Air Quality as Environmental Justice
This post was originally published on Legal Planet. Reprinted with permission.
The environmental justice movement began with a focus on neighborhood struggles against toxic waste facilities and other local pollution sources. That focus now includes other measures to ensure that vulnerable communities get the benefit of climate regulations. The most powerful tool for assisting those communities, however, may be the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS). The NAAQS (pronounced "knacks") are supposed to be the maximum amount of air pollution consistent with protection of public health and welfare.
Air pollution is the biggest threat to low-income communities and communities of color. As the American Lung Association has said:
- "The burden of air pollution is not evenly shared. Poorer people and some racial and ethnic groups are among those who often face higher exposure to pollutants and who may experience greater responses to such pollution. Many studies have explored the differences in harm from air pollution to racial or ethnic groups and people who are in a low socioeconomic position, have less education, or live nearer to major sources of pollution."
Those unequal pollution levels translate into more deaths, more asthma attacks, and more hospitalizations.
Once the U.S. Environmental Protection …
According to press reports, EPA is preparing to ignore possible deaths caused by concentrations of pollutants occurring below the national ambient air quality standards (NAAQS). This is a key issue in a lot of decisions about pollution reduction. For instance, there is no NAAQS for mercury, but pollution controls on mercury would, as a side benefit, reduce pollution levels of harmful particulates. According to EPA’s prior cost-benefit analyses, those reductions could save many lives even in areas where current levels of particulates are below the NAAQS. Scientists see no reason to think that particulates in those areas are harm-free. But EPA now seems poised to ignore those saved lives. There’s a seeming logic behind that stance, but it’s fundamentally wrong.
The logic is simple — as simple as a magician pointing out she has nothing up her sleeves. The NAAQS is supposed to be set …
- 1 (current)
