In the South, where the ruins of shuttered factories once stood as monuments to industrial decline, a different kind of energy is taking hold quite literally. From the sprawling solar farms in rural Georgia to Black-led, community-owned energy cooperatives in the Mississippi Delta, the South's green energy shift isn't just focused on clean energy. For Southerners, the movement is more about reclaiming control. Unlike conventional green initiatives driven by Wall Street interests and scale, the South's grassroots energy transition is rooted in local ownership and environmental justice, in a deliberate effort to transition the region's economy into one that prioritizes repair over extraction, and people over profit.
As the U.S. accelerates its green transition to curb climate change, the South, as the birthplace of the environmental justice movement, remains the nation's front line. The question on people's minds isn't just focused on green energy transition and its benefits, but on how the new transition impacts the local communities and environments around it. To the people of the South, there's a legit fear that the new green energy transition could become another chapter in a long story of energy extraction that could easily reproduce the same story of extraction and exploitation, this time under the guise of environmental sustainability and progress.
Across Alabama, Louisiana, and the Carolinas, local organizers and energy justice advocates are asking bold questions like, "What would a green transition look like if it centered the same people who've historically been left behind by every boom before this one?" The answer might just flip the script on what the South and the future are meant to look like and what the new transition could become. As Eloise Reid of Gulf South Organizer puts it, "The South's economy has always been built on taking, whether through plantations, fossil fuels, or petrochemicals, and dumping the costs on Black, Indigenous, and working-class communities. That extractive muscle memory is still shaping the so-called green transition."
Building on the record-breaking investments in 2023, clean energy deployment in the United States continues to accelerate. These strong gains highlight the growing role of clean electricity in both the U.S. economy and power system, with renewable energy and battery storage accounting for most new grid additions. Carbon-free resources such as geothermal and nuclear are also drawing greater attention. At the same time, U.S. industrial and commercial supply chains are expanding, spurred by the CHIPS and Science Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and the Inflation Reduction Act, but continued growth will be critical for maintaining global competitiveness and thus again putting the South at the center of this transition.
As the federal government and the global renewable energy sector funnel billions into the green transition of energy re-industrialization, policymakers in the South are being propositioned for lands as the hub for solar panel manufacturing, hydrogen production, and carbon capture infrastructure. With limited political power speaking in favor of protections from exploitative practices, and minimal influence over the future being built around the people, there is a haunting fear that the South's legacy of sacrifice zones will persist under a new green banner.
In St. James Parish, Louisiana, widely known as "Cancer Alley" because of its dense concentration of petrochemical plants, residents are now witnessing green energy companies setting up operations on the same polluted lands, promising economic growth and new jobs. Yet the underlying dynamics look strikingly familiar: industry tax breaks, weak regulatory oversight, and the exclusion of local communities from meaningful decision-making. According to Jesse George, New Orleans Policy Director for the Alliance for Affordable Energy, "In Louisiana, we are experiencing an eruption of liquefied methane export facilities along our coast, as well as the approval of so-called 'blue' hydrogen and carbon capture projects that threaten the same Black and Indigenous communities that have borne the brunt of industry's harms in the state." For many who have spent decades confronting environmental racism, the so-called energy transition appears less like a clean break from the past and more like a rebranded continuation of harm.
Local justice assessments and policy reviews show that leaders from both major political parties in Louisiana and across the South have repeatedly thrown their support behind industry-driven initiatives such as carbon capture and storage, blue hydrogen production, and petrochemical expansion. These projects are marketed as climate solutions but, in reality, sustain the South's long legacy of extraction and environmental exploitation.
They routinely attract billions in state and federal subsidies while leaving the root causes of the climate crisis untouched, further entrenching cycles of pollution, land loss, and economic dependency that disproportionately burden Southern communities. George observed, "Unfortunately, it seems that leaders of major political parties in Louisiana and the South have enthusiastically embraced industry-backed false solutions to the climate crisis that continue the legacy of extraction and exploitation in the South."
Many residents are sounding the alarm against proposed carbon capture pipelines that are routed to cut through farmlands in Louisiana. For these communities, it's understandable why these projects feel less like climate solutions and more like the toxic polluting legacy dressed up in green. The new promises of the pipelines claim to trap carbon emissions from industrial sites and bury them deep underground, often near the same communities that have long shouldered the weight of pollution. For Black farmers and rural families, many of whom have fought really hard to hold onto their land for generations, it reads less like innovation and more like the latest form of dispossession, cloaked in the language of sustainability.
There is a haunting fear that the South's legacy of sacrifice zones will persist under a new green banner.
Meanwhile, hundreds of miles east, lithium mining deals are rapidly encroaching on sacred Native lands in the Carolinas. Lithium, hailed as the "white gold" of the energy future for its role in powering electric vehicle batteries, has sparked a modern-day resource rush. But beneath the market hype lies a familiar colonial impulse: extract first, consult later, if at all. In parts of North Carolina, proposed mining sites overlap with areas of cultural and spiritual significance for Indigenous communities like the Catawba and Lumbee peoples. In Memphis, Tennessee, residents of Boxtown, a predominantly Black, working-class neighborhood that successfully fought off the Byhalia crude oil pipeline, are now being asked to welcome lithium recycling plants and EV warehouses, with no clear assurances about environmental safety or labor conditions. These mines, though implemented with a seemingly good intention, threaten not just the landscape but also tribal sovereignty and ecological balance as they encroach on the owners' right to determine their own future.
What ties these struggles together is a dangerous myth at the heart of the green economy: new technologies alone can undo centuries of systemic harm without shifting power to impacted communities and offering them meaningful reparations. Whether it's pipelines passing through Black soil or mines burrowing into Native lands, the pattern is the same: solutions imposed from above, driven by profit, and masked as progress. As companies like Tesla, Hyundai, and Formosa Plastics continue to receive massive public subsidies to build green infrastructure across the South, the communities hosting these projects are asked, once again, to bear the cost in land, health, and generational trust.
Across the South, solar farms are cropping up on land that was once stolen, under-taxed, or stripped from Black families. The land has now been leased to major energy conglomerates that often bypass local labor and offer little in the way of long-term community investment. The parallels to past extractive practices are hard to ignore, echoing a carceral logic that prioritizes control and profit over care. At the same time, utility monopolies in states like Georgia and Alabama are actively blocking decentralized energy models like cooperatives and rooftop solar because they threaten to put power, quite literally, back in the people's hands.
As Eloise Reid clearly put it, "To make sure this transition doesn't just repeat the past, we need real power in community hands. That means binding consent processes, cumulative-impact permitting, and community veto rights where people already overburdened can say no. It means ownership models like co-ops, public utilities, and community solar that circulate wealth locally instead of shipping profits to Wall Street. It means enforceable community benefits agreements with living wages, union jobs, and housing protections so investment doesn't become displacement. And it means a strict do-no-harm standard: If a project adds toxic exposure or water stress, it's off the table. The transition has to make our communities healthier, safer, and wealthier, not more vulnerable."
Federal programs like the Biden Administration's Justice40 initiative were aimed at directing 40 percent of climate-related investments to disadvantaged communities. But in reality, that commitment has largely manifested as short-lived construction jobs, community grants with strings attached, or meetings that amount to little more than checkbox engagement. As Jesse George added, "Louisiana was a recipient of $156 million in federal funding through the EPA's Solar for All program, which the Trump Administration recently announced it would be clawing back from states.
This funding has the potential to provide urgently needed relief to people in Louisiana, who have among the highest energy burdens (percentage of household income budgeted to meet energy needs) in the nation, as well as ongoing utility reliability and resilience issues. Meanwhile, tax credits for false solutions such as carbon capture, which benefit the fossil fuel companies that have caused the climate crisis, remain untouched. While the green transition is touted as a job creator, many of those roles created by the green transition development are temporary, non-unionized, and inaccessible to local workers without advanced technical training. Meanwhile, decision-making remains centralized in faraway boardrooms and state agencies. Projects are often fast-tracked with minimal environmental review, and long-term community oversight is rare.
Rebuilding on the ruins of the old extractive economy isn't inherently unjust. But doing so without repair, without accountability, land return, and community power is simply exploitation in new packaging. The solution to environmental degradation and abuse is not going to be solved by simply switching fuels. The trauma of toxic industries won't be healed just by branding something "green." Without a shift in who holds power, who decides, and who profits, the South's clean energy future risks becoming another gold rush gilded in green.
Southerners have never been strangers to reimagining what's possible on broken ground. Across the region, organizers, farmers, and everyday families are already sketching a different blueprint: one where co-ops replace monopolies, where land is returned instead of leased away, where binding consent and veto rights keep communities safe, and where wealth circulates locally rather than being siphoned to Wall Street. A Southern energy future could look like solar fields owned by the very rural families who have held that land for generations, resilient micro-grids that keep lights on through hurricanes, and repair programs that clean up Cancer Alley instead of compounding its issues.
If the federal government's billions from the IRA, CHIPS Act, and Infrastructure Law are truly meant to build resilience, then the measure of success won't be how many megawatts come online, but whether Black, Indigenous, and working-class Southerners—those long sacrificed in the name of progress—get to decide their own future this time. That is the South's unfinished work of imagination: not just surviving the transition, but transforming it into a liberated future.
