Jamal Lewis’s path to climate work started when he came close to losing his life.
In 2014, Mr. Lewis, a Maryland native, was a student at the University of Pennsylvania, pursuing a communications major and playing basketball, when he developed a staph infection in his bloodstream. Doctors put him into a medically induced coma for six days. He said he came so close to death that his parents were told to call in the family to say goodbye.
When he woke up, he said, he had a clearer sense of what was important and decided to change his life’s focus.
“I switched my major while I was in the hospital bed to environmental science, and that was a decision that I made to pour myself into things that actually made me happy,” Mr. Lewis said.
He decided to devote himself to helping people suffering the harmful effects of toxic chemicals and fumes in their homes, a problem that he had never thought about much.
After college, he earned a masters in public health at Columbia University, focusing on environmental health. He joined Rewiring America, a nonprofit group founded in 2020 that is dedicated to electrifying homes and businesses around the country, and he is now a senior director of implementation learning and integration. The organization’s stated mission is to convert the 1 billion fossil-fuel-powered machines in the country to electric alternatives, and last year the voting rights activist Stacey Abrams became its senior counsel.
Both Mr. Lewis and another Changemaker, Aloja Airewele, are focusing on ways to electrify homes and businesses to reduce emissions. At the same time, both are trying to help communities that are struggling with the effects of racism, poverty, neglect and marginalization.
“The people that live in the oldest and most unhealthy homes are often low-income, Black and brown communities, rural, tribal, and those are the people that can benefit from these resources,” Mr. Lewis said.
Mr. Airewele, a pastor who lives in Ithaca, N.Y., is using his city’s climate goals to try to help people he believes are at risk of being left behind.
Since 2014, he has been running a program called Energy Warriors, based out of the Cornell Cooperative Extension in Tompkins County, which trains participants at juvenile detention centers in how to install heat pumps, induction stoves and better insulation.
But after Ithaca passed a Green New Deal resolution in 2019 that committed itself to reaching carbon neutrality by 2030, Mr. Airewele expanded the program to include other disadvantaged groups, including formerly incarcerated adults.
Mr. Airewele said that 23 people had graduated from the program and that 14 of them had jobs helping to electrify buildings. The program has expanded to teach local residents environmental literacy skills.
The Inflation Reduction Act invested at least $370 billion in rebates and tax incentives for clean energy projects, including electrifying American homes and businesses. And though Ithaca received significant attention when it announced its climate goals in 2019, Mr. Airewele and Mr. Lewis both said their biggest challenge was a lack of awareness about the incentives available to consumers.
“We still haven’t got that huge momentum that we are looking for, which is, say 100 homes want to be decarbonized every month,” Mr. Airewele said. With that level of demand, he said he could include far more participants in the program.
For Mr. Lewis, it’s a matter of who gets to benefit from electrification right now.
“I want everyone, literally everyone, to have access to that transition,” he said.
Aside from the rebates, Mr. Lewis said it could be empowering for anyone to play a role in reducing emissions. (Rewiring America offers advice for both renters and owners.) He pointed to a Department of Energy study by one of Rewiring America’s founders that showed almost half of energy-related emissions in the United States come from consumer decisions.
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