After hundreds of thousands of people participated in what may have been the largest climate change protest in history, National Review Online criticized the event, attacked environmental justice law that seeks to ameliorate health disparities, and misrepresented a study to argue “the effects of pollution on health have been exaggerated.”
On September 21, an estimated 310,000 demonstrators took part in the People's Climate March, a multi-city event protesting inaction on climate change and its harmful effects on the planet. Although the Sunday news shows ignored this historic event, National Review Online was quick to condemn it. Editor Rich Lowry called it a “symbolic protest,” questioned the settled science of the human causes of climate change, and dismissed advocacy on the dangers of climate change as “anti-industrial apocalypticism.”
Lowry's NRO colleague Katherine Timpf specifically criticized protestors in Harlem who were calling for legal action that would protect communities of color from toxic pollutants, a type of civil rights advocacy that is based on decades-old precedent. Timpf complained that “environmental-justice legislation does more harm than good” because “demonizing corporations is not the best method for bringing economic development to a struggling city.” Timpf also claimed that “the impact that pollutants actually have on poor communities is questionable,” and because of that, she argued, communities of color should embrace the potential economic benefits that a pollution-causing factory might bring:
During one of the march-preparation meetings, the deputy director of the Harlem-based group WE ACT for Environmental Justice, Cecil Corbin-Marks, tells me he's fighting for “global climate policies that focus on the challenges that local communities are confronting.”
“Not all communities have the same resources,” he says. “People of color are disproportionately affected.” He believes that world leaders must unite to stop destructive corporations from spreading the pollutants that sicken minority neighborhoods by causing asthma and cancer.
I don't support his cause. Am I callous and cruel? Am I just ignorant of the suffering of the residents of these areas?
[...]
“There is pollution, and it should be cleaned,” Harry Alford, president of the National Black Chamber of Commerce says during an interview. “But to say that it's happening because of race? No. That's crazy to think corporations sit in boardrooms and design strategies to pollute races. That's Nazi stuff.”
Politicians are responsible for keeping the neighborhoods clean, Alford says, so they're the ones who must be held responsible when they're not. All environmental-justice laws do is give these politicians more power.
Though Timpf eventually admits that East Harlem is “the neighborhood with the highest rate of asthma hospitalization in all of Manhattan,” she added to her attack on environmental justice by criticizing the science behind it, claiming that “many studies have suggested that the effects of pollution on health have been exaggerated. A California Air Resources Board (CARB) study, for instance, found that eliminating most human-caused ozone would reduce asthma-related emergency-room visits by only 1.8 percent.”
But the CARB study actually determined that California would see “significant public health benefits” by attaining the EPA's proposed ozone standards. In addition to 130 reduced emergency room visits for children per year, it would result in 3800 fewer hospitalizations, 3.3 million fewer school absences, and 640 fewer premature deaths each year.
Timpf is also misleading in her description of the law, endorsing the view of the conservative National Center for Public Policy Research that tougher enforcement of civil rights law in service of environmental justice is “just another tool in the activist bag of tricks to get what they want, which is more government control over you, me, and everyone else.” This point of view ignores how frequently and historically polluters' choices -- with or without a discriminatory intent -- disproportionately devastate communities of color. In fact, as the Natural Resources Defense Council has explained, “the environmental justice movement addresses a statistical fact: people who live, work and play in America's most polluted environments are commonly people of color and the poor. ... Communities of color, which are often poor, are routinely targeted to host facilities that have negative environmental impacts -- say, a landfill, dirty industrial plant or truck depot.” Since 1994, the federal government has been explicitly instructed to align environmental justice alongside its traditional civil rights priorities. Dr. Robert D. Bullard, dean of the Barbara Jordan-Mickey Leland School of Public Affairs at Texas Southern University in Houston, Texas, described the environmental justice movement as “the conscience of the environmental movement.”
For her part, Timpf minimizes the actual horror of living with the consequences of industrial or commercial polluters, and the real disparate impact these pollutants have on people of color. The causation in many instances is obvious, despite Timpf's disdain.
In a recent TEDx presentation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Professor Steve Wing explained how industrial pig farms in the state flush “liquid and solid waste ... into open lagoons, then it's sprayed out on nearby fields.” Dr. Wing spoke to neighbors who say the concoction has negative health effects and makes it nearly impossible to go outdoors. Yet as Dr. Wing pointed out, the location of the hog farms appear to correlate with non-white neighborhoods in North Carolina:
According to Dr. Wing, the number of hog farms steadily increased in North Carolina -- until they tried to open near “golf courses and country clubs,” and the state put a moratorium on new farms.
However, the existing farms continue to cause problems in the largely poor and non-white neighborhoods where they are located. On September 3, environmental protection groups represented by Earthjustice filed a complaint with the EPA, claiming that the inability of North Carolina's Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) to effectively regulate pollution from hog farms “discriminate[s] against communities of color” in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. Whether or not the agency intentionally targeted communities of color is beside the point -- as Earthjustice's complaint notes, Title VI “prohibit[s] recipients of federal financial assistance, such as DENR, from taking action that disproportionately burdens persons on the basis of race.” Despite these legal obligations, the lawsuit alleges DENR ignored the historic disproportionate impact hog farms have had on communities of color and took no steps to address the disparity its regulations caused.
While residents of Harlem may not need to deal with the effects of an industrial hog farm any time soon, protestors there still recognize that they may be vulnerable to future environmental mischief on the part of other corporate polluters -- something that Timpf evidently chalks up to the cost of living in certain neighborhoods.