Presentation short abstract

California focus groups show residents don’t just say yes/no to climate projects; they govern portfolios—setting safety, oversight, and benefit terms for what gets built and where, weighing cumulative risks, rerouting burdens, and insisting on local authority and enforceable monitoring.

Presentation long abstract

The green transition often routes new risk through old sacrifice zones, pushing frontline communities into a grey zone between refusal and conditional consent. Drawing on twenty focus groups in five California communities facing proposals for renewable energy, grid-scale battery storage, and carbon management (incl. DAC), this paper shows that residents do not respond with simple yes/no preferences to isolated projects. Instead, they practice portfolio governance—collectively ranking options, weighing cumulative harms, negotiating binding terms, and sometimes rerouting burdens while attempting to retain benefits. I develop a typology of place attachment that illuminates complex complicity under asymmetric power: (1) Protective attachment & bounded consent—already-burdened communities articulate survival conditions (strict safety standards, Tribal authority, independent monitoring, enforceable community benefits) under which limited hosting might be tolerated; (2) Survival veto—where cumulative risk makes additional siting ethically and materially impossible; (3) Selective redistribution—efforts to deflect high-hazard components elsewhere while demanding local ownership, bill relief, or revenue-sharing. These practices function as survival governance: situated strategies to reduce harm inside institutions that continue to reproduce extractive logics. The analysis complicates NIMBY/YIMBY framings, showing how “green” projects can perpetuate colonial-capitalist relations unless communities secure enforceable protections and decision-making power. I argue that evaluations of transition projects should center terms and power—not abstract support—by asking: who sets conditions, who monitors compliance, how are cumulative burdens capped, and what non-fungible goods (health, sovereignty) are protected? Without these, decarbonization risks deepening environmental injustice under the banner of climate progress.