Improving energy efficiency could have dramatic benefits for businesses owned by people of color, but systemic racism and the exclusivity of the old boys’ club bar many from accessing the capital required to invest, the Energy News Network reports. Energy efficiency improvements can cut operating costs without putting downward pressure on wages. Small business owners of color, however, are often blocked from obtaining the up-front capital required to make those improvements — especially if businesses are in areas of concentrated poverty, which is often the product of decades of racist, redlining-based lending practices. “Capital has become an issue for almost every Black-owned business, small and midsize businesses especially,” Carla Walker-Miller, the founder and CEO of Walker-Miller Energy Services, an energy efficiency company in Detroit, Michigan, told EEN. (Energy News Network)