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This decision raises significant climate change and environmental justice concerns, particularly for those disadvantaged communities who may live near future drilling sites.
Our recent study on community exposures to oil and gas production shows that historical redlining has perpetuated patterns of environmental injustice. Redlined neighborhoods have nearly twice the density of oil and gas wells than otherwise comparable neighborhoods that were not redlined.
This essay is also available in Spanish
Our findings may partially explain how it is that Black and Latinx people are more likely to live near oil and gas development infrastructure today.
In light of these findings, policymakers should consider the scientific evidence of the risks posed by oil and gas production to public health, and how historical racist policies contributed to the health disparities we see today.
Redlining and environmental injustice
Many environmental problems disproportionately faced by communities of color and the poor in the U.S. are rooted in discriminatory policies put in place generations ago by local, state, and federal governments. One such policy is known as redlining, in which the federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, in trying to revive the housing market in the 1930s in the wake of the Great Depression, graded and mapped how risky neighborhoods were for real estate investment.
Neighborhoods comprised of largely low-income, immigrant, or Black residents were deemed “hazardous” or “definitely declining” and mapped in red (i.e., redlined), while whiter and wealthier communities were considered “best” or “still desirable.”
A 2018 study in Los Angeles found that at least some Home Owners’ Loan Corporation officials explicitly considered the racial makeup of neighborhoods and the presence of oil and gas wells when making decisions about redlining, which influenced future locations of new oil and gas development. Officials gave the highest grade to one predominantly white Los Angeles neighborhood near oil and gas wells after local leaders agreed to impose “racial restrictions in perpetuity,” to keep the neighborhood white while also stopping future oil and gas well drilling. In our recent study, we found that neighborhoods that already had wells were more likely to be redlined, and, in turn, redlined neighborhoods were more likely to have new oil and gas wells drilled after the policy went into effect.
These legacies remain imprinted on neighborhoods today. For many families who have stayed in their redlined neighborhoods for generations, significant environmental and health consequences remain. Research shows that historically redlined neighborhoods have worse air quality, a lack of greenspace, and higher heat island risks, as well as elevated rates of cardiovascular disease, asthma hospitalizations, poor birth outcomes, and other diseases.
Although redlining may not have directly caused these disparities, this discriminatory policy codified and accelerated them through disinvestment in already struggling neighborhoods, which, in turn, has shaped the present-day location of environmental hazards and associated health risks. In terms of oil and gas production, research shows that drilling and operating oil and gas wells worsens air pollution and puts residents living nearby at risk of respiratory disease, cardiovascular disease, depression, and poor birth outcomes, including premature birth.
Shifting away from oil and gas
In California, policymakers, affected residents, and advocates are debating how to protect communities and workers from the impacts of nearby oil and gas production operations, including limiting new drilling permits and establishing buffer zones between active wells and the places where people live, work, play, and go to school. As the state seeks to phase out oil and gas production and prohibit drilling in residential neighborhoods, policymakers should account for the ongoing adverse impact of historical redlining on the environmental quality of communities of color.
This requires that decision-makers engage fence-line communities near oil and gas production facilities to reduce exposures. It also requires expanding programs such as California’s Climate Investments, which has invested over $4.5 billion in transformative, environmental justice projects that address climate change, including renewable energy initiatives. Similarly, the Biden Administration’s Justice40 Initiative, modeled closely on California’s program, would require that at least 40% of federal investments in climate-change mitigation and clean energy projects benefit environmental justice communities.
The worsening climate crisis, along with strained energy supply chains due to rising global tensions amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine, make clear the urgent need for the U.S. to shift away from oil and gas production and toward renewable energy sources. Equally important is that hastening this energy transition would go a long way toward advancing environmental justice for those communities who have endured the health impacts of oil and gas development for generations.
David J.X. González is a Ford Foundation and University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow and Rachel Morello-Frosch is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health and Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management. Morello-Frosch is also a member of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council.
Banner photo: UCLA Law students and faculty participated in a toxic tour of Wilmington, CA, a predominantly Latinx neighborhood surrounded by the Port of Los Angeles, heavy industry, and an oil field in 2019. (Credit: Emmett Institute/flickr)
For me, it had all the elements: I grew up in a North Jersey town known for housing a few Mafia celebs, like Willie Moretti, the real-life inspiration for The Godfather’s legbreaker, Luca Brasi.
A few miles away were the heavily-polluted Meadowlands, a once-gorgeous wetland that had become, among other things, the alleged final resting place of countless Mafia debtors, rivals, and no-account Goodfellas.
So when drought-parched Lake Mead gave up the skeletal remains of a potential Western wiseguy, I was fascinated.
Lake Mead drought
Lake Mead is in desperate shape. Along with Lake Powell, upstream on the Colorado River, Mead is the key to prosperity for the booming cities, suburbs and farms of the desert Southwest – Arizona, Southern California, and, of course, Las Vegas. In addition to the unfortunate guy in the barrel, decades of overuse capped off by several years of brutal, climate-driven drought has exposed an intake pipe for Southern Nevada’s 2.2 million people.
They’re running out of water. Putting megacities like Phoenix and Vegas in a desert was never a good idea. They were always destined to run out of water, some day. But the rampant growth and a years-long, killer drought have made the crisis immediate.
And with the corpse-in-a-barrel story, we have one more link between climate and popular culture: The Sopranos meets fossil fuels.
It hardly made a wave, thereby joining the long rap sheet for climate change’s impact on our culture. Mostly, it’s things we’re losing.
Climate change and wine
A California vineyard
Winecountry Media, via flickr
From Bordeaux to the Napa Valley, vineyards are in trouble. Bordeaux’s quarter million acres of vines face “a slow but simmering” climate crisis, according to Wine Enthusiast magazine. Increased temperatures, more frequent damaging storms and more can have a big impact on the sensitive grape, increasing the alcohol content in some varieties by 10% or more.
In California’s Napa Valley, frequent wildfires have scalded multi-million-dollar vintages. Other vintners who thought they were spared by the flames were felled by the smoke, which either ruined the taste of America’s priciest wines, or blackened the grapes to make the costliest raisins in history.
Insurers have also turned the screws on California wineries, either jacking up premiums, limiting coverage, or cancelling policies outright.
Changing seasons
Phenology is the science of measuring plants’ and animals’ responses to long-term changes in weather and climate. (Note: phenologists get really upset when their work gets mixed up with that of phrenologists, the sideshow quacks who tell your fortune by reading the bumps on your head.)
As spring replaces winter each year, the time- honored work of the tree tappers yields the sweet sap of sugar maples from the northeast U.S. and Quebec. But researchers tell us two things about rising temperatures and sugar maples: The maple syrup is less sweet, and the trees’ range is slowly moving north. Someday, phenologists tell us you won’t be able to find Vermont maple syrup in Vermont.
Lobsters, fluke and whales
Lobstermen hauling traps on the Maine coast
Offshore, New England lobsters could meet the same fate. Warming waters are chasing much of the food chain northward. Connecticut and Long Island lobstermen are struggling with a dwindling catch; within decades, Maine lobsters may only exist on the state’s license plates.
Summer flounder, or fluke, are a popular target for both sport and commercial fishermen. North Carolina commercial boats hold most of the permits for fluke in the $22 million industry, but they have to motor north to New Jersey to find the fish.
Northern right whales winter and calve off the Georgia and Florida coasts. They feed in summer in the Gulf of Maine. For now. The 300 or so remaining whales are what’s left after centuries of whaling. Ship strikes and entanglement in fishing gear risk taking more But three recent studies indicate that climate change may be a final blow. The zooplankton that are right whales’ primary food source are increasingly scarce in the whales’ northern range.
So many climate stories
I could go on. Ocean wildlife everywhere is under threat from acidification and from the everyday torrent of microplastics. Shorter term, the energy dynamics of the Ukraine crisis have become the newest rationales for keeping the oil & gas infrastructure afloat.
But I guess that’s plenty for now.
Peter Dykstra is our weekend editor and columnist and can be reached at pdykstra@ehn.org or @pdykstra.
His views do not necessarily represent those of Environmental Health News, The Daily Climate, or publisher Environmental Health Sciences.
Banner photo credit of Lake Mead: Jakob Owens/Unsplash
A fire in Reactor Four of the Chernobyl Nuclear Complex kicked off a series human errors and mechanical failures leading to an explosion and a core meltdown at the site just north of Kyiv in the then-Soviet state of Ukraine in 1986.
The subsequent radiation release was detected a thousand miles downwind in Scotland. Scandinavian livestock and reindeer grazed on radioactive grass. The city of Pripyat, created to house Chernobyl’s workers and their families, became a ghost town built for 50,000.
The immediate death toll is still in dispute. The eventual toll of radiation-related deaths and illnesses is a matter of greater controversy and conjecture.
Chernobyl roared back in the news in February, as Russian troops streamed toward their unsuccessful attempt to overrun Kyiv. They passed through the so-called Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, a 1,000 square mile Dead Man’s Land of contaminated trees, plants, grass, soil, and water.
Today, 15 reactors provide electricity to Ukraine, according to the Nuclear Threat Initiative. Russia shelled the six-reactor complex at Zaporizhzhia on March 3, striking one reactor shell but not causing a radiological risk.
When the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, Ukraine inherited the roughly 1,700 Soviet warheads stationed within the newly independent nation. All 1,700 were returned to Russia by 1994.
Close to home
Let’s digress to a few U.S. nuke items. A piece of my monthly payment to Georgia Power helps atone for the travails of the only two nuclear generating stations currently under construction in the U.S.
Georgia Power’s Plant Vogtle has long-planned to add two new reactors to its two existing nukes about a three-hour drive east of Atlanta. Vogtle Units 1 and 2 opened in the 1980’s. Unit 3 was intended to open in 2016, with Unit 4 a year later.
We’re still waiting, and the price tag for these two beauties has doubled from roughly $14 billion to $28 billion. And counting.
Other recent nuke projects have boiled over in South Carolina and Florida.
Picking winners and losers
Remember that meme from 10 years ago? The Obama Administration had just blown a half-billion-dollar loan guarantee in the Solyndra solar fiasco. Republicans pounced, and Solyndra remained a 2012 campaign issue for Obama’s challenger, Mitt Romney, who teased the incumbent: “You don't just pick the winners and losers; you pick the losers."
Now, Obama’s VP is president. President Biden’s Energy Department has thrown a $6 billion lifeline to a foundering nuclear industry: Utilities whose nuke plants are facing early closure because they’re aging and priced out of the market can apply to the DOE for relief.
Counterintuitive, anyone?
The rationale, embraced by some environmentalists, is that carbon-free nuclear power can help control climate change. Many others take the environmental community’s more traditional view, that shuttered nukes, like New York’s Indian Point Energy Center, shouldn’t be on welfare with on-site nuclear waste storage. (Read Tom Henry's Saturday story on decommissioning nukes in the Great Lajkes region).
And $6 billion, of course, equals 12 Solyndras.
Peter Dykstra is our weekend editor and columnist and can be reached at pdykstra@ehn.org or @pdykstra.
His views do not necessarily represent those of Environmental Health News, The Daily Climate, or publisher Environmental Health Sciences.
Banner photo credit: Vladyslav Cherkasenko/Unsplash
In modern times, the party that holds the White House almost always takes a drubbing as one-third of U.S. Senate seats and the entire House of Representatives is up for grabs. The smart money, if there is such a thing in Washington, sees Republicans recapturing both houses later this year, and making a serious play for the White House in two years.
This, in part, explains why the current administration's pro-environment rhetoric is run off the road by its pro-petroleum actions.
Winter blends
This week, President Biden traveled to the heart of corn country, Iowa, to announce the suspension of a 1989 Environmental Protection Agency regulation seasonally limiting the amount of ethanol in gasoline.
The corn-based fuel acts as gasoline’s Hamburger Helper, extending its use. But it also creates more smog—ground level ozone pollution that impacts asthma and other respiratory woes. Smog is a warm-weather phenomenon, so the EPA limited the summertime use of ethanol additives. “Summer blend” gasoline can add as much as 15 cents per gallon to gas prices. Selling "winter blend” gas is a windfall for corn growers, but ignores environmental and health concerns.
Pain at the pump
State governments are using the Ukraine crisis to drop at-the-pump prices by another dime or so. More than 20 states have suspended their collections of state gasoline taxes for the next several months. For many of these states, the date for reinstating those taxes will arrive shortly before Election Day.
And last week, Biden took the unprecedented step of releasing more than a million barrels of oil per day for at least several months from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve. This may sound like an Oprah-ish everybody-gets-a-car tactic but analysts warn it will have little impact on prices at the pump.
Environmental electoral politics
Even if Biden’s moves are cosmetic and electorally motivated, they can’t match the cold-blooded condescension of George W. Bush’s eight years. Vice President Dick Cheney headed Bush’s Energy Task Force. Cheney was roundly criticized for huddling with fossil fuel interests and shutting out environmentalists. A few months into the Bush-Cheney leadership, Cheney shrugged off energy conservation efforts, saying “conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy."
Instead, Cheney’s task force created mechanisms for oil and gas interests to hide many of the pollution and climate change risks of fracking, a drilling technique for both oil and natural gas that enjoyed a boom in subsequent years.
On the Democrats’ side, green lobbyists say they were stiffed by both the Clinton and Obama administrations during their respective first terms. The Clinton-Gore Administration held off on most environmental moves, then took a beating from Newt Gingrich’s anti-regulatory “Contract With America” in the 1994 midterms.
In 2009, Obama’s staff told environmental reps that the White House would shelve any major environmental initiatives until the sagging U.S. economy was fixed. The 2010 midterms handed the House back to an increasingly hostile GOP.
So Biden faces the strong possibility that his agenda will be hogtied after his first two years. Just at a time when a desperate world looks to America for climate leadership.
Peter Dykstra is our weekend editor and columnist and can be reached at pdykstra@ehn.org or @pdykstra.
His views do not necessarily represent those of Environmental Health News, The Daily Climate, or publisher Environmental Health Sciences.
Banner photo: The White House
“[I]t is clear that, to date, many members of the General Assembly, the Governor’s Office, and the DOH have failed to make a good faith effort to understand and address the health risks and resulting health impacts of shale gas development,” the paper, entitled "Pennsylvania's Shale Gas Boom: How Policy Decisions Failed to Protect Public Health and What We Can Do to Correct It," states.
Environmental Health Project, a health organization focused on how shale gas drilling and its byproducts impact communities, collected health data from Pennsylvania residents living near shale wells, which now number more than 13,000 in permits, to make up for what it describes as inaction by the state.
“Since we have been doing this for 10 years, it seemed like time to reflect on the comprehensive narrative on how we got to where we are today,” said EHP Executive Director Alison L. Steele.
Research has linked increased risk of infant mortality, low birth rates, depression, and hospitalizations for skin and urinary issues to live near fracking wells. The findings come a year after Environmental Health News’ “Fractured” investigation, which found that Western Pennsylvania families near fracking are exposed to harmful chemicals, and regulations fail to protect communities' mental, physical, and social health.
The authors of the new report call for more funding to government agencies, for drillers to make public the list of chemicals they use, and a better way for residents to file environmental health complaints.
Original shale drilling law
The report criticizes Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell, whose term, from 2003 to 2011, saw the staging of the first fracking wells. However, it traces much of the systematic neglect to Act 13, passed in 2012 under Republican Gov. Tom Corbett.
The law established some fundamentals for shale drilling in Pennsylvania. It enabled the state to preempt some local environmental laws and zoning authority in order to establish uniform statewide standards for shale gas well development.
Act 13 also created the “impact fee,” an annual per-well fee paid by the operator. Pennsylvania is the only state to tax drill operators in this way; the 33 other oil producing states tax profits. While the fees generated about $150 million to $200 million a year, the report states that, “It has been estimated that a severance tax, either instead of or in addition to an impact fee, would have provided the state with billions of dollars in revenue over the first decade of the shale boom.”
Related: The body burden of living near fracking
This money could have gone toward mitigating the impacts of the fracking industry on infrastructure like highways and bridges, future capping of abandoned wells, or efforts to track the health effects of fracking. Environmental Health Project researchers could find no evidence that any impact fee revenue was put toward evaluating residents’ complaints or concerns about fracking.
The state kicked around the idea of creating a registry to log health complaints that may be related to contamination of ground water and other complications of fracking. Act 13 included $2 million for one, but that feature was cleaved off the bill before it passed.
Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf, who took office in 2015, proposed $100,000 for one and the General Assembly agreed to fund it in 2016. By then, “the DOH had been getting phone calls from residents with health complaints for several years, but there was no established structure, systematic protocol, or sustainability plan for the collection of reliable information,” the new report states, adding “it is possible that this move is still too little, too late to have a significant impact on the state of health research in frontline communities.”
Department of Health
The report gives Wolf credit for reinstating a ban on fracking on state-owned lands, which had been removed by Corbett, and for bringing health consequences of shale gas development back into conversation, but concludes that none of his actions have “limited residents’ exposure to toxic substances in their air and water, which continued to increase.”
The DOH also “failed in its own right to protect public health,” the report states, noting media investigations alleging that staffers were instructed not to return calls from residents reporting health problems linked to franking and “were given a list of words related to gas operations and told not to engage in conversations with residents who called about any of the words on the list.”
When reviewing calls about water and emissions near drilling operations on the ground, the DOH often collaborated with the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, but their investigations yielded little follow up.
DOH’s stated position, in a correspondence with state Attorney General Josh Shapiro included in the report, was that “the science in this area is developing, and it is fair to say that it has not been proven that fracking harms public health.”
Steele said this approach contrasts starkly with the DOH’s responses to Covid-19 and to the opioid epidemic—which encompasses data collection, prescription drug monitoring and guidance and education for healthcare providers.
“We know that they are capable of delivering a public health response,” she said. “In this case, they were not given a mandate.”
Environmental Health Project is not the first to point out DOH inaction. Attorney General Shapiro, in a comprehensive report on the state’s response to fracking issued in 2020, stated that it was “remarkable that a newly created organization like [Environmental Health Project] swiftly gathered data and provided guidance to Pennsylvanians on how they could protect themselves from the effects of industry operations, while a long-established government entity, DOH, did not.”
DOH did not immediately return emails seeking comment.
Noting that neighboring New York and Maryland instituted moratoriums on shale drilling in light of new evidence of their public health costs, the Environmental Health Project concludes that, “The public health failures Pennsylvania’s governors have demonstrated with respect to shale gas development were not inevitable; they were choices. The only constraints were political.”
Editor's note: This article was updated to more accurately reflect EHP's positions, and to correct earlier errors in PA oil and gas laws.
Banner photo: Bryan Latkanich of Washington County, Pa., points to drilling equipment near his home in 2019. (Credit: Kristina Marusic)