'Inexcusable': Ex-EPA chiefs decry uneven pollution impacts (E&E News)

Evidence that air pollution disproportionately affects minority and low-income people is undeniable and needs to be confronted, three former EPA chiefs agreed yesterday.

Their views amounted to a striking admission of failure to address deeply rooted environmental inequities that can cut lives short or contribute to debilitating disease.

"Nobody's asking for special favors here," Bill Reilly, who led the agency under President George H.W. Bush, said during a virtual forum keyed to the 50th anniversary of the 1970 Clean Air Act. "They are not getting the benefit of the equal protection of the laws, and that's what they should have."

"From my personal perspective, it is simply inexcusable and it has to be fixed," said Carol Browner, EPA administrator during the Clinton administration, as she recalled the signing of a 1994 executive order requiring federal agencies to incorporate environmental justice into their activities. Despite such efforts to bring the federal government together, she said, "We have still come up really just completely short."

"It's time to stop talking about this like it's something that we can't manage when we can," said Gina McCarthy, who ran the air office and later all of EPA during President Obama's tenure. "These are the front-line and the fence-line communities, and they are the people most at risk of dying from pollution exposure throughout the world."

Joined by Tom Jorling, a former congressional aide who helped draft the landmark air law a half-century ago, the three rounded out a five-hour symposium hosted by American University and the American Lung Association. Other participants included current and former regulators, representatives of environmental groups, and a senior employee of the emissions control manufacturer Corning Inc.

There was no disagreement that the Clean Air Act, amended in 1977 and 1990, has led to profoundly improved air quality overall. But there was also acknowledgment that the benefits have not been spread equally — with Black, Latino and low-income communities more likely to be exposed to dirtier air.

More than 70% of Black people live in areas that don't meet national air quality standards, and the proportion is even higher for Latinos, said Peggy Shepard, executive director of the advocacy group WE ACT for Environmental Justice, during an earlier panel discussion. Research linking higher long-term pollution exposure to increased death rates from COVID-19, Shepard added, "has really exposed this racial disparity."

And as smoke-spawning wildfires again raged in Northern California this week, rising temperatures could worsen the disparities and more broadly threaten decades of progress toward cleaner air, other speakers said.

"Climate change is a health emergency," said Harold Wimmer, the American Lung Association's president and CEO.

But if the former EPA chiefs agreed that evidence of environmental injustice is now irrefutable, there was no firm consensus on a long-term strategy for grappling with it.

"You can try and get laws to fix it, but we better not count on them," Browner said, after noting that she saw promise in Reilly's framing of the issue as one of equal protection. More preferable, she continued, is "to figure out how to thread our way through the existing laws, the existing structures to make things happen."

McCarthy, however, noted that New Jersey, whose environmental agency is now led by former EPA official Catherine McCabe, recently enacted an environmental justice bill "comprehensive enough to make a really big difference."

"It is something that will not only think about aftereffects, but fundamentally build the issue of cumulative impact into permitting decisions," McCarthy said. "That's the gold standard."

Reilly also suggested tying environmental justice and enforcement "to begin to take some actions where you can." Under the Trump administration, however, the agency's environmental justice branch was moved from the enforcement office to the policy office, putting it more directly under the control of the EPA administrator (Climatewire, Sept. 6, 2017).

The current administration has come under fire for actions that critics say hurt environmental equity goals, though EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler defends his agency's approach (see related story).

Also, as E&E News reported earlier this week, the agency undertook a potentially far-reaching rollback of air toxics standards last year after brushing off the need for an environmental justice analysis (Greenwire, Sept. 28). As of this morning, the agency had not released the final version of the rule, leaving it unclear whether it is standing by that position.

But in the last few years, Reilly said, it's been helpful to have scientific and monitoring data showing that people in many jurisdictions "aren't imagining things" when they say they're getting a different level of both air quality and regulation.

"It's incumbent now to deal with it."