Ambia McClendon [00:02:00] My name is Ambia McClendon and I am the campus manager here at Allen Temple.
Laura Klivans [00:02:04] She kindly showed us to a sort of courtyard area where we saw these big humming white boxes which were backup batteries.
Ambia McClendon [00:02:14] They are big white boxes or big white cases. They have like gridded doors, I guess you could say, on the outside that store, like these little battery packs, essentially.
Laura Klivans [00:02:24] Do they look like flat shelves?
Ambia McClendon [00:02:27] Kind of like shelving. Yeah. They kind of like.
Laura Klivans [00:02:29] Sitting atop the gym is an array of about 270 solar panels. So a huge array of solar panels which you cannot see from the road. What happens is the energy from those solar panels is used to power the building below. And the extra energy that those panels create go to these batteries. When the sun is not shining, those batteries then drain the energy back into and they pour the energy back into the building and power the building.
Ambia McClendon [00:02:57] We did have an outage and still were able to automatically kicked in. There was nothing we had to do. We didn’t have to turn on anything. You know, the rest of the campus didn’t have power. But here we are completely lit up and able to function.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:03:11] And what is so unique about a church that has solar panels like this? Like, why did you want to visit this particular church?
Laura Klivans [00:03:21] What’s so neat about this is that houses of worship are huge. They are community fixtures. Visually, you see them so they represent clean energy. They show you the potential of clean energy. And they also socially have this ability to share the potential for using renewables.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:03:44] And Allen Temple is one example of something called Green the church. What is green? The church, and how did it get started?
Laura Klivans [00:03:53] That is all the brainchild of this guy named Reverend Ambrose Carroll. He, 14 years ago founded an organization called Green The Church.
Rev. Ambrose Carroll [00:04:03] This faith based national organization at the intersection of the environment, sustainability and the black church.
Laura Klivans [00:04:11] And what he’s working on right now is to transform these these houses of worship into what he’s calling resilience hubs. And what a resilience hub is, is that these churches are not just places that are cutting down on emissions, but they’re also helping the surrounding community. When we have extreme weather or power outages.
Rev. Ambrose Carroll [00:04:32] When done right, they can be centers of resilience. They can be places that in times of storm and disaster, the community can run to.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:04:41] And what did Reverend Carroll tell you about why it was so important for him to do this, to get black religious leaders specifically talking about faith and the environment?
Laura Klivans [00:04:55] What Reverend Carroll is saying is like climate and environment are so central to the black community.
Rev. Ambrose Carroll [00:05:01] We are in the midst of planes, trains and automobiles.
Laura Klivans [00:05:06] Like if you go to East Oakland and West Oakland, we see the highest rates of asthma in the region. And this is a result of pollution, right? This is an air quality issue. This is this is all connected to climate change. And so people in the black church are talking about asthma. They’re talking about cardiovascular health. They’re not saying I’m an environmentalist.
Rev. Ambrose Carroll [00:05:28] When people are talking about saving the polar bears, that’s good. But we want to know that you care about our cousin Pookie and not just the polar bear. And so there’s always been that estrangement. And so we have created green the church for us to talk about it from our historical lens with our own language. We don’t always consider ourselves as environmentalists, but we consider ourselves revivalist.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:05:56] How our churches like Allen Temple able to do this.
Laura Klivans [00:06:01] So in terms of price for Allen Temple, it costs about $1 million to do their project. It was fully covered by a grant from Tesla. They spent about $700,000 on solar panels and batteries. And then they had to redo their roof, which was about $300,000. Obviously, these prices differ. That’s a really big building that they covered in solar panels. Some churches are just these smaller buildings like storefronts. So it would differ. The other ways that you can finance it. It’s through fundraising, through the church, it’s through outside grants and then also through through congressional legislation. The most major landmark climate law that we had a few years ago. Churches now can gain back about 30% of the investments they put into things like solar panels.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:06:49] Besides solar panels, what are other ways greening the church looks like?
Laura Klivans [00:06:54] So there would be weatherizing a building. So that sounds like super boring, but it’s actually really important. It’s like changing out the windows. Four double pane windows insulation really helps. There’s changing out the way that we heat and cool our spaces and also our water. So, you know, now all the rage is our heat pumps, which are electric, and then the car chargers and the solar and the backup batteries.
Rev. Ambrose Carroll [00:07:21] We want to be a part of making sure that all of those buildings have clean air and clean water. How’s the energy? Do we have a heat pump, water heater? Are we going to change our stoves out from these gas ovens to electric ovens? All of those are environmental conversations.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:07:40] Have these solar panels already helped Allen Temple in some way?
Laura Klivans [00:07:46] Yeah. Yeah. It’s so amazing. They are saving about $20,000 annually on utility bills.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:07:52] Wow. That’s a lot of money.
Laura Klivans [00:07:54] Yeah. And so for them, they’re excited because like, they’re able to do more of the work in the community that they do to support the community in all sorts of ways beyond.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:08:05] You know, retrofitting your church, being something that like, we should just be doing right because it’s good for the planet. How do black church leaders talk about their place in the environmental movement or why it’s important for them to do this?
Laura Klivans [00:08:22] So the folks that I spoke to were talking about this with language that resonates with churches.
Rev. Jacqueline Thompson [00:08:29] For a lot of people. When you just say an environmentalist, they think it is, you know, having a lot of leisure time to walk around the redwood trees and hug trees.
Laura Klivans [00:08:39] Just one person I spoke to with Reverend Jacqueline Thompson. She’s the senior pastor of Allen Temple. She mentions that her grandmother picked cotton. And so like to say like, okay, let’s get involved in the environment. Let’s be environmentalists. Like it has a much more just so much more like historical baggage with a word like that at a black church.
Rev. Jacqueline Thompson [00:09:01] That concept of building bicycles is the concept of being concerned about the total and complete health of the person. Because we believe God is concerned about the total and complete health of humanity. And so that’s a lot of the work that we do is driven by that holistic understanding of ministry. And environmental issues are no different.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:09:27] How do members of the congregation talk about the effect that this work is having on them?
Ambia McClendon [00:09:34] It’s made me even think about it from my own home, right? Like how I can be more environmentally conscious.
Laura Klivans [00:09:41] Ambia McClendon who’s who works at Allen Temple and also is a member. It’s one of the things that she said was that it had made its way into her life at home, that she thinks about consumption at home. She thinks about like her energy.
Ambia McClendon [00:09:54] Even just a simple stuff that, the piece of paper I dropped on my hand, like picking it up and just those little things that made me all around. Take a look at my life in general and say, how am I, you know, contributing to the environment and then being able to be in a space that is moving that forward.
Laura Klivans [00:10:12] There’s outside research that shows how solar spreads. A really cool weather that people use with it is seeding solar, right? And so the seed is that at the church right now. And what this research that was done by the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab showed was that for every house of worship that adopted solar for surrounding homes would put solar on their roofs annually. And from there, that has like a, you know, a ballooning effect rate because like, then other people see their neighbors. And so it’s like it’s just sort of exponentially has the potential to grow. But you’re not going to necessarily do solar if you don’t have any example of it because it’s just it’s like a new thing, right? You need to see your friend has an iPhone and it’s so cool. And so then you’re like, okay, I get my phone.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:10:59] Yeah. And it’s not enough to just tell people like, You should get solar because it’s good for the planet.
Laura Klivans [00:11:04] For sure. Yeah. You need to know how to practically do that and who to talk to. And Reverend Thompson said that that some of the churches had have people saying, let’s put solar on the church and some companies had been predatory towards the churches. And so there was some distrust prior to it. So when Allen Temple got solar, you know, they have all the contacts they can they can talk people through the process that they used.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:11:27] And how, I guess, would green the church. And Reverend Carroll like to spread efforts like this even further?
Laura Klivans [00:11:35] So one thing that’s really special about the church building in a black community is this is a building that is owned by the community. And so Reverend Carroll is trying to take this model beyond just the Bay Area. And ideally, he has this goal of making 2000 resilience hubs in the next few years, which I was when I first heard that, I was like, that sounds amazing. And also maybe impossible. But I asked him more about it and he was like, Here is why I’m thinking about this. There are billions of dollars that have been through federal legislation that are specifically for disadvantaged communities. Who owns the buildings, What buildings we own. We own churches. Like, this is the perfect situation if we’re going to have, you know, millions of dollars coming in towards East 14th Street, like let’s we’re going to put on the church.
Rev. Ambrose Carroll [00:12:19] This is the center of resilience for our people. And we believe that can happen again. We believe that because of the Biden administration infrastructure bill, the IRA, Justice 40 mandate that brings $150 billion to inner city or urban or marginalized communities that we can leverage all of that in this space and spaces like it all around the country.
Laura Klivans [00:12:42] And what’s cool about this idea is that houses of worship make up 3% of energy consumption of all commercial buildings. So, you know, that’s that’s something it’s not huge, but it’s a part of the pie.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:13:00] I mean, Laura, you report on climate around the Bay Area, California. What about this story? Do you think we could really learn from it?
Laura Klivans [00:13:11] I think what’s so cool about this story is that it is community specific solutions. Here’s this national organization saying like, here’s this idea we have. But the way that they’re, you know, handing this off to churches is like you decide how you do it and how you implement it. You use the language that makes sense for your congregation.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:13:34] And it feels more doable, I guess, than some of the other like big things that we think about when addressing climate change. Doing this locally feels, I don’t know. It feels within reach, I guess.
Laura Klivans [00:13:48] Yeah, I think that’s a good, good way to say it because it’s like we think about like, offshore wind or building new nuclear. And these projects have really big runways. You know, I think that locally grown climate solutions are like going to be the most effective. And this. Like, I’m really having trouble trying to find like any sort of negative of this, right? It’s like about agency and local projects and education. Yeah. I just I think this is like a real win win win.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:14:19] Well, I love a good feel good climate story. So thank you for bringing it, Laura. I appreciate it.
