Studies show Black and Latino communities targeted in redlining now hotspots for oil drilling wells

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Just because the Fair Housing Act of 1968 made redlining illegal doesn’t mean discrimination on all fronts disappeared—far from it, activists and scientists alike argue. The same Black and Latino neighborhoods that fared worse during the white supremacist tradition of redlining or deeming Black areas too risky for housing loans are now being targeted with nearly twice as many oil drilling wells as those in white neighborhoods, according to a study The Washington Post cited.

Joan Casey, lead author of the study, told The Washington Post it is “more evidence that this legacy of structural racism created through redlining boundaries has implications for health today.”

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Casey’s work is a joint effort by researchers at the University of California at Berkeley and Columbia University in New York. It included data from 33 cities in 13 states, excluding southern cities in Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Researchers told The Washington Post that Los Angeles houses more oil drilling sites than any other city and that those sites are mostly located in urban areas including “Tulsa, Kansas City, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Buffalo and Lower Westchester County outside New York City.”

David J.X. Gonzalez, a co-author of the study, told the newspaper that research such as his “makes us aware that we need to focus on disparate exposures and health outcomes when we consider new policy.”   

“Studies like this can put equity into the equation,” Gonzalez added.

Researchers found that “living near oil and gas wells is associated with higher risk of cardiovascular disease, impaired lung function, anxiety, depression, preterm birth, and impaired fetal growth,” according to the study.

“In several studies, risk was heightened among racially and socioeconomically marginalized people, and in several U.S. regions these same groups have disproportionately high exposure to wells and natural gas flaring,” researchers added.

Black people are “nearly four times as likely to die from exposure to pollution than White people,” according to another study referenced in the Post. That same research showed that Black people are also 75% more likely to live in neighborhoods with a plant or factory in their backyards.

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The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) launched a civil rights investigation into two Louisiana agencies that permitted chemical plants and a grain terminal in the majority-Black parishes of St. John and St. James, the New Orleans Advocate reported. The parishes help form what environmental activists know as “Cancer Alley,” areas along the Mississippi River with reportedly elevated concentrations of pollutants and more cases of cancer than anywhere else in the state. President Joe Biden used the phrase in announcing his signing of climate and environmental justice orders.

The specific businesses the Louisiana state environmental quality and health department is being investigated for working with are the Denka Performance Elastomers plant, the proposed Formosa Plastics Sunshine plant, and the proposed Greenfield Exports grain terminal, the New Orleans Advocate reported.

EPA Administrator Michael Regan told the Associated Press the EPA will make unannounced inspections at the industrial sites in question. Earthjustice and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law filed complaints with the Louisiana state departments, and the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic also waged a complaint that was obtained by the AP.

”Nearly every census tract between Baton Rouge and New Orleans has … a higher estimated cancer risk from air toxics than at least 95% of U.S. residents,” the law clinic wrote in its complaint.

According to the New Orleans Advocate, the federal agency’s probe is specifically about:

• The continued release to the air of carcinogenic chloroprene from the Denka plant.
• Emissions of cancer-causing ethylene oxide from other chemical plants near the Denka facility in St. John.
• The potential release of the smallest size of particulate matter, called PM2.5, at the proposed $400 million Greenfields grain terminal in Wallace.
• The potential release of particulate matter, nitrogen dioxide, volatile carbon monoxide, benzene, formaldehyde and ethylene oxide by Formosa Plastics’ proposed $9.4 billion Sunshine facility in St. James, which is owned by its FG LA LLC subsidiary.

General counsel for the Louisiana Department of Health Steven Russo told the New Orleans Advocate the department is taking “these concerns very seriously.”

“We have received the complaint in full from EPA and are reviewing it closely,” Russo said.

Robert Taylor, president of the nonprofit Concerned Citizens of St. John, has written extensively about activists’ fight for environmental justice in Black neighborhoods. “I have lived my whole life in Reserve, Louisiana, on a block a few hundred feet from a chemical plant emitting the “likely carcinogen” chloroprene,” he wrote in The Guardian last February. “It is the only location in the country to emit the compound and it makes my neighborhood, and others nearby, endure the highest risk of cancer due to airborne pollution anywhere in the United States.

“The plant was operated for half a century by DuPont and now by the Japanese company Denka. These corporations have always done what they wanted, regardless of the harm they have done to my community. We have had no way of protecting ourselves.”

Taylor told The Guardian last week: “We need this investigation from the perspective of racial injustice. It is so obvious what’s happening is discriminatory.”