A new analysis The White House’s signature environmental justice program has found that breathing more polluted air won’t shrink racial disparities, in part because of efforts to ensure it can withstand legal challenges.
The program, known as Justice 40, aims to address inequities by directing 40 percent of the benefits from certain federal environmental investments to disadvantaged communities. But the Biden administration intentionally left out the process of figuring out who might benefit from race in designing the program. The Supreme Court recently struck down race-based affirmative action in college admissions, which some believe could affect federal environmental programs.
Unless carefully implemented, the program may not work as promised and may widen the racial gap by improving air quality in white communities, which may be disadvantaged in some ways, faster than communities of color, according to a peer-reviewed study published Thursday in the journal Science by researchers from several universities and environmental justice groups.
The investments involved in Just40, which span 19 federal agencies, are in the billions of dollars. “It’s not just play money,” said Robert Bullard, director of Texas Southern University’s Bullard Center for Environmental and Climate Justice. In the 1980s Dr. Bullard’s research provided some of the earliest evidence that polluting facilities were systematically placed near communities of color.
The new study predicts the concentration of a type of air pollution, such as PM 2.5, or fine particulate matter, across the country using a model of pollutants moving through the atmosphere.
The researchers compared the current “business as usual” trajectory in air quality improvements with two alternative scenarios in which air quality in disadvantaged communities, as defined by the White House, would improve by double or quadruple the overall rate. They found that while PM 2.5 pollution improved rapidly in these broadly defined disadvantaged communities, pollution remained significantly worse for people of color.
“The results we have here are a piece of evidence that suggests that if you don’t account for race/ethnicity, you don’t address race/ethnicity disparities,” said Julian Marshall, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Washington and one of the paper’s authors.
A spokeswoman for the White House Council on Environmental Quality said the study made assumptions that did not reflect how the Justice 40 initiative was being implemented.
Air pollution in the United States has generally improved since the Clean Air Act of 1970, although the recent increase in wildfires is erasing some of that progress. This summer, Americans across the country were affected by wildfire smoke from fires in Canada, which increased the burden on communities exposed to poor air quality from other sources such as transportation, power plants and industrial facilities.
People of color in the United States breathe 14 percent more PM 2.5 pollution than the overall population, according to a study Thursday. Low-income people, regardless of race, are more exposed to this type of pollution than the general population, but only 3 percent more. Disadvantaged communities face about 6 percent more of this pollution, as defined by the White House.
PM 2.5 consists of fine particles in the air that are small enough to enter people’s lungs and bloodstream. In worst cases, continued exposure can lead to lung cancer, heart attacks or strokes. Estimates of deaths from air pollution vary, but a 2017 study found that PM 2.5 could be linked to nearly 90,000 premature deaths annually in the United States.
In order to administer Justice 40 and direct environmental investments to disadvantaged communities, the White House Council on Environmental Quality created the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool. The tool’s screening criteria include income and exposure to PM 2.5, as well as other local pollution, climate change impacts, energy costs, health, housing quality, education and employment, but omits race and ethnicity.
White House guidelines for individual federal agencies, however, allow them to direct their program investments to more specific locations and populations within this broad “advantaged communities” category.
A spokesperson for the Council on Environmental Quality said via email, “This study analyzes a hypothetical scenario where air quality investments are made haphazardly and without thought to reduce pollution from sources upstream of communities.”
Still, activists and researchers have criticized the omission of race from the primary screening tool. Race isn’t the only factor in determining American air quality, it’s the “highest indicator,” said Manuel Salgado, director of WE ACT for Environmental Justice, a nonprofit group. Mr. Salgado was not one of the authors of Thursday’s paper, but his firm was involved in research for the analysis.
Dr. who is a member of the advisory board of the White House. Bullard, but not involved in the study, called the new assessment “probably the most comprehensive analysis I’ve seen so far” of the Justice 40 screening tool.
Francesca Dominici, a data scientist at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health who has researched the disparate effects of air pollution but was not involved in the study, said the research was rigorous and based on “sophisticated modeling.”
The White House Screening Tool is updated every year. WE ACT’s Mr. Salgado suggested that the administration could use the existing screening tool in a more refined way, without dividing the population into two separate categories of “disadvantaged” and “disadvantaged”, considering the spectrum of pollution and identifying which communities are most burdened.
As it decides how to manage the hundreds of small climate, energy and pollution control programs that fall under the Justice40 umbrella, it may be closer to the approach individual federal agencies take anyway.
