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environmental racism
Federal Judge Gives Louisiana Polluters a 'Free Pass' to Harm Communities of Color
"Louisiana has given industrial polluters open license to poison Black and brown communities for generations," and the new ruling from a Trump-appointed judge will only magnify the problem, a campaigner said.
Aug 23, 2024
A right-wing federal judge in Louisiana on Thursday permanently blocked two federal agencies from enforcing civil rights legislation that could protect Black communities from disproportionate pollution in the state, drawing condemnation from environmental justice advocates.
The two-page ruling, issued by U.S. District Court Judge James Cain, who was appointed to the federal bench in 2019 by then-President Donald Trump, is a setback in the push for accountability for corporate polluters, most notably in "Cancer Alley," a roughly 85-mile stretch that runs along the Mississippi River from Baton Rouge to New Orleans.
Cancer Alley is home to a disproportionate number of poor and working-class Black people who have highly escalated risks of cancer thanks to the long line of petrochemical plants in the corridor. A recent study showed that the air there is far worse than previously realized.
"Louisiana has given industrial polluters open license to poison Black and brown communities for generations, only to now have one court give it a permanent free pass to abandon its responsibilities," Patrice Simms, a vice president at Earthjustice, said in a statement.
The ruling forbids the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Department of Justice from enforcing "disparate-impact requirements" under Title VI the 1964 Civil Rights Act in the state of Louisiana. The ruling affects permitting for industrial projects and could, according to Earthjustice, even be applied to "basic services such as sewage, drinking water, and health services." Cain opted not to make the ruling effective nationwide.
The main events leading up to Thursday's decision began in January 2022, when Earthjustice filed a complaint to the EPA on behalf of St. John the Baptist Parish, a majority-Black community in the heart of Cancer Alley. The EPA then opened an investigation into whether Louisiana state agencies had failed to protect the parish from environmental health threats. The agency was preparing to negotiate reforms with the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality. This was part of a nationwide EPA effort to tackle environmental racism.
However, Louisiana, like other states, fired back. In May 2023, then-Attorney General Jeff Landry, who is now governor, filed a lawsuit—the same lawsuit Cain ultimately ruled on—against the EPA to block the investigation. The next month, the EPA dropped its investigation, disappointing parish residents and human rights groups. The Intercept later reported that the agency dropped the investigation because of fear the state's case would reach the U.S. Supreme Court.
Cain could then have dropped Louisiana's suit, but, in a move that may have been aimed at preventing future such investigations, he moved forward with it, issuing a 77-page temporary injunction in January that laid the groundwork for today's far briefer decision, which made the ruling permanent.
In the temporary injunction, Cain put forth ahistorical and power-blind arguments about race that are common in right-wing circles.
"To be sure, if a decision-maker has to consider race, to decide, it has indeed participated in racism," the judge wrote. "Pollution does not discriminate."
Earthjustice warned that though Cain's ruling applies only in Louisiana, "it may embolden other states to seek similar exceptions and create a chilling effect on civil rights enforcement by other federal agencies."
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'Permit to Kill': LNG Buildout Would Boost Premature Deaths, Health Costs
"The bizarre rush to overbuild methane gas export capacity is not only a climate and an economic mistake—it is also a public health disaster," said the report's co-author.
Aug 14, 2024
Permitted emissions from both currently operating and planned liquefied natural gas terminals in the United States "have a major price tag for communities' public health," with existing facilities already estimated to cause scores of premature deaths and nearly a billion dollars in damage each year, according to an analysis published Wednesday.
The report— Permit to Kill—was published by Greenpeace USA and the Sierra Club, which said the analysis "adds to the mounting body of evidence showing that LNG exports are not in the public interest."
Greenpeace USA senior research specialist and report co-author Andres Chang said in a statement that "this study shows that any discussion of LNG exports that ignores the deadly air pollution from LNG terminals is missing the boat."
"The bizarre rush to overbuild methane gas export capacity is not only a climate and an economic mistake—it is also a public health disaster," Chang added. "Our research shows that air pollution from continuing the LNG buildout would hit fenceline communities the hardest, but would also be carried downwind to further away cities like Dallas and New Orleans, causing childhood asthma onset, lost work and school days, and premature death."
Among the report's key findings:
- Direct air pollution from currently operating LNG export terminals is estimated to cause 60 premature deaths and $957 million in total health costs per year;
- If all the planned terminals and expansion projects are built, these numbers would increase to 149 premature deaths and $2.33 billion in health costs per year;
- By 2050, the same permitted air pollutants from currently operating LNG export terminals alone are expected to yield 2,020 premature deaths and $28.7 billion in total health costs;
- There is a strong overlap between areas that are already experiencing climate harms and the areas slated to suffer the worst air pollution impacts;
- At the national level, Black and Hispanic Americans would respectively experience air pollution from LNG terminals at 151–170% and 110–129% the rate of white Americans, if all projects slated for 2030 are built; and
- If the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) halts approvals of new LNG export applications, it would save an estimated 707 to 1,110 lives and avoid $9.88 billion to $15.1 billion in health costs through 2050, compared with a scenario in which all proposed LNG projects are built.
"This briefing provides a new compelling and distressing data point in the long list of reasons to stop approving LNG export applications," said Sierra Club energy campaigns analyst and report co-author Johanna Heureaux-Torres. "It is shocking that regulators do not already consider deadly pollution impacts in their environmental analyses of gas export projects and related infrastructure."
"DOE and other federal agencies should listen to the science and frontline communities, and develop more robust controls on the cumulative impacts of air pollution from these high-polluting projects," Heureaux-Torres added. "The health of communities and the climate depends on the folks in charge to stand up and do the right thing based on the facts of the situation on the ground."
Climate defenders applauded U.S. President Joe Biden's January pause on LNG export permit applications pending a review of their environmental and economic impacts.
However, the Biden administration has also presided over what climate campaigners have called a "staggering" LNG expansion, including Venture Global's Calcasieu Pass 2 export terminal in Cameron Parish, Louisiana and more than a dozen other projects that, if all completed, would make U.S. exported LNG emissions higher than all of Europe's combined greenhouse gas footprint, according to climate campaigner Bill McKibben.
"It's time for DOE to stop using permitted emissions from operating and planned LNG export terminals as a license to pollute our most vulnerable people and places."
Numerous other studies have highlighted the public health harms of LNG, including a 2023 study by the University of Pittsburgh and the Pennsylvania Department of Health that found children who live near fracking operations are roughly five to seven times more likely to develop lymphoma than those whose homes are at least five miles away from drilling sites.
"The Permit to Kill report underscores what residents in frontline communities have been saying for decades—it's time for DOE to stop using permitted emissions from operating and planned LNG export terminals as a license to pollute our most vulnerable people and places," said Robert D. Bullard, director of the Bullard Center for Environmental and Climate Justice and distinguished professor of urban planning and environmental policy at Texas Southern University.
"DOE now has the opportunity and moral responsibility to correct its flawed approach, methodology, thinking, and assumptions that follow the dominant pattern and allow Black, Hispanic, and low-income residents to be overburdened with health-threatening air pollution," he added. "Our communities matter."
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'People Are Dying': Air in 'Cancer Alley' Louisiana More Toxic Than Previously Thought
Ethylene oxide, a carcinogenic gas, is nine times more prevalent than the EPA estimated, a study shows. And inside petrochemical plants, workers are likely subjected to much higher concentrations, an author said.
Jun 11, 2024
The presence of a dangerous chemical in the air of southeast Louisiana's "Cancer Alley," which has a substantial Black population, is far greater than the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimated and exceeds safe limits, a study published Tuesday found.
The levels of ethylene oxide, exposure to which can cause lung, breast, or other cancers, are nine times higher than the EPA estimated, the study, which was published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, shows. Ethylene oxide is a gas used in plastic production and in the sterilization of medical equipment. Long-term exposure is exceptionally dangerous: The EPA regards it as unsafe, due to cancer risk, at a level above about 11 parts per trillion (ppt) in the air.
The new study found that the gas' presence averaged about 31 ppt in Cancer Alley, and was far higher in certain locations within the industrial corridor, which runs alongside the Mississippi River from Baton Rouge to New Orleans. In each of the census tracts the researchers studied, the level of the gas was higher than the EPA had estimated for that area, in most cases significantly, with a median discrepancy of about 21 ppt.
"We expected to see ethylene oxide in this area," Peter DeCarlo, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University and an author of the study, toldThe Guardian, noting that it was "worrisome," especially for children. "But we didn't expect the levels that we saw, and they certainly were much, much higher than EPA's estimated levels."
Concentrations of ethylene oxide could be much higher "inside the fenceline" of petrochemical plants—areas which couldn't be studied—where workers are "getting much, much higher concentrations over the course of their day," DeCarlo toldGrist.
A groundbreaking study by @JohnsHopkins in @EnvSciTech has uncovered alarming levels of ethylene oxide emissions from petrochemical facilities in Cancer Alley, Louisiana. #BeyondPetrochemicals #PeopleOverPollution pic.twitter.com/s9vygj8RlV
— Beyond Petrochemicals (@BeyondPetrochem) June 11, 2024
People in Cancer Alley are nearly twice as likely to get cancer as other Americans, and ethylene oxide accounts for most of the known carcinogenic risk there, roughly 68%, if EPA estimates are correct. "The fact that so much of the environmental risk in this area seems to come from a single chemical is remarkable," the study authors wrote.
DeCarlo said this is why the authors deemed it important to study the amount of ethylene oxide in the air there. However, he cautioned that ethylene oxide is far from the only problem.
"The reality is people aren't just breathing ethylene oxide, they are breathing a whole soup of chemicals," he told The Guardian. "When you start to add everything up it becomes a much more problematic picture."
The risk to human health is likely not limited to facilities that are emitting ethylene oxide, as the researchers found plumes of gas that were miles long. East Ascension High School in Gonzales, Louisiana, is about five miles from an ethylene oxide hotspot, the study notes.
In 2021, United Nations experts called for an end to environmental racism in Cancer Alley, and the organization's special rapporteur on the issue of human rights called the area a "sacrifice zone" the following year. In January, Human Rights Watch released a report on systemic injustice there.
Sharon Lavigne, the founder of Rise St. James, a community organization in St. James Parish, said the findings were a "step in the right direction" but must lead to accountability and change.
"These monitors are good, but in the meantime, people are dying," she toldGrist.
Earlier this year, the EPA announced new ethylene oxide rules that could cut Louisiana emissions of the gas by nearly 80%—"the first time that federal regulations for chemical plants have been updated in decades," Gristreported in April. Cancer Alley had been among the places that EPA Administrator Michael Regan visited on his 2021 "Journey to Justice" tour. Yet the new study may lead to calls for further action.
"The EPA's new rule was necessary but should only be the start of how we begin to make things right here," Heather McTeer Toney, who leads a Bloomberg Philanthropies campaign to end petrochemical plant expansion, told Grist. "I'm hopeful to see levels go down, but the data suggest we have a long way to go."
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