Without focus on race, Biden effort on air pollution disparities will fail ... - The Washington Post

Without focus on race, Biden effort on air pollution disparities will fail, report says - The Washington Post

The Biden administration has pledged to address deadly air pollution disparities in communities of color that resulted from historically racist policy decisions. But its efforts are destined to fail if officials follow through on a decision to dismiss race as a factor to determine where federal aid should be focused, a new report says.

When the White House announced its effort to confront the problem last year, officials said the racial makeup of communities would not guide their decisions on where to prioritize government funding and programs. They were concerned that using race would lead to court challenges that could undermine its plan to devote 40 percent of environmental cleanup resources to disadvantaged communities under an initiative called Justice40.

The administration’s environmental leadership is seeking to sidestep race and rely on a newly introduced screening tool to identify disenfranchised communities by household income, unemployment, air quality data and the location of various pollution sources.

That colorblind approach might lead to modest reductions in exposure disparities, said the report, which was published Thursday, but “it may not ameliorate the frequently larger disparities by race-ethnicity.”

In most cases, the report said, race and ethnicity — not income — reflect the largest air pollution disparities. “An important underlying cause is racist policy, land-use planning, and regulatory actions,” such as redlining, refusal to offer loans, exclusionary zoning and housing covenants that barred non-White people, African Americans mostly, from living in areas that were largely protected from major pollution sources, according to the report.

“If you don’t focus on race, then it’s really hard to address disparities by race,” said Julian Marshall, an adjunct professor at the University of Washington and a co-author of the report. “Many decades ago, race was an explicit part of this, and if we can’t look at race now it’s going to be much harder.”

The White House took issue with the study’s finding, saying its portrayal of how emissions should be addressed is not how Justice40 works.

“This study analyzes a fictional scenario with air quality investments being made haphazardly and without thought to actually cutting pollution from sources that are upwind of communities,” a spokesperson for the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality said in a statement. “This is not how the Justice40 Initiative is being implemented. Instead, agencies use the screening tool to target the historic investments secured by the Biden-Harris Administration appropriately so that the benefits of nearly 470 federal programs actually reach the communities that are most underserved and overburdened by pollution.”

The council oversees the Justice40 Initiative.

Air pollution causes about 100,000 premature deaths in the United States each year, “which corresponds to billions of dollars of health damage each day,” the report says. The Clean Air Act has dramatically improved air quality for all Americans since its adoption in the 1970s, but gaping racial disparities continue to exist.

The report focused on fine particulate matter pollution when investigating the impact of using a colorblind strategy to alleviate poor air quality. Exposure results in higher rates of lung cancer, stroke, heart attacks and respiratory problems such as asthma. African Americans are exposed to more fine particulate matter than any group, followed by Asian Americans, Latinos and White people.

The report used a mapping tool to peer 20 years into the future to determine pollution emissions with and without federal intervention.

With no stronger regulation, a business-as-usual scenario, African Americans, Asians and Latinos would continue to suffer disproportionately from exposure to fine particulate matter. With Justice40 intervention based on factors that do not include race, air quality would dramatically improve for everyone, but for those racial groups, the disparities will still continue. “This outcome could be interpreted as undermining a core environmental justice goal: eliminating exposure disparities by race-ethnicity,” the report says.

The Biden White House is well aware of how race is at the core of environmental health problems in the United States. As president-elect in 2020, at a time when the covid-19 pandemic was ravaging Black, Latino and Indigenous communities, Biden pledged that environmental injustice would be a focus of his administration.

Biden followed up with executive orders to address the issue, forcing every department in his administration to incorporate environmental justice into their operations. He appointed Michael Regan, an environmental justice advocate from North Carolina, to lead the Environmental Protection Agency.

In 2021, the EPA detailed how climate change would disproportionately affect people of color — more deaths from laboring in extreme heat and property loss from flooding in the wake of sea-level rise where homes sit in low-lying areas.

Robert Bullard, an urban planning and environmental policy professor at Texas Southern University and the author of pioneering environmental justice research such as “Dumping in Dixie,” said Thursday’s report tracks with research that has been conducted over the past 40 years.

“America is segregated, and so is pollution,” Bullard said. “Race-neutral metrics and tools will leave out a big chunk of the problem and will not solve the structural components that disadvantage communities.”

Bullard, who sits on the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, said members of the council understand why Biden officials tried to steer clear of race, even as the council advised them to add additional data to a mapping tool to better target the problem.

“That was the trade-off to getting the program out and not getting it knocked down,” Bullard said. “But you lose the power of getting at the core of what’s driving disproportionate pollution. It’s like dealing with fair housing and come up with the metric that you’re not going to use race when one of the biggest drivers was discrimination.”