The EPA allows polluters to turn neighborhoods into “sacrifice zones”
propublica.org
propublica.org
Also, it strikes me as extremely speculative on your part that this is a zoning issue. How do you know that these plants didn't shift product mixes or expand after there were established communities nearby, or that the companies provided incorrect information to regulators? Unless you want to fund armies of scientists for the regulator to validate the truth of claims made on submissions then you have to blame the companies that submit false data. That seems far more likely than your assumption.
Putting zoning aside, companies have no motives outside of growth and profit. That’s why governments exist to protect the population they represent. From people, companies, foreign invaders, etc.
[0] or local state equivalents
In general this can be solved with an extension of property rights, the industrial zone/airport/music venue etc can own the rights to "pollute" the neighboring areas, much like buying air rights in a city. Then it's clear when you purchase / rent / what level of noise / pollution you can expect.
This allows market forces to work, if after a certain time the city is bigger and that land is more valuable for quality housing then they can buy the rights from the polluter and shut it down.
Instead, put a price tag on each pollutant. The charge is applied at the point in the supply chain where the pollutant is created or extracted and is rebated to anyone who destroys the pollutant (although they may be charged for other pollutants created in the process.) Think of the oft-proposed carbon tax, just much, much broader.
It isn't always one way or the other.
As someone who is seeing more and more how irreversible so much of our environmental damage is these days, I am leaning on the plant owners being responsible, not the schoolchildren who are getting rolled a 1:20,000 chance of cancer.
Perhaps, knowing how much pollution affects surrounding areas, we should force such chemical plants to purchase all the land around them that will be affected to a certain extent. Internalize the costs of their damage to the community, and prevent others from being exposed to it.
But not always, let's not paint them with the same brush. Zoom out on the problem broader.
Why are industrial companies polluting land that they don't own? Well, because this was all established in an age when we considered pollution out of sight and out of mind. If it's not an oil barrel lying in a ditch, but some happy vapor going out into the atmosphere, who cares?
So the lack of government regulation of pollution on land not owned by the companies is the problem.
In 21st century sensibilities about externalities, an industrial plant should not be able to pollute land it doesn't own. And if there is no way to avoid that, the government should set it up as an isolation zone not zoned for residential, and force the company to price that into their economics.
By the way this is what the rest of the developed world does. The US, with it's obsession with profits, and deregulation, and "letting the free market" decide doesn't, and now has the worst correlation between health outcomes and socioeconomic class of any developed country.
Yeah, if your industrial process causes cancer you need to re-engineer the process to be safer and polluting less, even if you were there first.
I’m not saying this is good, but by your logic you should give up your car because someone moved in to the lot next to you and built a house.
The article says the factory does not have an ethylene oxide scrubber installed.
> A lot of the things we rely on every day have toxic byproducts
And we should stop and fix that. Why do we accept this as ok?
> by your logic you should give up your car because someone moved in to the lot next to you and built a house.
My logic says we should phase out cars that we know kill people. Maybe build cars that use a new, less-polluting method of pollution. Like EV! We solved this issue with cars, maybe Exxon should solve their issue with petroleum.
Of course. But it is not always easy. You can’t always wave your hand and make non-harmful alternatives. Sometimes it is due to incentives, but also sometimes it is really just chemistry or physics.
See the “tin whisker” phenomenon when they took lead out of solder.
We can fix those. If you could sue a chemical plant (or it's engineers!) that design/implement carcinogenic pollution, i bet the incentives get better fast.
> but also sometimes it is really just chemistry or physics. >You can’t always wave your hand and make non-harmful alternatives
I think we can more often then we give it credit for. Especially if there was more money flowing into R&D, and more regulatory efforts.
> See the “tin whisker” phenomenon when they took lead out of solder.
I've never heard of this and I buy tons of electronics. Seems like industry incentives took care of this. Now we have no lead... and i can still buy iPhones whenever i want.
Why do we accept destruction in our society? Why don't we push for better? Nothing has to be the way it is if we don't want it to be.
You won’t hear any argument from me there.
To put it into perspective, the annual budget of the entire (US) National Science Foundation is $8 billion. Now compare that the revenue or even profit of google, apple, etc.
Or the pricing of everything goes up astronomically to account for the new risk, and the poor go back to living in the stone age because they can't afford to pay for the risk assumed by anyone using industrial processes.
Watch how quickly AC vanishes from the poor when Freyon becomes $2,000 for a refill. I doubt the chemicals we use to treat water are free of industrial carcinogens either.
> Why do we accept destruction in our society? Why don't we push for better? Nothing has to be the way it is if we don't want it to be.
Because none of this is free. Handling the tin whiskers wasn't free, there's a certification process for that now. It killed a satellite in 1998, temporarily shut down a nuclear plant, and may have been a culprit in some Toyota car issues.
That was probably worth the tradeoff. It was a fairly minor change, and the payoff was pretty good.
I don't think we can just handwave away that getting to 0 carcinogens would be a net benefit. I'd probably take a 1 in 50,000 chance of dying from industry effects rather than having to go back in time 200 years in terms of quality of life.
By exporting it to a poorer country? Because that's what happens.
The value structures of how much to care for any one person are different independent of government. Individual versus collective shows itself in both democratic capitalist governments on both sides, and now with market reforms so does communism.
Anyway even if you want to live in Cass Sunstein land where everything is a cost benefit analysis then you have to work on some really hard problems like how it's not really possible to fairly cost something like a person getting cancer. It's also really hard to fairly compare them to the extremely diffuse "benefits", like the oil company doesn't need to spend a million bucks to install a scrubber so everyone's gas is 1 one trillionth cent per gallon cheaper on average.
Point is this kind of cost benefit stuff is a buck passing truism unless and until we can solve these problems and more. I won't be holding my breath.
No, there is no difference between a person and a factory. A factory is many people, so change your equivalence to “my suburb” or “my town”, by the time you get to “my city” there are hundreds of studies that prove car usage has much more widespread health effects - they’re slower to materialize and lifelong, but they also impact 100% of people over a much wider area.
You also assume electric vehicles are inherently better, which is a shockingly common logical fallacy. Where does the power come from? Once you trace that back, based on a geographical area, you can start to make comparisons.
For instance a lot of power (to your house and the car you’re charging in the garage, to the city’s charging points, to the Tesla charging points), still comes from burning coal or things like shale (particularly in certain areas of Europe). Know what you’ve done with your “green” EV? Take the pollution you spread out across the city/county/state/country and concentrate it around the local power plant.
What about the oil that lubes the moving parts? The tires? The metals in the batteries? The acid in the batteries?
And now you, your family, your friends, are all basically as bad as the chemical plant. Still sleeping ok at night up on your high horse?
if the engineers did not set out to create a process free from polluting carcinogens, then they did something wrong.
If you burn a tire, you're polluting and releasing toxic fumes around. But one burnt tire doesn't affect the neighborhood.
Industry is not negligible. At larger scale toxic waste hurts a lot more people, of course it does! The campfire whataboutism is a bit silly in comparison.
Dont bring your olive oil to the smoke point
Other than mixing our own colors everything involved was available at the local hardware store. We were simply staining wood, the issue was the solvent evaporating while drying.
Sounds like a failing over EPA penalty, not that we should allow pollution! Why should we as a society allow large scale pollution to poison our world without containment?
Yes.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-51581817
https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/property/1430579/wood-b...
For the reasons that you set out. It's fairly straightforward.
Its hard to say you're doing something "right" by releasing carcinogens. But scale is important here. Its hard to really conflate burning olive oil in your kitchen with oil refining.
You can't burn wood. You can't heat a lot of metals. Practically anything that requires smelting metal is out because of the preceeding two. Eletrical power is basically a non-starter, because the mining and refining both release carcinogens.
We need more advanced technology to be able to truly isolate those emissions, but we don't have the ability to develop that technology without releasing those emissions. The goal should be managing the amount of emissions we allow, and prioritizing the "emission credits" towards goals that can reduce those emissions further.
In cities like Mobile, Alabama, the opposite is usually true[1]: people already lived in those areas, but companies (and local governments) don't consider their health sufficiently important. I'll leave it up to you to infer why that is.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jan/26/africatown-s...
In Alabama it would the industrial sector that is in the wrong.
Nobody wants to pay for more expensive land, but we should force them to via regulation if they are going to spread cancer in the air.
Economic incentives are a scientific force. You can’t solve problems by suggesting that people ignore them, you have to work within the bounds of the natural effects that inherently exist. Groups of people do not make moral decisions like an individual person does.
We won’t solve this issue with mere criticism while we continue to financially reward these outcomes. Make negative externalities illegal.
That wasn't your property to make unsafe. If it's your own property that you've made unsafe, then sell it, I'd consider it on the buyer, unless you hid that it was unsafe
No one should be able to build houses or establish habitations on poisonous and polluted area. You can sell poisonous land to someone else but anyone owning poisonous land needs to take precautions to keep people off.
It's like one should be able to sell spoiled food (to eat) or lead contaminated toys. Warning people here isn't enough because some people will be foolish or desperate.
The adjacent property is already owned and already being spoiled.
Going forward wouldn't it make sense to zone an entire area to not be allowed to build for residential purposes (essentially a buffer around the industrial zones)?
It feels like its a grey area of responsibility etc. For industrial processes that are known to be highly toxic it would fall on the industrials but as we find out more information around toxicity and impacts (which it feels like more is coming to light all the time) it will require some deft navigating.
Are you suggesting that this question is somehow hard to answer? I don't think it is.
This argument confuses policy and morality and somehow implies we should ignore both.
Morally, if you spew chemicals you know are going to cause significant excess deaths, you will have to live with yourself and myself and many people will think little of you.
Legality, if you spew an otherwise unknown chemical that you happen to know is quite toxic, you'll be liable. If you stay with EPA guidelines but happen to know this is going to kill or injure significant number, you only have public perceptions and your own conscious to answer for.
Policy wise, the EPA should impose regulations that make all neighborhoods reasonably safe. Moreover, I suggest structuring the regulation process to incentivize creating compliant processes rather than in terms of after-the-fact punishments. (I've heard a variety of contrasts between the US and Europe, where despite the US very "pro-capitalist", the regulatory paradigm is entirely adversarial).
Why not make that our political discourse? We stop the world at work to solve problems in revenue generation.
Somehow this has to be mired in political speak.
Letting figurative power thrive while squashing people is good business.
What I'm wondering is why the shaded areas around the hot spots on the Gulf Coast are so much bigger than the shaded areas around hotspots elsewhere.
Pennsylvania has a bunch of metal processing industries. Given Pittsburgh's reputation for steel production, that makes sense too.
Looks like a big blend of different industries in Chicago. That one I can't explain.
https://chicagodetours.com/history-of-chicago-transportation...
I've only been able to afford a 3 month rental of AQMesh's sensor, hopefully it'll trigger enough interest to get a few of these bad boys around Gary/Chicagoland.
If you drive past 80/94 or 90, there's a real rotten egg smell, or Hydrogen Sulfide. It's been known for a long, and is a common complaint in NWI https://web.archive.org/web/20210204024942/https://www.wbez....
When the sensor is up and running, I'll be adding the data to the air quality site I run https://millerbeach.community
So you may have one plant in Kansas and another one in Texas, but the Texas one processes and discharges 100x the volume the Kansas one does.
Which makes sense re: Gulf, because there's always more demand for oil, so most of the refineries probably operate more continuously.
1) Every now and then, our entire town would smell terrible, presumably from the winds carrying the emissions to us
2) A friend who moved here during my high school had to move away since his whole family suffered from asthma and it was made much noticeably worse here
3) Heard a couple huge explosions during my lifetime from these refineries sadly.
If there was a release of sulphur dioxide that was going to stay on the Canadian side, the plant management notified the relevant authorities. Sometimes the kids were told not to go outside for recess.
If the SO2 was potentially going to drift over the border, the entire plant was shut down because the U.S. EPA would hit them with millions of dollars in fines.
Was someone talking about ethics and morality?
Boston area has no big chemical/hard industrial industry, and nothing on that map. Neither does seattle (but the map shows some small process in areaa). Id wager a lot of modern "intellectual" cities (where knowledge worker industries dominate) can be devoid of such processes. Tourism cities too - eg, Vegas and Miami don't have such a history and their maps are clean.
Obviously SFBay is a notable exception to the knowledge-worker idea, but SV was founded on horribly toxic silicon refining which, while mostly gone, has a terrible history of poisoning the ground.
But to make sure that it doesn’t veer into city bashing (as HN is sometimes wont to do): the only difference between the glistening urban core and 300 square miles of suburban sprawl is the number of trucks needed to distribute the raw materials involved. All things being equal, the pollution involved in building the former is both lesser and more sustainable.
Seriously? The problem is the government allowing private corporations to poison the environment to benefit the bottom line of the corporations. I don't care if someone moved next door to an industrial plant or a pig farm, if they are spewing toxins into the air we breathe, the water we drink, the ground someone else will eventually purchase, they are responsible for damaging the environment as well as harming, and in the long run, killing people and that should absolutely be illegal and stopped. We're not talking about a bad smell or loud noise, we're talking about people getting leukemia or Parkinson's and so on. Are you sociopaths?
The EPA has all sorts of silly guidelines like saying setback a gas station 500 feet from school or wetlands if they pump over 3.6MM gallons a year. Under that? 25 feet.
https://postpump.org is the project so far.
A crazy thing I learned recently is the cost of cleanups for underground storage tanks is not really tracked or published publicly. I started requesting information a few weeks ago. https://postpump.org/oregon
Thank you, a voice of reason! This really needed to be said on this thread.
I disagree with the notion that regulations are inherently harmful to corporate profits. Foreign competitors do generally exist in other countries with different regulations, which complicates the matter in the real world; but in a healthy, homogeneously regulated market, a new regulation should increase the operating costs of all suppliers more or less equally. Assuming that there's a sufficient amount of competition to keep profit margins reasonably thin, the increased cost of regulatory compliance should be passed onto customers in the form of higher prices.
ProPublica knows how to present data.
Let's hope shining light on this brings pressure for change.
- Company buries toxic waste in 1920’s in drums that corrode
- Another company buys property, is aware of buried drums
- City seeks to buy property after company shuts down
- Company tells city there is toxic waste. City acknowledges.
- City talks about building on the dump site. City reminds city of toxic waste.
- Company finally sells land, makes city sign acknowledgment of toxic waste dump
- City then expands building school and new housing toxic waste dump
- People get sick, company gets sued
I'm thinking of where I grew up. A local anti-establishment rag noted a cancer cluster in one part of town and wouldn't let go even when shown the truth. The end result of the mess was it went from a cheap but decent area to somewhere I wouldn't want to venture even by day.
The only toxic stuff in the neighborhood was benzene from all the old cars about--the "cluster" was because it was the cheapest decent area in town, people who got sick and had medical bills and couldn't work ended up moving there. The rate of *diagnosis* of cancer there was below average, the cluster was purely due to immigration.
Cancer is just a risk. Having a job an earning money will always outweigh that risk. People will put up with a lot of crummy environment to put food on the table.
You can argue about the merits of having that informed consent and still _choosing_ to put up with it, and whether that's truly free will or necessity, or something in between.
But time and time again, there are companies that will lie to everyone, employees included, about the risks.
That is _not_ informed consent, and is not defensible for any reason.
Yes, we should aim for zero emissions. Yes, the health impacts carry their own costs not to mention the human tragedy. However, good public policy is about rewarding good behavior (eg. tax credits) and punishing bad behavior (eg. tax, enforcement, penalties). Everyone loves to talk about the latter, while the former is ignored.
We really need to be long-term smart about how we craft environmental policy in America, and particularly so given other countries unwillingness to manage pollution in an effective or transparent manner.
Large corporations and not governments offshore production. Arguably this hasn't much to do with regulations but wholly different economies such that the comparative cost advantage is 10x or more. And of course it's possible to check under what conditions suppliers produce things.
Industry contributes all the time. Their contribution is to make sure nothing at all gets done by funding politicians, lawyers and fake science. This pattern has been repeated ad naseum with lead, asbestos, PCBs, climate, etc.
In a just world this kind of bad faith action would mean at a minimum industry is ignored in the policy process while a solution is imposed on them. Better would be to wipe out the shareholders in order to compensate for the externalities they've inflicted on others.