Coates; https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/ "What Drives Racial and Ethnic Differences in High Cost Mortgages? The Role of High Risk Lenders" by Patrick Bayer, Fernando Ferreira, and Stephen L. Ross; https://www.nber.org/papers/w22004 "Housing Discrimination and the Toxics Exposure Gap in the United States: Evidence from the Rental Market" by Peter Christensen, Ignacio Sarmiento-Barbieri, and Christopher Timmins; https://www.nber.org/papers/w26805 "A community-based approach to low-income residential energy efficiency participation barriers" by Tony Gerard Reames; https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13549839.2015.1136995 "Targeting energy justice: Exploring spatial, racial/ethnic and socioeconomic disparities in urban residential heating energy efficiency" by Tony Gerard Reames; https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0301421516304098 "Resources Radio" episode: “The Economics of Environmental Justice, with Samuel Stolper and Catherine Hausman”; https://www.resourcesmag.org/resources-radio/economics-environmental-justice-samuel-stolper-and-catherine-hausman/