“Environmental Racism” in the Desert?
Sun October 26th, 2003 17:41 MSTTHERE’S NOBODY THERE - HOW CAN THERE BE ENVIRONMENTAL RACISM?
Recently I read that a refinery project proposed for the almost empty desert near Mobile, Arizona is being opposed on the grounds of “environmental racism.” Apparently the local press never bothered to do any research. Otherwise they would have reported that Mobile is has only 33 people in the vicinity, none of them closer than a mile to the site, and the vast majority are white!
ONSITE RESEARCH
Having driven to the area decades ago and seen no population at all, I was rather surprised at the implication that a minority community had sprung up. Thus, armed with a camera and GPS, an expedition was mounted to investigate this amazing development. The pictures are shown throughout this article. In addition, a little web research was undertaken.
Here is a picture of the pristine environment about to be protected by this doctrine:
Naturally, it is primarily used to block progress - as a useful legal and propaganda weapon in the armory of radical environmentalists and NIMBY’s. It’s especially useful since so few people understand it, much less see its effects. In accord with the idea of blocking any progress, the Clinton administration created an EPA organization (NEJAC) to ensure compliance with this dubious doctrine.
ENVIRONMENTAL RACISM/ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE - A DANGEROUS IDEA
Before continuing with the Mobile investigation, a few definitions are in order.
“Environmental justice”, or its opposite, “environmental racism” is a dubious idea that combines environmental radicalism with the thinking behind affirmative action.
The EPA defines “Environmental Justice” as follows:
Environmental Justice is the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies.Fair treatment means that no group of people, including a racial, ethnic, or a socioeconomic group, should bear a disproportionate share of the negative environmental consequences resulting from industrial, municipal, and commercial operations or the execution of federal, state, local, and tribal programs and policies.
This means that every action that affects the environment must have roughly proportional impact on all racial, ethnic and socioeconomic groups. This is, of course, an impossible standard to meet. It smacks of racial quotas in reverse! It requires the loathesome practice of defining people by race and ethnicity, with socioeconomic status thrown in for those cases where progress must be stopped and there aren’t enough minorities in the neighborhood.
This is yet one more way in which the green/left can use the courts to stop progress or block the will of the people. If this had been in existence 40 years ago, Los Angeles wouldn’t have any freeways, which, of course, would suit the environmental radicals just fine.
THE MOBILE,ARIZONA REFINERY PROJECT
In Arizona, an important $2.5 billion oil refinery project is being threatened by a dishonest application of this doctrine. See here, here, and here to read about the gasoline shortages that this refinery would have averted.
This would be the first refinery built in the US in a quarter century!, because of the actions of obstructionists! In other words, it would be the first refinery that could take advantage of decades of technological progress (like the invention of the powerful computers smaller than warehouses).
According to the Phoenix Business Journal:
The lack of home-grown gas production facilities is being blamed as one of the major factors contributing to the unprecedented fuel shortages. There are no refineries in Arizona, leaving the Valley dependent on pipelines and refineries from Southern California and Texas to get petroleum products to Phoenix gas pumps.Supporters of refinery construction also cite May reports by the state Attorney General’s office and Department of Commerce that concluded the lack of in-state gas production facilities contributes to Phoenix susceptibility to price increases and disruptions in supplies.
The Commerce Department report also said refineries in California and nationally are operating at or very near capacity. There has not been a new oil refinery built in the United States in more than 30 years.
The site is ideal (except for the few NIMBYs) because it is far from any significant population, but has a major highway, a major railroad and a major natural gas pipeline going right through it. There is also the nations largest nuclear power plant nearby to assure adequate power. In addition, it is close to the Gulf of California where oil supplies can be delivered.
THE USUAL CULPRITS INTERFERE
That the refinery will be built out in the middle of nowhere hasn’t slowed down the usual culprits, a lawyer who represents environmental organizations such as the Sierra Club and the Center for Biological Diversity, and the very few NIMBYs who chose to live way out in the desert, next to a couple of huge landfills, the mainline of the Southern Pacific, a very busy highway, and a major natural gas pipeline. Interestingly, the same lawyer is also on the 2003 EPA enforcement subcommittee for NEJAC, something us ordinary non-lawyer mortals might consider a bit of a conflict of interest!
A previous project for this area, a hazardous waste incinerator, was also shot down by NIMBYs and Environmental radicals. Since this was before the codification of “Environmental Racism”, they had to use more disruptive tactics. GreenPeace sent activists from California to disrupt meetings, break the law and get arrested, That project was ultimately abandoned, costing the state government tens of millions of dollars in penalties and plenty more in foregone taxes. Needless to say, the environmentalists were ecstatic!
THE TRUTH ABOUT MOBILE, ARIZONA
The Arizona Republic reports:
Mobile was founded by African-American sharecroppers from Mobile, Ala., among other places.Attorney Howard Shanker has notified Owens of his concerns that the refinery would continue a pattern of discrimination against minority communities when it comes to locating industry. The area is home to two landfills, and another large landfill is proposed.
Sounds like an African-American area!
What isn’t mentioned is that nobody lives there (the US census shows a whopping 33 people live within 4 miles of the site, of whom 5 are black, and 5 are mixed race Native American). Too bad the Arizona Republic didn’t bother to drive to the site or check the US Census bureau before blandly reporting the racism argument! !
MOBILE, ARIZONA IN PHOTOS
See if you can spot the residents of Mobile in this panoramic photo collection taken from exactly the former waste incinerator and proposed refinery location. You can click on any one of the photos and see the full resolution picture.
Photos are also available from Arizona Clean Fuels, the company behind the refinery project (and with which this reporter has no relationship, direct or indirect).
Of course, there is the school… which could obviously be moved if it was in that much danger. But the school is .64 miles upwind of the refinery site, sitting right on the highway and the railroad track, very close to the major natural gas pipeline, and just south of the landfills. Is the refinery going to hurt the school? Hardly!
The school and a view looking north from it to the landfill are shown here:
Other than the school, there is one visible building from the refinery site, and it appears to be part of the site. Here is the site itself:
And then there’s the view of the school from the refinery site. Look closely!
If you drive down the highway a bit, then go south a mile on a dirt road, you do find a few properties. These do not appear to be poverty stricken, but are rather mostly “horse properties” - one or more acre lots set up for people with horses. Apparently this is the group which is to be protected by “environmental justice.”
This site is more remote than ANY existing refinery in the southwestern US.
If this is a case of environmental racism, as implied by the attorney, then the race under attack must be a few lizards and rattlesnakes!
What’s really happening here is another common case of NIMBY and environmentalist obstructionism, and lying, aided and abetted by the laziness and bias of the press.
[UPDATE: 10/30/2003] The refinery is not going to be built. Although the company said that the opposition was not the reason they are going to move, I would chalk this up as an other victory to the obstructionists. Of course the company is not going to admit to such a thing, but the threat of an added lawsuit, with a short deadline to get the project built before a change in clean air rules, was enough to push it over the edge.
Now they are considering building in Yuma county, which is less favorable as a location, except for envirowhining.
But mark this prediction: the NIMBY’s and the environmentalists will do their best to block it there. Oh, and the area they are looking at is also out in the middle of the desert!
Nice bit of investigative blogging!
Ahhh, home…
Actually, environmental justice almost never influences the outcome of a project or rule. If Shankar is trying to use E.O. 12898, then he has nothing. There are a hundred other ways to challenge projects, E.O. 12898 is the last way. Therefore, my guess is that this project will go forward if the statistics you cited bear up.
I highly recommend that you submit your analysis and the photos to EPA during its review process for the project permit. I may be wrong, but it appears that the window is still open to get them into the administrative record. Then, any decision made by the agency must be based upon the materials in the administrative record (or must at least address them).
“Environmental Racism?”
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If you’re cold and shivering, throw another environmentalist on the fire.
Seriously, have you noticed how the goals of the left have changed as the negative results of implementing leftist programs have become obvious?
Back in the good old days the old left told us it had something better than capitalism - faster growth, more industrial output, higher standard of living. Now that the socialist program clearly results in widespread poverty and misery, that’s exactly what the leftist luddites are offering us. The means justify the ends.
I have no comment. Except, that if the situation is so silly in the US, how bad do you think is in Europe. Even a liitle worse, I think. The Green cult should be limited - ASAP!
As a leftist, I sometimes even find some of these environmentalists to be a little excessive. While I don’t know enough about the area to determine if you’re right, it may be another example of overzealous enviromentalism. But, then again, that doesn’t demonstrate anything about environmentalism writ large any more than the fact that the Reagan administration openly lied about MiGs to Nicaragua in the 80s reflects upon conservatism. It’s true that a big industry is forming about pseudo-environmentalism, both in the government in the form of the EPA and without, and insofar as this is true, it’s a stain on the record of real environmentalism.
You argue that environmental racism is dubious, but this is a common conservative misunderstanding about racism in general. An effect that has a disproporationate impact upon an ethnic group but isn’t of bigoted intent is still “racism”. Racism, bigotry and prejudice are too often conflated, and leftists should do more to make this clear. It is entirely correct that white people don’t often simply dump garbage directly on minority communities for fun. The likelihood is more that, due to past racist and colonalist practice, minorities are disproportionately poor and poltically incapable, and thus cannot keep pollution away from them. For example, Larry Summers of the World Bank wrote an article called “Let Them Eat Pollution” in which he argued that it is within the logic of the market to export pollution to Third World countries in order to be more “efficient”. (This speaks volumes about the nature of the market and of Lawrence Summers, but not of the vacuous proposal). This is an environmentally racist proposal, even if there is no malevolent intent on Larry’s part.
As for socialism failing (Man Mountain Molehill): Isn’t it a logical fallacy to argue that the antithesis of what somebody advocates is a failure of the advocacy? Market socialism and centrally planned socialism are both not socialism in the sense that they deprive workers of workers control. Marx saw the worker not as a dissatisfied consumer, but as a angered producer, incapable of controlling his work due to market relations (the true meaning of the “commodity character of labor”.) Though I am not a Marxist, and I believe Marxist practice replicates coordinatorism in the economy, it’s rather unfair to blame the misery of the Soviet Union upon them. (Of course, even if you do, it’d only be fair if you recognize that, despite its faults, the Union outproduced and even outallocated Brazil despite Brazil’s tremendous natural advantages, demonstrating a failure of capitalism to adequately produce). It’s clear that your beloved markets also fail to produce and price accurately: by failing to take into account all social and environmental costs of goods in the pricing process (price only determined by buyer/seller interactions and not anything outside of the those interactions); by forcing every individual to maximize his or her own interest at the cost of everybody else, leading workers to work as little as possible, managers to fight both workers and capitalists, and capitalists being forced to expend effort in ideological and methodological warfare to force others to obey their will (view the tremendous amount of money put into advertising, a completely wasteful investment); by leading to cyclical recessions and wasteful speculative capital (something even high school history books and advocates of capitalism, such as Walter Russell Mead, concede); and so on. Capitalism doesn’t produce - let’s let that myth die, directly alongside the similarly awful tyranny of Stalinism.
I do not accept your expansion of the definition of racism. There are thousands of examples of the excesses of environmentalism, as an important viewpoint has been exploited and taken over by radicals.
As far as capitalism. It doesn’t need any defense. Your characterization of it is cliche and wrong. Capitalism is like communism, the worst system man can come up with, except for all the others!
Totally pure capitalism, like totally pure anything-else-ism, doesn’t work. For example, pricing externalities into processes is an appropriate governmental interference in capitalism where it can be done well.
It is socialism which has never worked, and 100,000,000 people were murdered by governments claiming to be socialist.
Environmental Racism in Arizona?
How can there be racism in a landscape where no-one lives? From Arizona Blogger John Moore: “THERE’S NOBODY THERE - HOW CAN THERE BE ENVIRONMENTAL RACISM? Recently I read that a refinery project proposed for the almost empty desert near…
species diversity as an ultimate value would have us killing as many people as needed to save every species that is endangered by there being too many of the dominant species , namely human beings. but how are any human beings expected to value mass murder on this scale? it is so far beyond even hitler and stalin, to value killing people on the scale of billions. yet for a great many rare species , nothing less will suffice; therefore valuing diversity is wrong.
Please see my further comments at
Diversity
John, do you have any recent information about this project? We have 20 acres of land southeast of Mobile, and have recently received a call from a realtor about selling it. Then, just yesterday, we received a letter from the Flood Control District of Maricopa County about them conducting aerial and field surveys in the area for “hydrologic and hydraulic purposes relative to future floodplain delineations.” I’ve been doing some Internet searches to find out if anything is going on in that area that would suddenly create an interest in this land — that’s how I happen to come across your site.
Tribals are socially rich but economically poor.