An activist collective says making buildings carbon-free is just the start.

Sarah Sax

Feb. 22, 2022

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On a cold December morning, Anjeanette Brown sat inside a Shari’s restaurant, nursing a cup of coffee and casually pushing sharp objects out of the reach of their 1-year old daughter. Brown, a Black environmental activist, grew up in northeast Portland, once home to a thriving Black community. The area’s cornerstones — the Cotton Club, Joe’s Place and Geneva’s Shear Perfection — survive only as historical posters, replaced by faux French cafes and vegan restaurants. Brown now lives farther east, around an hour’s commute from downtown.

Every winter, Brown worries about energy bills. Their rental home heats with a wood stove — the cheapest option — but this year, they told me, pulling a fork from their daughter’s fist and smiling at her antics, “I’m not going to use my wood.” That’s mainly for the safety of the child, who gurgled happily and turned her attention to the creamer packages. The only other option, however, is space heaters, which are also problematic: They’re expensive, running just under $400 a month for the three coldest months of the year, and they’re also potentially dangerous; a space heater in a Bronx high-rise, where tenants had previously reported problems with the heat, sparked a fire this January that killed 17 people. Portland lacks standards for energy, health, efficiency or climate resilience in existing buildings, so Brown has little recourse to demand more options.

Members of the Build/Shift Collective (from left): Anjeanette Brown, Derric Thompson, Ezell Watson, Taren Evans, Nikita Daryanani, Samantha Hernandez, Alma Pinto, Bretto Jackson and Jona Davis. Photographed in Portland, Oregon, in February.

On average, Black, Latino and low-income families live in less energy-efficient homes and pay more for their energy, with low-income households spending the most, up to 38% of their income, according to the Oregon Energy Fund. But access to the energy needed to heat and cool homes isn’t just a matter of cost. It’s also a matter of survival: Climate change, created by the burning of fossil fuels, has made extreme weather and wildfire smoke increasingly common and severe. This summer, a record-breaking heat dome killed at least 95 people in Oregon, a disproportionate number of them people of color and those living on lower incomes. At its core, safe, clean and affordable heating and cooling has become a justice issue.

“I feel like if we don’t champion this work now, there’s nothing. There’s nothing left to really fight for. This has to be fixed, now.”

“I see year by year the fires are getting closer to our neighbors, the smoke is taking people out, and the heat is killing people,” said Brown. “I feel like if we don’t champion this work now, there’s nothing. There’s nothing left to really fight for. This has to be fixed, now.”

Brown is part of a collective that is working to address the health, climate and equity issues associated with homes. The Build/Shift Collective, which stands for “Building relationships, shifting power,” is a grassroots group in Portland made up almost exclusively of people of color, many of them low-income renters. Buildings are one of the largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., but the push to decarbonize them needs to involve more than just emissions, the activists believe. Decarbonization should also account for the unequal effects of climate change, racist housing policies and air pollution on communities of color, and it should strive to make sure everyone has access to a healthy home, not just an energy-efficient one.

LATE LAST NOVEMBER, I logged onto a virtual meeting with some of the core members of Build/Shift. The collective came out of the Zero Cities Project, developed in 2017 as an initiative to help cities develop practical, equitable road maps to achieving a zero-net-carbon building sector by 2050. Since the fall of 2020, the participants have gathered about once a week to discuss, among other things, a set of building standards they’re developing with the city of Portland. Around 10 people popped up on screen, some at home or in offices, a few in their cars.

Ezell Watson joined from the lobby of his apartment building. A man with a big smile who chooses his words carefully, Watson works as the director of diversity, equity and inclusion for Oregon’s Public Utilities Commission, although he joined the collective as a private citizen. “Energy or the restriction of it or the placement of non-clean energy has been systematically used to devalue certain communities,” explained Watson, who is Black. “We’ve always had to live on the margins. That’s where all of the pollutants are.”

Watson’s parents, who live in Atlanta, have health problems that he believes are connected to their exposure to dirty energy. “It is critically important for my mom to have clean energy. … She needs good clean air because she’s already struggling some days to get out of the bed,” said Watson. “My father, 60 years old, has suffered multiple strokes.”  The World Health Organization has called air pollution a “silent public health emergency” that’s linked to higher rates of depression and suicide as well as to asthma, lung damage and a slew of other health problems. This also applies to the air indoors: A growing body of research has found that the same fossil fuels behind climate change also cause significant indoor air pollution, especially from sources like gas stoves.

Scientists, activists and local governments have made reducing buildings’ carbon emissions a major focus of climate action. Dozens of municipalities and cities have started to restrict the use of natural gas and limit the amount of energy new buildings can use. Late last year, the Eugene, Oregon, City Council approved starting a process that could lead to a ban on natural gas hookups in all new commercial and residential buildings.

But there’s one problem with that approach: It doesn’t limit current emissions, only future ones. “There’s no emissions coming from buildings that haven’t been built yet,” said Olivia Walker, technical strategist at the Natural Resources Defense Council. The focus on new buildings is also more likely to help higher-income people and white residents. “They’re not the ones facing the issues that a low-performing building stock has brought about,” said Walker.

“We’ve always had to live on the margins. That’s where all of the pollutants are.”

Many people living in older, energy-inefficient and low-quality housing are there because of racist policies like redlining and decades of discriminatory lending and development. In the early 20th century, for example, the city of Portland effectively restricted African Americans to a single neighborhood, which it later razed under the guise of urban renewal, displacing many of the families. Now, some community members fear energy incentives will also be used to evict people, especially if communities of color are not involved in designing the new policies. Studies generally concur, showing that shifting to more renewable energy consumption can inadvertently drive up energy poverty.

“We’re going to always be on the end of the stick that gets oppressed,” said collective member Bretto Jackson. “In this case, it’s just that this energy is clean energy,”

One common problem with trying to make rental housing more energy efficient is that landlords who don’t pay the utility bills often have little incentive to make energy improvements in rentals. When they do, however, they often use it as an excuse to evict tenants, contributing to displacement. It’s something energy experts refer to as the “split-incentive” barrier.

“When the value goes down, they swoop in and push these people out, then they’re gonna build it up again,” said Derric Thompson, another coalition member, during the Zoom call. “In northeast Portland, they’re gone. But now there’s condos, so why couldn’t those things have been built with the Black people in the community?”

THE BUILD/SHIFT COLLECTIVE is fighting to make sure that history is not repeated, in part through the new rules they are working on with the city: the Health, Equitable Energy, Anti-Displacement, Resilience, and Temperature control, or HEART, standards. The requirements would apply to the city’s largest existing commercial and multifamily residential buildings. They would require landlords to insulate all units properly and have air conditioning installed. They would also make sure that renters have the resources to push back whenever housing isn’t up to code, without fear of eviction.

In the first months of this year, Portland’s Bureau of Planning and Sustainability will prepare draft rules and begin getting public input. If the city council approves the rules, a version of the HEART standards could be implemented within the next few years.

“We’re going to always be on the end of the stick that gets oppressed. In this case, it’s just that this energy is clean energy.”

While that would be a huge step forward for the collective’s energy policy, Build/Shift has its eyes set on a bigger vision: shifting more of the political power to people of color. “You look around this room, you see diversity in here,” said Watson at the end of our Zoom call last November. “Build/Shift had to be intentional about that. It’s intentional that certain groups are excluded from the discussion.”

The collective wants more BIPOC representatives to help draft and make policy, but also to change where and how policy is made. “We do need our people at these tables,” said Brown, who volunteers as an urban forestry commissioner and spends a lot of their time attending meetings far from their home. “The problem is not people can’t or they won’t. It’s because it’s not accessible.”

Back at Shari’s, Brown talked about Build/Shift’s ideas for a truly equitable energy future. For them, a lot of it comes down to the kind of world they can leave their children. “I envision that we are champions in saving our environment at whatever cost for our benefit, for our future generations,” they said, looking at their daughter. “Hopefully, she can have her own problems. And she can champion them herself.”

Sarah Sax is the climate justice fellow at High Country News currently living in rural Washington. Email her at [email protected] or submit a letter to the editor.

Follow @sarahl_sax

Reporting for this story was supported by the Society of Environmental Journalists.

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Remember the COVID deep-cleanse? Two years ago, in the early days of the novel-coronavirus pandemic in the United States, many businesses and even homeowners obsessively sprayed disinfectant on open surfaces, aggressively wiping down and scrubbing every countertop and desk and table.

The fear back then was that the SARS-CoV-2 pathogen might survive on and spread via surfaces. People were afraid that simply sitting at a table after an infected person would expose them to COVID.

That fear was bunk.

It was soon apparent from contact-tracing and other epidemiological analyses that COVID spread pretty much exclusively via aerosols, those fine mists we all exhale as we breathe, talk, laugh, cough and sneeze. There are few, if any, documented cases of the novel-coronavirus spreading by way of “fomites,” the scientific term for virus-covered surfaces.

Now we’re finally beginning to understand why this is the case. A new study led by Jessica Kramer, a biomedical engineer at the University of Utah, found that the same spittle that helps spread the virus in the air actually blocks it from later infecting someone via surfaces as the liquid dries.

“Our data indicate that the mucin molecular structure plays a complex and important role in host defense,” Kramer and her teammates wrote in their peer-reviewed study, published on Feb. 14 in the journal of the American Chemical Society.

The safe, highly effective vaccines (available for free in the U.S.!) are still the best way to protect yourself from COVID, of course. But no vaccine is perfect. As a backup to vaccine-induced immunity, we could make our homes and businesses safer. But as Kramer’s study indicates, a deep clean isn’t the way. “The risk of contracting coronavirus from touching a surface is quite low,” she told The Daily Beast.

That’s not what researchers claimed early in the pandemic. One study, published in The New England Journal of Medicine in April 2020, found that the SARS-CoV-2 pathogen remained “viable” on surfaces for up to three days. Other studies claimed the virus remained viable for up to several weeks.

But there was a problem with those early experiments: prior studies on surface transmission looked at the virus’s survival in water. “But, of course, people don’t sneeze out water,” said Kramer. “They sneeze out mucus.”

Viruses interact differently with water than they do with mucus, Herek Clack, a University of Michigan engineer who specializes in protection from viruses, told The Daily Beast. For one, mucus evaporates slower than water does, Clack said.

More importantly, our snot and saliva contain proteins as well as sugars called “glycans.” Water doesn’t. And those proteins and sugars make a huge difference when it comes to spreading, or not spreading, the coronavirus via surfaces.

Courtesy the University of Utah

“When we add mucus [or] saliva proteins, the virus could no longer infect live cells,” Kramer explained. “Our data explain why epidemiologists have found surface transmission is low risk in the real world, despite early lab studies that found infectious virus on surfaces for weeks.”

Kramer and her team didn’t actually conduct tests with the SARS-CoV-2 virus, given how dangerous that would be. Instead, they used a different coronavirus called OC43, which causes less severe respiratory infections in people than SARS-COV-2. “The two viruses are structurally very similar so it’s a good surrogate,” Kramer said.

The scientists added samples of OC43 to droplets of cow saliva, which is similar to human saliva, and placed them on a variety of surfaces. They waited varying spans of time (ranging from five minutes to an entire day) for the droplets to evaporate, then exposed the dried-out virus to a “cellular growth medium”—i.e., simulated human tissue.

Then they waited another five days for the virus to infect the samples, something virologists term the “cytopathic effect,” or CPE.

Incredibly, that never really happened. “For the simulated sneeze droplets with mucin, we observed very little CPE from the five-minute dry sample,” Kramer said. After five minutes, virus that splattered onto a surface inside protein-rich mucus was 96-percent less likely to cause infection than virus that landed on a surface inside a protein-free water droplet. After a day, the mucin-soaked virus was 99-percent less likely to cause an infection.

The surface the droplets landed on made no difference. “We tested glass, plastic, metal and surgical masks and mucus works on all of them,” Kramer said.

“The risk of contracting coronavirus from touching a surface is quite low.”

— Jessica Kramer

So why would mucus cripple the coronavirus? The answer, Kramer and her teammates concluded, lies in the distinctive spike protein that helps coronaviruses grab onto and infect our cells. In a droplet of snot or spit, there are plenty of proteins for the virus’s spikes to grab. The glycans seem to encourage the process. After a few minutes, the spikes are all “full,” so to speak.

It’s a process scientists call “binding.” “We think that the virus and mucus proteins concentrate together when they dry and that improves binding,” Kramer said.

In a sense, the same mechanism that allows SARS-CoV-2 to spread via airborne droplets also greatly limits its spread on surfaces. The difference is wetness. Airborne coronaviruses, when we inhale them, are still wet, so they still have spike proteins that are free to bind to other things, including our healthy cells.

But a virus that’s evaporating on a tabletop somewhere grabs all the proteins it can as the surrounding fluid disappears. By the time the virus is dry, its spikes are full. In Kramer’s experiment, even rehydrating a desiccated virus with a drop of water didn’t restore its infectivity.

“This is an important study as it highlights that mucins and their glycans may play a central role in preventing our bodies from coronavirus infection,” Katharina Ribbeck, a biochemist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was not involved with Kramer’s study, told The Daily Beast.

Obviously, the biggest implication of the new findings is that we can stop stressing about sterilizing surfaces. Sure, a good scrubbing might help keep your kitchen clean and prevent bacterial contamination of food (and clean smell is a nice bonus). But it’s not going to do much to prevent COVID.

Instead, once you’ve gotten vaccinated and boosted, try increasing ventilation of indoor spaces. Fast turnover of indoor air can dissipate the aerosols that are responsible for most COVID transmission. “A greater focus on addressing airborne spread would be good,” Douglas Reed, an expert in respiratory viruses at the University of Pittsburgh, told The Daily Beast.

But better ventilation is no panacea, of course. “Vaccination, masks and avoiding crowded areas with poor ventilation continue to be our best defenses,” Kramer said.

Kramer said she hopes she and her team, as well as other scientists, will build on this initial study. One goal is to test a wider variety of coronaviruses, ultimately exposing samples of SARS-CoV-2 to a whole lot of actual human mucus.

“We hypothesize that people’s mucus will be more or less protective based on their genetics, diet, environment, et cetera, but we have yet to prove that,” Kramer said. “We need to collect, purify and analyze many human mucus samples, which does present challenges—people don’t usually like their lungs [and] eyes scraped!”

Kramer’s research could eventually lead to new non-vaccine drugs for preventing COVID. The idea would be to “mimic” the proteins in mucus and somehow incorporate them in a pill that could “block the virus from infecting our cells,” she said.

A hypothetical mucus-based medicine would be a welcome addition to the growing number of prescription pills for treating COVID infections. Unlike anti-COVID drugs such as Pfizer’s paxlovid, you might take the mucus-derived pill before infection sets in. Say, right before or right after exposure to people with COVID.

A mucus-based meds is still just an idea, albeit a promising one. For now, it might be reassuring to have hard science to back up what many of us realized a couple years ago. Deep-cleaning your home or business is nice. But it won’t stop COVID.

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