Green Redlining

How rules against "environmental racism" hurt poor minorities most of all.How rules against "environmental racism" hurt poor minorities most of all.

Henry Payne from the October 1998 issue

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Most damning, however, have been studies by the EPA itself. Two such studies were obtained by David Mastio of The Detroit News. The EPA studies were conducted to confirm the link between pollution and race found in the United Church of Christ report and other studies. In both cases, however, the EPA's exhaustive survey of the communities surrounding 1,234 Superfund sites--some of the most polluted land in the country--turned up no evidence of disparate impact on minorities. To the contrary, the studies found that the populations most exposed to these toxic sites were white and middle class. For example, in EPA Region 5, which includes the heavily industrialized Rust Belt, all minorities were underrepresented in areas around Superfund sites. But because the EPA's studies contradicted emerging administration policy on environmental racism, they were never made public.

Upon The Detroit News's exposure of these hidden reports, the House Commerce Committee, outraged that key documents on a major EPA initiative had been withheld from congressional oversight, immediately launched an investigation and demanded all relevant EPA documents. But two months later, the News's Mastio found that the agency continued to withhold a key report contradicting the National Law Journal study. The report, written five years ago by Bernard Sisken, a government expert on civil rights cases, found the Journal's findings were either "statistically insignificant" or erroneous.

Lacking evidence for their cause, environmental justice activists have used scare tactics to turn residents against proposed plants. In Claiborne Parish, Louisiana, Greenpeace and Earth Justice used a campaign of fear (and exploited Clinton's 1994 executive order) to torpedo a proposed $855 million uranium enrichment plant last April.

The Claiborne Enrichment Center (see "Environmental Injustice," August/September 1997) had been recruited by a rural parish where there are few industrial jobs and where 30 percent of residents live below the poverty line. Internal company documents show the plant's investors--a consortium of American utilities and a European construction company--were attracted to the area by local leaders' enthusiastic response as well as its proximity to an interstate highway, its low property prices, and its minimal seismic activity (an operational necessity for the facility's high-speed centrifuges). But while polls showed broad, multiracial support for the company's location of 180 high-paying jobs in a sparsely populated enterprise zone, anti-nuclear activists fanned out among the roughly 250 poor, black residents of the area bordering the 440-acre site (the plant itself would have occupied 80 acres), warning of poisonous gases that would strangle them in their sleep and of radioactive materials that would contaminate their groundwater.

Marjorie Walker, an African American who lives in a clapboard home within a mile of the Claiborne site, was visited by Greenpeace representatives who told her that company officials and the state of Louisiana would deliberately contaminate her community because it was black. "Greenpeace told me how many plants had been located in poor communities," she says. "All those plants down in `Cancer Alley' are located where the black people live."

But "Cancer Alley," a term coined by environmentalists to describe the alleged sickness inflicted by chemical and refining plants along the Mississippi between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, is a myth. In a study released this year by the nationally respected Louisiana Tumor Registry, which has tracked cancer incidence in Louisiana for 20 years, cancer rates for the so-called "river parishes" were found to be at or below national averages. "Are people who live in the industrial corridor likely to get cancer?" asks Tumor Registry Director Vivien Chen. "The answer is no."

Yet activists continue to talk routinely of people "dropping dead" in Louisiana's Mississippi Valley. Back in St. James Parish, situated in the middle of the industrial corridor, Brenda Huguet believes that she's been made ill by local industry. A kindly white woman who is part of a local anti-Shintech group, Huguet says she's been convinced by the group's legal representatives at the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic and her environmentalist allies that she is suffering from an unidentified lung disease caused by "Cancer Alley" industries. If Shintech were allowed to locate in the sugar cane fields near her home, she says, she would die.

Huguet emphasizes that she and other plant opponents aren't against jobs; they're just against the location of another chemical plant in the parish. She wants to know why St. James can't recruit "clean" industries like auto plants. Leaving aside the likelihood that environmental groups could also claim environmental racism if a large automotive facility were to locate in St. James, the idea that a PVC plant is somehow less healthy than other factories illustrates radical environmentalists' exploitation of the regulatory process to oppose industrial development.

At the core of Greenpeace's opposition to Shintech is the plant's alleged production of dioxin. In fact--as detailed in LDEQ and industry reports--the plant would produce none. Zero. In its analysis of Shintech's Romeville and Freeport facilities, Chemrisk, an environmental engineering firm, put it this way: "Greenpeace made several assertions that the production process produces high concentrations of dioxins in its wastewater effluent. There is no objective scientific data that supports this claim."

Huguet's concerns about Shintech's emissions are influenced by Greenpeace claims, echoed in media reports, that Shintech will dump 190 tons of toxic pollutants into the air every year. While Shintech has permits to put out 190 tons of pollutants each year, it will emit much less; the typical PVC plant of that size emits between 30 percent and 50 percent of that amount. And Hilry Lantz, an environmental engineer for the LDEQ, says over two-thirds of these emissions are from methanol, used as a catalyst in the production process. Methanol is a noncarcinogen hailed as a clean, alternative fuel for automobiles by the very same environmentalists who oppose Shintech! Indeed, a modern, "clean" General Motors plant in Shreveport emits around 1,400 tons of similar, noncarcinogenic pollutants a year.

On nearly every aspect of the environmental racism debate, the administration and its allies make false claims to residents and reporters. Luke Cole, for example, is general counsel for the Center on Race, Poverty, and the Environment in San Francisco, an adviser to the EPA on environmental enforcement, and perhaps the single most influential activist in prodding the EPA to draft its Title VI rule. Like many of the groups that have filed claims under the EPA's rule, Cole's group also received funds from the agency.

Asked what Shintech must do to satisfy environmental justice concerns, Cole says the answer is simple: The company need only ask other industrial plants located in St. James Parish--13 in all--to collectively reduce their air emissions by the same amount that the Shintech plant would add. This would at least sound reasonable if the St. James Parish area were bumping up against its federally imposed "attainment" ceiling for industrial emissions. But LDEQ engineer Lantz, who approved Shintech's emissions permits, says Cole's point is moot because St. James is well within attainment limits even with the addition of the Shintech plant. Cole's "simple solution" is a red herring.

The foundation of the administration's support of environmental racism claims seems to be a belief that minorities are permanent victims. It is a theme that runs through press coverage of the issue as well. A July National Journal cover story, for example, examined the Shintech case in detail by talking to plant managers and opposition groups. But the reporter did not once consult a black member of the St. James Citizens Coalition, or Janice Dickerson, or a black parish councilman for their opinion of the plant. The article's assumption is that blacks near the plant must be victims because they are black.

Shintech's black supporters in Romeville are aware that they are not conforming to stereotype. "Blacks are supposed to play the role as victim," says Nanette Jolivette, lawyer for the St. James Citizens Coalition. "But this community did not play that role. This community is to be commended." The fact that the community has not been commended by national black leaders has rankled plant supporters. Despite never having visited the Shintech site, Jesse Jackson, Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), and Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun (D-Ill.) are among those who oppose Shintech on grounds of environmental racism.

"Jesse Jackson has never visited us," says an angry Oliver Cooper, a black councilman from St. James Parish who, like Dickerson, has been named in the anti-Shintech suit for his "discriminatory" support of Shintech. "He does not represent us. Six of seven councilman [in this parish] support this plant." Jackson, complains Cooper, "has never spoken to any of us."