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Differentiated disadvantage: class, race, gender, and residential energy efficiency inequality in the United States

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Abstract

This study focuses on energy efficiency inequality in the United States. It examines the extent to which class, race, and gender, which have been shown to be key determinants of inequality in other areas, are related to energy efficiency inequality, measured by energy use intensity (EUI). Regression-based analysis of longitudinal data assembled from three waves of the Residential Energy Consumption Survey (2005, 2009, 2015), indeed, shows significant relationships between these variables and EUI in the residential sector. The results show that disadvantage in terms of EUI disparities in the African American community is differentiated by gender and class. Specifically, they show that while female-headed African American households fare worse than White households in terms of electricity EUI, male-headed African American households actually fare better. The relationship between being an African American household and residential EUI is conditioned by income: as incomes rise, EUI for housing units occupied by African American households decreases. This study underscores the importance of considering the joint influence of class, race, and gender when analyzing residential energy inequality, burdens, or insecurity.

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Notes

  1. Information retrieved 12/12/19 from: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=9951

  2. https:/www.eia.gov/energyexplained/use-of-energy/efficiency-and-conservation.php

  3. https://www.imt.org/resources/map-u-s-building-benchmarking-policies/

  4. Information retrieved 12/12/19 from: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=9951

  5. https://www.eia.gov/consumption/residential/

  6. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=38332

  7. The other approaches are anticategorical and intercategorical. The anticategorical approach focuses on the deconstruction of categories. The approach considers social life as irreducibly complex, which makes “…fixed categories anything but simplifying social fictions that produce inequalities in the process of producing differences” (McCall, 2005:1173). According to McCall, the anticategorical approach renders the use of categories suspect. The intercategorical approach is also referred to as the categorical approach. The approach observes that “there are relationships of inequality among already constituted social groups, as imperfect and ever changing as they are, and takes those relationships as the center of analysis” (McCall, 2005:1785). From this approach, therefore, researchers’ task is to explain those relationships, which entails starting with categories.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, USA

    Lazarus Adua

  2. Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, USA

    Ruan De Lange

  3. C.K. Tedam University of Technology and Applied Sciences, Navrongo, Ghana

    Anontise Isaac Aboyom

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  1. Lazarus Adua
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Adua, L., De Lange, R. & Aboyom, A.I. Differentiated disadvantage: class, race, gender, and residential energy efficiency inequality in the United States. Energy Efficiency 15, 49 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12053-022-10056-7

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