The politics of percentage: Informating justice in the US clean energy rush

Justice40 and the energy transition proposal economy

Complying with Justice40 hinges on being able to identify both project benefits and “disadvantaged communities” (DACs) to deliver them to. In January 2021, the Biden administration issued Executive Order 14008, which laid out the Justice40 initiative, ordering federal agencies to direct 40% of the benefits of energy and environmental infrastructure, climate resilience, housing, and workforce investments to “disadvantaged communities.” ⁵ The term “disadvantaged community” remains in federal programming, even though many communities reject the designation. Critics argue that the term fails to account for the structural problems that create injustice in the first place and centers damage, which “reinforces and reinscribes a one-dimensional notion of these [communities] as depleted, ruined, and hopeless” (Tuck, 2009: 409, quoted in Horgan et al., 2023; see also Underhill and Esparza, 2022). The federal definition of a “disadvantaged community” is hyper-quantified and set out by the Office of Economic Impact and Diversity: “a census tract must rank in the 80th percentile of the cumulative sum of the 36 burden indicators [in their state] and have at least 30% of households classified as low-income [at or below 200% of the federal poverty level].” ⁶ The 36 “burden indicators” cover fossil dependence (2), energy burden (5), environmental and climate hazards (10), and socio-economic vulnerabilities (19). ⁷ The most widely used screening tool to identify places that meet the federal definition of a disadvantaged community is the federal Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool (CEJST) (Figure 1), which includes a map interface and supporting datasets. Most funding calls require or request that applicants use CEJST to identify the Justice40 dimensions of their proposals.

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Figure 1.

CEJST screenshot showing “disadvantaged communities” (DACs), the darker areas (left), with a close-up of one census tract and summary statistics (right).

CEJST itself exists in a dizzying ecosystem of other justice-related information systems, such as the EPA’s EJScreen, ⁸ the DOE’s Energy Justice dashboard, ⁹ the Department of Transportation’s Equitable Transportation Community Explorer, ¹⁰ and state-level screening tools, such as California’s CalEnviroScreen and Colorado’s Enviroscreen. ¹¹ Like CEJST, these tools obscure the relational production of privilege and harm (Horgan et al., 2023).

To define the benefits that ought to flow to these communities, the DOE published the following guidance for how proposed projects could help the agency meet its Justice40 goals:

1. Decrease energy burden in disadvantaged communities (DACs).

The DOE channels funds to entities such as corporations, national labs, universities, and community-based organizations via multiple mechanisms, including competitive proposals in response to funding calls. In this way, the massive infrastructure investments are enacting the energy transition through what Stern and Hall (2010) call a proposal economy: one in which essential goods and services are allocated via competitive grant proposal writing rather than public deliberation. The DOE issues Funding Opportunity Announcements (FOAs) that proposers must follow when writing their applications. Public participation in the process of setting funding priorities, evaluating proposals, and evaluating projects is ambiguous at best (Arkhurst and Williams, 2024). With the exception of some programs specifically marked as being directed toward community groups and local governments, most projects are proposed by private developers, universities, and national labs. Applications go through a merit review, which includes panels of internal and external experts who assign quantitative values to each proposal in variously weighted categories. Program leadership then provides recommendations, paying attention to the politics of the districts where federal funds are directed. The Secretary of Energy and/or their immediate subordinates provide final approval or disapproval for projects.

FOAs are massive legal documents, produced through a long series of negotiations, that describe program goals, explain application and project requirements, and provide guidance on preparing the submission. The 2022 FOA for the carbon capture and storage program that funded our team’s carbon capture and sequestration project, for example, was 289 single-spaced pages long and included 18 appendixes. ¹³ Justice40 was most visible in the package of Societal Considerations and Impacts documents, which included a Justice40 Plan Development Proposal; a Community, Labor, and Stakeholder Engagement Plan Development Proposal; a Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA) Plan; and a Workforce Development questionnaire. Each of the planning documents had to include discrete tasks, milestones, and SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timely) goals – all of which had to be integrated into the overall project narrative and timelines. The Justice40 guidelines required applicants to use the CEJST screening tool to identify potential DACs affected by the proposed activities. Underscoring the point that “the DOE” is not a singular entity, these requirements varied office-by-office, and FOA-by-FOA. Other FOAs that I helped STEM faculty interpret pared down the societal considerations material to one single 5- or 10-page document that included each of the components described above. Yet others – especially those for early stage research – required no identification of disadvantaged communities, but evidence of considerations of societal impacts if the proposed technology were to be successful in the future.

This detailed information apparatus for conceptualizing, tracking, and communicating the justice dimensions of projects has yet to stabilize. DOE staff developed templates to help ensure that applicants made tangible, actionable commitments that aligned with program goals and could be audited for compliance. In summer 2023, a new Community Benefits Plan template replaced the Societal Considerations and Impacts documents. The switch in the title itself highlights potential benefits while minimizing negative impacts of projects. While previous iterations had been loosely structured and allowed narrative form with supporting tables, the new template created a rigid outline that pre-defined what information teams ought to include. For example, it required applicants to name specific stakeholder or community organizations; characterize the engagement as project development, research and design, decision making, input, reporting back, technical assistance or other; state the date of engagement; and share the outcomes of the engagement, which the template suggested were memorandums of understanding or letters of support. The new DEIA section presented a narrow view of what legible DEIA activities could be; it directed applicants to enumerate their partnerships with minority- , woman- and veteran-owned businesses, including the contract amount and overall “financial value” of the partnership, and then quantify the project’s financial commitment to workers in the form of childcare and other assistance. The Justice40 section laid out each of the eight policy priorities summarized above and directed applicants to state when the proposed “benefit” would be delivered to which particular DACs and assessed using which metrics. The intention of the document was to add rigor and guidance to the applications, and each of these sections included caveats that teams could add or delete information. Yet the template made a number of troubling assumptions: that publics are organized into formal groups, that engagement can be defined by singular dates, that outcomes of engagement ought to be legal documents demonstrating support, that the value of DEIA efforts can be measured in dollars, and that benefits ought to be measured quantitatively.

In spring 2024, the application and reporting structure underwent yet another significant change, with the introduction of the Community Benefits Outcomes and Objectives (CBOO) document and a series of Excel files. Despite high-profile DOE equity specialists publicly stating that community benefits and Justice40 should not be treated as a checklist, the new CBOO did precisely that in the form of a “milestone table” that pre-populated outcomes and objectives and directed users to check “yes” or “no” next to each one (Figure 2).

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Figure 2.

Screenshot of the 2024 Community Benefits Outcomes and Objectives template.

At the same time as the agency released the new CBOO, it also released a series of Excel files that teams with successful proposals had to fill out and update in order to demonstrate compliance with their proposed plan and agency priorities. Most of the cells were protected and limited what kind of information could be entered into them. For example, the stakeholder sheet required users to select pre-defined engagement types and select whether the engagement of each stakeholder was “planned” or “completed” – closing the door to the possibility that engagement types might shift and that the engagement itself might be ongoing. The Justice40 sheet included 25 columns and insisted that all benefits be defined with measures, units of measure, and number of units proposed or delivered (Figure 3).

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Figure 3.

Partial screenshot of the Justice40 Excel sheet.

Each new iteration of the community benefits and Justice40 application, reporting, and auditing materials more squarely relies on quantification. Such metrics “can help correct systemic inequalities by identifying important features and developing standards, such that actions can be informed and geared toward meaningfully improving the quality of life as well as monitoring its evolutions” (Baker et al., 2023: 741). Yet they also narrow the ways in which engagement and benefits can be imagined.

In part, the proliferation of numbers identified here could be viewed as responsive to the techniques used by the environmental justice (EJ) movement to make the case for systemic injustices in the distribution of pollution and environmental risks. Since the pivotal 1983 Government Accountability Office study establishing that the communities near four major hazardous waste landfills in the South were disproportionately African-American, “hundreds of studies conclude that, in general, ethnic minorities, indigenous persons, people of color, and low-income communities confront a higher burden of environmental exposure from air, water, and soil pollution from industrialization, militarization, and consumer practices” (Mohai et al., 2009: 408). To make their case, these studies almost all rely on complex and contested multivariate statistics (Horgan et al., 2023; Mohai et al., 2009).

This approach is replicated in the significant and often uncoordinated energy put into improving and creating new metrics to help advance justice in energy systems. Baker et al. (2023) provide an overview of these, arguing that most capture distributional dimensions of justice. Tarekegne et al. (2021) provide an overview of energy equity metrics, grouped into categories of target population identification, investment decision making, and program impact assessment. The Initiative for Energy Justice published a Justice in 100 Scorecard (Bolon et al., 2021) that creates scores for process, restoration, decision making, benefits and access. The University of Michigan’s Energy Equity project evaluated 148 potential energy equity measures related to procedural, distributive, restorative, and recognition justice (Energy Equity Project, 2022). Barlow et al. (2022) created a list of 19 energy equity metrics related to those same justice dimensions. The JUST-R tool (Dutta et al., 2023) combines metrics from energy justice (e.g. Sovacool et al., 2016) with key principles of Responsible Research and Innovation, such as anticipation, reflexivity, inclusion, and adaptiveness (Stilgoe et al., 2013). Heleno et al. (2022) created a quantitative decision-support tool to “optimize” energy equity. Responding to a lack of energy indicators in dominant justice screening tools, Popovich et al. (2024: 1) created a “nationwide, census tract-level index of cumulative burden that includes energy-relevant indicators alongside climate, social, environmental, and economic indicators, and is flexible to the inclusion of additional data sources.” As even this short review makes clear, the array of options for quantifying energy justice is dizzying. Identifying correspondence between the DOE metrics and a longer history of quantification in the EJ movement, however, is not sufficient to explain the ongoing frenetic pace of metric-making, let alone to begin to untangle its significance.

The work of numbers

The Justice40 initiative fits within a much longer history of statistics being used as a key mode of statecraft (Barry, 1993; Hacking, 1990; Merry, 2016; Rose, 1991). Out of this long history, Goodale (2023: 4) draws our attention to the mid-20th-century shift from the welfare to the regulatory state, which made “the success or failure of governments and institutions at all levels depend on meeting quantitative benchmarks.” Porter (1995) proposes that numbers came to dominate the flow of information in democratic political systems because they convey impartiality and objectivity in the midst of contestations over authority. Numbers in the form of data may figure largely in confrontations over accountability because they are treated as “pre-analytical and pre-factual” (Ghosh, 2023: 4). Numbers grease the wheels of bureaucracies, where accountability stems from representing decision making as the result of rules, routines, and divisions of responsibilities rather than decision making by individual bureaucrats (Miller and Rose, 1990; Porter, 1995; Weber, 2007). As Lampland underscores, “the shift toward quantifying information is a result of the specific social features of bureaucracies and political struggles over knowledge produced by scientific and technical experts, not a simple result of refined techniques” (2010: 381, emphasis in original).

In contrast with a commonsense view of the objectivity of numbers, critical scholarship “argues against the illusion that the world can be neutrally represented and accessed by measurement” (Holtrop, 2018: 77–8). Instead, it questions how numbers come to be, how they behave, and how they intervene in the world. As a starting point, numbers are always preceded by judgement of what ought to be measured, and they appear to make known the “realities” of the world while simultaneously shaping our perceptions and everyday practice (Rose, 1991: 675). As Guyer and colleagues write, “Once number moves out of technical life and into domains of culture and power, quantitative anthropology becomes no longer about how we should quantify the world, but about how people inhabit worlds that they already apprehend numerically” (2010: 37). As Verran (2013) evocatively argues, thinking about numbers as “inseparable from the practices in which enumerated material entities come to life” recognizes that “the workings of numbers are deeply embedded in and constitutive of the real – they lubricate its happening” (2013: 3). To return to the federal definition of disadvantaged communities, the collection of indicators used is itself a valuing process: it does not neutrally identify already existing disadvantaged communities, but defines what constitutes a “disadvantaged community” and brings the category into being. Deeper shifts to “data-driven governance” (Ghosh, 2023) have followed increasing calls for greater accountability, especially for questions of carbon and climate (Günel, 2016; Whitington, 2020) and environmental and health harms (Fiske, 2017; Fortun, 2004; Ghosh, 2023; Li, 2015; Verran, 2010).

In this vein, the proliferation of numbers set off by Justice40 can be interpreted as an attempt to informate justice. Fortun (2004) proposes the term “informating environmentalism” to capture how environmental problems are made meaningful through monitoring, collecting, managing, and communicating data, and Whitington (2020) shows this process at work in the creation of carbon markets. ¹⁴ The audit-oriented DOE Excel files are particularly strong examples of attempts to render justice into quantitative metrics. Energy democracy, eighth on the list of DOE energy equity policy priorities, is a textured concept that references control and ownership of energy systems as well as equitable participation in planning and governing those systems (Wahlund and Palm, 2022). It is difficult to imagine rich enough Excel-ready metrics that would capture energy democracy in its fullest sense. For example, tracking the number of people from different stakeholder groups who participate in planning and management meetings would not capture whether that participation was just, satisfying, impactful, or tokenized in nature. As philosopher Achille Mbembe asks, “What remains of the human subject in an age when instrumental reason is carried out by and through information machines and technologies of calculation?” (2021: 11; quoted in Hirsch et al., 2024).

Beyond metrics in general, the informating of justice in Justice40 hinges on the political work of the percentage form, in this case, the goal of 40% of benefits flowing to communities classified as disadvantaged. Percentages call attention to part-whole relationships and proportionality (Verran, 2013). Ballestero (2014) and Holtrop (2018) draw attention to the temporality of percentage. Ballestero (2014: 31) writes that “percentages are tied to their own change” because they envelop both “past relations and future commitments.” In her case, activists used percentages to aspire to fullness – if 80% of organizations met a particular target, it galvanized discussion about what to do with the remaining 20% to reach a 100% target goal. This observation leads her to argue that percentages “help establish systems of responsibility, economic relations, and future aspirations without explicit and constant recourse to the discursive legitimacy, or lack thereof, of the law” (Ballestero, 2014: 30). Holtrop (2018: 83) similarly observes that the percentage form emphasizes “the possibility of de-/increase of the proportion” but also warns that it may eclipse focus on the “constituents themselves or the mathematics of their relation.” In her case of evaluating gender and education in Afghanistan, this would involve focusing attention on changes in the proportion of Afghan girls receiving education rather than on the girls and the educational systems themselves. Similar critiques have been made of the justice screening tools outlined above, which presume to identify disadvantaged communities without attention to the past and current relationships that created inequitable harm in the first place. Horgan et al. (2023: 2) argue that tools that “quantify and map harm in static time and discrete borders” are inadequate because they:

elide the actual relationships and processes that produce environmental harm. By definition, inequity exists when some have less than others; standard EJ approaches focus attention on one side of this relationship (the disadvantaged side). Less attention has been paid to the mechanisms, policies, and processes that maintain inequitable outcomes, through which affluent and predominantly white suburbs are shielded from environmental harm.

Without attention to the relational construction of privilege and harm, new infrastructure investments may simply reinforce already existing inequities (Arkhurst and Williams, 2024).

Anxiety over an “undefined accountability”

Percentages like the 40% invoked in Justice40 are powerful because they both “mobilize people’s moral sentiments … and measure those commitments” (Ballestero, 2014: 29). Justice40 has been used as an explicitly political tool to make ethical claims about the “place of energy in human and more-than-human lives” (High and Smith, 2019: 9). DOE Secretary Jennifer Granholm publicly stressed the importance of Justice40 as integral for the mission of the DOE, stating:

When you hear President Biden say he wants to Build a Better America … he means a more equitable America. A more inclusive America. A more just America. And we’ll build it with clean energy. ¹⁵

These aspirations of equity, inclusivity, and justice are highly politicized in the US, associated with Biden’s Democratic party and disparaged by top Republican presidential contenders as well as many state-level politicians. Because numbers can mask their social and political origins (Fiske, 2017; Merry, 2016), the informating and hyper-quantification of justice as a set of numerical indicators may be a strategy to ease a political goal by making justice seem more neutral and objective.

The moral register invoked by Granholm trickled down to DOE program officers and mid-level employees as they presented themselves and their work. Their descriptions of their work brimmed with a sincerely felt moral ambition (High, 2019). They described Justice40 as the “right thing to do,” as assurance that energy development could be done ethically. For some, it presented an opportunity to connect what they called their “passion” for community development with their everyday lives as a bureaucrat. One DOE staffer, for example, described spending their early career trying to set up renewable energy projects in and for vulnerable communities. They jumped at the opportunity to work for the DOE, as it provided them an opportunity to direct massive funding to projects that they thought would “really make a difference” for the kind of communities they had always wanted to serve. Another said that Justice40 gave him the “platform” he had always wanted to direct more funds to the people who needed them the most. An early career employee who self-deprecatingly described himself as a “bureaucrat” said, “That is the reason why all of us are here – we’re trying to do good.” While these descriptions of career choices may seem trite, it bears noting that the majority of the DOE scientists, engineers, and economists I met all could have made more money working in the private sector, suggesting that their government positions offered more than just financial incentives.

Justice40 was energizing as it galvanized the moral imaginations and future goals of DOE leaders and personnel. Yet it also generated a pervasive sense of anxiety, especially when considering questions of accountability to the US taxpayers footing the bill for the massive spending. Chris Castro, Chief of Staff for the DOE’s Office of State and Community Energy Programs, succinctly described this tension, saying, “It feels incredible to come into the office every day. We’re working around the clock. We know there’s not enough time in the day to get these resources out as quick as we can.” He went on to say that he and his staff felt a “mix of joy but real concern that if we don’t get this right, we could set ourselves back a decade … we don’t know if we’ll get another bite at the apple.” ¹⁶ Castro was referencing the urgency of stemming climate change while there were both resources from the once-in-a-generation federal financial investment and the political will from the Biden administration. The impending 2024 presidential election weighed heavily on most of the people I came to know – they described frantically issuing funding calls and pushing along the review process in order to get the money out before a different administration could kill the programs. “We just need to get this money out now, while we have it,” a DOE staffer explained to me. “We can’t delay because everything is so uncertain, politically.”

In their anxiety, staffers primarily worried about their accountability to Congress and American taxpayers. Accountabilities to the historically marginalized communities the investments were meant to bolster were portrayed as a function of that broader accountability to Congress and American taxpayers. “Imagine that you’ve just been handed a massive amount of money from the American people to go make systemic changes in our energy system to make it cleaner and more equitable,” a DOE engineer instructed me. “Now imagine a scenario in which we have to defend [so-called] ‘woke’ political ideology to people who don’t believe in climate change.” He described his colleagues and himself being stuck in a position in which they had to anticipate critiques from conservative Congress members, but without having a system in place to ensure that they were actually being accountable. “We don’t know how to ensure that money is flowing to benefit the people who we want,” he said. “It’s an undefined accountability, in terms of reporting, monitoring, and measuring success. And we’re all clueless.” He pinned his hope of defending their funding decisions on numbers. Recalling Porter’s (1995) argument that numbers become potent for managing contestations in authority, he said, “We use numbers and units to explain in measurable, quantifiable ways how what we are doing and what we are spending is good.” He and other DOE staffers imagined that the Excel files would help them calculate and communicate the total number of jobs created and environmental harms mitigated across the discrete awards.

This “adding up” of benefits to demonstrate accountability rests on commensuration, in which different entities can be brought into comparison using a common metric (Strathern, 2000). Merry (2016: 10) influentially identifies commensuration as central to indicator culture, which rests on the belief that “all things can be measured and … those measures provide an ideal guide to decision making.” Commensuration threads through the DOE proposal economy and ensuing audits of awarded projects. The CEJST tool provides rankings of the burdens experienced by particular census tracts, facilitating comparison across geographies. To return to Figure 1, it marks Moffatt County as ranking above the 90th percentile for energy cost and above the 65th percentile for low-income populations. These percentiles facilitate comparison in the proposal writing and evaluation stage: reviewers and program officers may privilege projects in more marginalized communities in order to raise the impact of the benefits that could be delivered, and project developers may choose to locate their projects in communities with higher burden scores in order to enhance the likelihood of their proposal being funded. Once projects move into the award stage, the Excel files enable commensuration, presumably by allowing personnel to aggregate data from multiple files to make statements about the overall impact of a program. Yet sharing data such as the total number of jobs across multiple projects presumes that they are equivalent – that a construction job created in an Ohio coal community is the same as a construction job created in Nevada’s lithium region, to paraphrase Merry (2016: 10).

Despite the “avalanche of numbers” (Hacking, 1990) the proposal economy obliges developers and awardees to consider, generate, and promise to report, DOE staffers also evaluated projects in more qualitative ways. An engineer said that he and his colleagues could judge the sincerity of the Justice40 documents based on their language. Some energy projects seemed to emerge in clear partnership with communities, he said, while others were a “thinly veiled, strong-arm panhandle.” Cynically, he paraphrased his interpretation of the worst ones: “They’re going to do PR [public relations] to convince locals that their plan isn’t going to kill them like the last one – ‘Sorry that you live in a Superfund site that we own!’” These judgements were easy, he said, anticipating that the hard part would be “trying to report out years from now, when billions have been spent, ‘Hey, this is the cumulative net effect on the economy.’” Like the staffers quoted above, he also worried about future accountabilities, saying that he imagined a “cynical, adversarial relationship with a potential future Congress.” He continued, “We want to be accountable to US taxpayers that the money was spent in the best interest of the American people.” He paused. “We can’t do that right now.” A colleague of his worried that most of the funds were going to “major engineering firms, coal companies, pipeline operators, etc.” He said, “The money isn’t going to John Henry.” John Henry is a folk hero, an African-American freedman and steel driver who raced against a steam-powered rock drilling machine and won, only to die with his hammer in his hand. Invoking the legend of John Henry poignantly critiques the privileging of industry over the people Justice40 is supposed to benefit.

Lampland’s (2010) notion of a false or provisional number helps to capture the work done by the 40% referenced in Justice40. False and provisional numbers are “made for thinking and planning” while eschewing claims to stable referents and accuracy (Lampland, 2010: 383). For her, these numbers make possible different kinds of formalizing practices, including quantification, standardization, rationalization, and modeling. In the DOE case, the 40% galvanizes moral commitments, obliges project proponents to consider the energy and environmental justice dimensions of their proposed plans, encourages them to direct benefits to disadvantaged communities, and establishes expectations for accountability – all without any project proponent or DOE official needing to prove that the projects they fund will actually direct 40% of benefits to disadvantaged communities.

Justice40 in the vernacular

Goodale (2023: 16) summarizes one of Merry’s key concerns about commensuration: that the “successive transformation of data from one level of extrapolation to the next” means that “by the time a massive aggregated global index was produced, it had no real relation to actual human rights practices in particular places at particular times.” Indeed, discussions about Justice40 too infrequently considered the relationship between the numbers that were being generated and the things the numbers purported to represent, and ample scholarship demonstrates that quantified environmental and health measures can fail to capture local experiences of harm (Checker, 2007; Li, 2015; Murphy, 2004; Ottinger, 2023). Laying the groundwork to treat number as a material-semiotic device, Verran (2010, 2013) opens up how numbers are often treated as icons or symbols when they are better understood as indexes. Recalling Peircian semiotics, she argues that numbers as icons propose a one-to-one relationship between the number and the thing being represented; numbers as symbols require (but often do not explicitly acknowledge) theories and categories to communicate value; and numbers as indexes involve “explicitly working with what using them as icons blithely takes for granted, and using them as symbols insistently denies: the need to wrestle with the always and already overwhelming, blooming, buzzing real” (Verran, 2013: 8). Numbers as index acknowledge a proposed relation to and intervention in the world (see also Latour, 1999). Holtrop (2018) uses the term “interface” to analyze this indexicality.

These analytical frameworks are useful for interpreting how the avalanche of numbers generated by Justice40 are interpreted and used by different actors. Many treated the metrics used to identify disadvantaged communities as icons: results in the “80th percentile of the cumulative sum of the 36 burden indicators” meant that a particular census tract was a disadvantaged community. An indexical treatment would instead consider the relationship between the numerical designations and communities as actual, lived-in places, perhaps by questioning which people were left out of the census data, the hidden politics of dividing regions into census tracts, the strengths and limitations of the methods used to ascertain air pollution, or how the numerical designation of a place as a disadvantaged community made it an appealing location for clean energy developers. This approach would ask how well these numbers captured “meaningful bodily experiences and stories about the past, present, and future” and question whether different meanings could be made from the same ‘results’” (Whitney and Kiechle, 2017: 4). Some FOAs tried to encourage a more indexical view of Justice40, encouraging users to treat tools such as CEJST properly as a screening tool to conduct further investigation and social and environmental characterization, rather than treating the results as proof that a place is a disadvantaged community. This nuance was easily lost in the massive amounts of data the tools generated and the frenetic desire on the part of proposal writers to demonstrate that their project would benefit historically marginalized communities.

Attending to justice in the lived-in world requires rethinking commensuration. Goodale (2023: 1) develops Merry’s (2016) concept of vernacularization to rescue the concept of justice while accounting for its “highly specific, contingent, and, most importantly, incommensurable” nature. He points to research on “everyday indicators,” which maintain the possibility of measurement but are contextually specific and created by people from the ground up. A powerful example of place-based, everyday indicators is a project in which Latinx community members, activists, and students in Central California visualized groundwater pollution via ancestral natural dye practices (Underhill and Esparza, 2022).

A vernacularized Justice40 would require developing indicators with the people affected by a particular project (see also Baker et al., 2023). Only one of the many FOAs I read suggested that communities themselves ought to participate in creating (and contesting) the frameworks to assess the justice implications of an energy project, doing the assessment, and making meaning from both the resulting metrics and the gaps in what numerical metrics cannot represent. This FOA encouraged project proponents to consider “What parts of this project (location, technical characteristics, implementation, etc.) can be changed according to community input?” and asked “Where are the opportunities for community input to shape what happens in the project?” It also proposed the following provisional goals:

• Seeking input on alternative project characteristics.

Instructions such as these were perceived by many STEM professionals as revolutionary, as they challenged the technical authority of project proponents to define a project on their own and then defend it against criticism. At its best, this language encouraged proponents to think about how to adapt a project itself to particular social and environmental contexts. Yet, as many activists pointed out in public commentary, the executive order and the FOAs stopped short of enshrining consent, in which affected people and communities have the right to oppose and stop a proposed development rather than simply being “consulted” during the planning of it (Kirsch, 2018). Some did reference consent-based siting, a concept that has a specific definition in the context of the DOE’s nuclear waste program (Richter et al., 2022) but has expanded to more generally refer to the idea that industrial projects ought to be sited where host communities have provided consent. Richter and her colleagues identified institutional barriers to its implementation, including “the DOE’s focus on expediency; imposed limitations on the scope of [consent-based siting]; bureaucratic obstacles to public input; a lack of continuity in values across executive administrations; and absence of top-level commitment to procedural and institutional learning, innovation, and adaptation” (Richter et al., 2022: 1). The FOAs had much in common with corporate social responsibility programs that narrowed the ethical consideration of new technology projects by posing the question as a pragmatic one of how to do the development responsibly rather than whether to do the development at all (Smith, 2021).

Conclusion

Major efforts to hasten a US energy transition are being rolled out in the form of a proposal economy, which Stern and Hall (2010) critique for privileging experts at the expense of public deliberation. This article has shown that techniques of quantification and commensuration animate the current energy transition proposal economy, including the Justice40 mandate to deliver 40% of benefits to historically marginalized communities. The overarching emphasis has been on creating tools to facilitate the “adding up” of benefits, from screening tools used to identify historically marginalized communities to Excel files to track the delivery of benefits to those communities. While this commensuration echoes techniques originally developed by the environmental justice movement to demonstrate and seek to rectify systemic harm, the DOE personnel I came to know primarily hoped that commensuration would allow them and their programs to positively shape projects and demonstrate accountability for the massive investments they stewarded.

Recalling Fortun (2004), these tools attempt to informate justice, turning it into something that can be measured and manipulated using information systems. The metrics engendered by Justice40 offer a version of justice grounded in optimism that new business can benefit the people and places who have disproportionately shouldered the burdens of our current energy systems. They sideline crucial questions of consent in favor of economic benefits. The question of the relationship between the numbers that are proposed and reported and actual improvements in the wellbeing of the people and places that host major energy infrastructure projects remains open. The applications, including the community benefit plans, are not currently made publicly available (but may be requested via the Freedom of Information Act). This article has proposed that considering justice in the vernacular (Goodale, 2023; Merry, 2016) offers one possibility for directing these once-in-a-generation investments to the communities that would benefit the most.

It is important to recognize that not all DOE-funded infrastructure projects materialize. These awards do not guarantee that a particular project will go forward, raise all of its required funding, or receive all of the required permits. They do, however, send the message that the federal government endorses a project. They envision a future and create a sense of forward-looking momentum that a project will likely go forward, which can lead to a sense of inevitability (Benson and Kirsch, 2010). As the projects begin roll out, key questions remain. What will become of the impending avalanche of numbers produced by project teams? Who will care for the massive amounts of data they will generate (Whitington, 2020)? Will the numeric representations of justice generated in “output tables” be treated iconically, or could metrics be treated more capaciously as indexes that invite further consideration of the lived-in world? What will become of the experiences and considerations of (in)justice that are less amenable to numerical representation? What opportunities will emerge for projects to incorporate more vernacular understandings of justice that are accountable to the people and places such projects ostensibly seek to serve?