17 ms·
The EPA allows polluters to turn neighborhoods into “sacrifice zones”
- redleggedfrog 5y ago"Before there was climate denial, there was cancer denial." 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.
- FireBeyond 5y agoYou're entitled to informed consent. 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.
- Someone1234 5y agoThis pollution impacts people who don't work at these facilities, and if you start looking at them many employ less than the nearby Walmart.
- lotsofpulp 5y agoThe people employed by the facilities can afford to raise families, whereas the people employed by Walmart cannot.
- Someone1234 5y agoNot everyone that works at these places is a chemical or manufacturing engineer; many are on similar wages to Walmart.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- anonAndOn 5y agoWhat many corporations try to do is downplay the risk or flat out deny, and pay a fool's wages because the locals don't know they're slowly getting poisoned. Ignorance is great for business because it increases profit margins.
- pfortuny 5y agoThe map itself: https://projects.propublica.org/toxmap/ https://projects.propublica.org/toxmap/
- AutumnCurtain 5y agoThe Gulf Coast seems rife with these spots, and of course with all population-linked metrics the Mississippi is apparent as a dividing line.
- leereeves 5y agoThere are quite a lot in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and around Chicago too. 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.
- apocalyptic0n3 5y agoLooks like they're oil refineries and related industry, which makes sense given how much oil is pulled from the Gulf. 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.
- toomuchtodo 5y agoChicago used to be (and somewhat still is) an industrial and transportation hub. A substantial amount of metals and chemical industry still operates there. https://chicagodetours.com/history-of-chicago-transportation-as-a-world-hub/ https://chicagodetours.com/history-of-chicago-transportation...
- kingsloi 5y agoI just launched a non-profit, part of is it high quality air quality monitoring for Gary, IN. I'm looking to install it at/near the nearest residential area near USS Gary Works. 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.org/stories/the-smell-of-money-not-so-pleasant-in-northwest-indiana/58d698af-c002-45ef-be01-1d75e8249b52 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 https://millerbeach.community
- chrisseaton 5y agoCalifornians have watered down the phrase 'cancer-causing' so much that probably nobody cares! I guess being down-wind of a Starbucks counts as being in a sacrifice zone according to Californian regulations!
- kybishop 5y agoDo you have evidence to back up this claim? I'm aware CA puts many warning stickers on various products... but isn't it possible that profit-seeking corporations are, in fact, using cancer-causing materials simply because they're cheaper?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- chrisseaton 5y agoPeople don't seem to change their behaviour due to those warnings. Nobody's going into a coffee shop, seeing that warning sticker and thinking 'ah whoops better get out of here' are they? The warning 'cancer-causing' has no effect.
- californical 5y agoI almost bought olive oil, then noticed the California warning sticker that it contained lead, and didn’t buy it - I don’t see that on all olive oil. So it does make a difference sometimes
- djbusby 5y agoWorked (sorta) for tobacco.
- zbrozek 5y agoMy social circle is in CA. None of us pay any attention whatsoever to prop65 labels. They're about as useful as any other type of product or business labeling: there's so much of it that it's just visual noise that's long-ago been brainfiltered out of existence.
- howmayiannoyyou 5y agoBefore the emissions control feeding frenzy begins, let's try to remember that further regulation without industry input contributes to further inflation & moves more polluting production overseas where we have no control over its impact on the world. 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.
- anonAndOn 5y agoYou mean they'll be like oil fields out in the middle of a desert where nobody lives? If it's gonna off-gas, might as well be in the middle of nowhere.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- blablabla123 5y ago> further regulation ... moves more polluting production overseas where we have no control over its impact on the world. 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.
- thinkcontext 5y ago> let's try to remember that further regulation without industry input 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.
- NittLion78 5y agoAs I've said for years, any time you see a glittering urban core full of glass towers, steel bridges, and classic old stone architecture, somewhere there's a Mordor nearby that made all that happen.
- woodruffw 5y agoI think this is a fantastic way to think about pollution. 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.
- vineyardmike 5y agoEh, not really. 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.
- scottyah 5y agoAll that stuff is still being made and polluting, "mordor" is just further away.
- mazamats 5y agoIsn't that the whole point? To keep it away from urban populations?
- vineyardmike 5y agoThen its not really "nearby" is it? Its another city, another nation, and not really related to that city at all?
- yellow_lead 5y agoSome anecdotes as someone who lived near one of these locations growing up (fortunately about 30 mi away) 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.
- gramie 5y agoI did an internship at a pulp mill that was on the Canada-U.S. border (Canadian side). There was an elementary school literally besides the plant (~50m away). 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?
- yellow_lead 5y agoNot particularly but for what it's worth things like bad smells and explosions haven't happen in a really long time here. I am not sure if there's an increased cancer rate where I am located but will likely be researching that soon.
- EMM_386 5y agoInteresting article, and those are some fantastic infographics and associated embedded video clips. ProPublica knows how to present data.
- kaiju0 5y agoThis is a pretty typical growth pattern. Industrial zone establishes and city is set far away in a safe area. City expands and resident need cheap housing. The cheap housing is built near the industrial zone as that is how economic forces work. People then see this and say they built industrial next to the poor people when the opposite occurred. Now the industry is giving cancer to poor people and needs to be punished. Who is right and who is wrong?
- dd36 5y agoProperty rights. If the adjacent property is unsafe due to your actions, you should pay to fix the problem.
- parineum 5y agoIf someone buys the adjacent property after you've made it unsafe without breaking any laws, who pays?
- 8note 5y agoI'd say still you. 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
- joe_the_user 5y agoIf 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.
- likeclockwork 5y agoFor someone to buy it someone has to sell it, no? The adjacent property is already owned and already being spoiled.
- missinfo 5y agoThis is really well presented, but wouldn't it be more accurate and useful with actual cancer case data instead of estimated cancer risk?
- s1artibartfast 5y agotoo many confounding factors.
- LorenPechtel 5y agoToo hard to figure out. 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.
- readams 5y ago"Cancer clusters" by themselves are not really surprising, since statistically if you look at enough small subsets it's certain you'll see such seemingly-anomalous "clusters." It's interesting only as the first step in an investigation, and not at all interesting as evidence.
- refurb 5y agoBut the problem with estimated cancer risk is you end with the whole breast implant issue - it was “proven” silicone breast implants caused cancer until data proved they didn’t.
- htek 5y agoJesus, this story is going to have all the bad takes. People's main takeaway from the article is, "it's just the way cities grow," "it's the zoning board's fault," "people moved near a cancer cluster, it's their fault," "you should be able to pollute an area you pay for." 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?
- clairity 5y agoyes, internalize externalities first, starting with the most dangerous and egregious. most other ‘solutions’ are apologist distractions from this primary mitigation.
- dd36 5y agoProperty rights. Why can you spew your toxin into my air/land?
- noahtallen 5y agoExactly. This isn’t some sort of weird environmental topic. This is a human rights violation. The foundation of a huge swath of our law is “no one has a right to encroach on a person or their property.” (Examples being murder and theft.) Pollution is a violation of that principle on a massive scale and it should be treated that way.
- philips 5y agoAbsolutely! I have started a project to encourage municipalities to use land use to protect their water and other sensitive spots from service stations. 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 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 https://postpump.org/oregon
- eigengrau5150 5y agoIsn't the entire USA a "sacrifice zone"?
- stuaxo 5y agoThe results of almost unabated regulator capture for decades. Let's hope shining light on this brings pressure for change.
- refurb 5y agoRead up on the Love Canal disaster. - 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