President’s climate plans reach local communities
WASHINGTON — The census tracts span much of Pittsburgh, along with the suburban North Hills and South Hills. They snake along the banks of the region’s rivers, encompassing small towns like Connellsville and Kittanning, rural swaths of Indiana County and the woods of the AlleghenyNational Forest.
State officials have deemed the tracts environmental justice zones: areas with high poverty rates or high rates of “non-white minorities,” or both, and often contend with industrial developmentor pollution issues.
They could be poised for greater representation in President Joe Biden’s efforts to tackle climate change, which has been at the forefront of his
administration’s policy since he took office in January. Mr. Biden’s executive order to emphasize environmental justice — beyond his orders to cancel the Keystone XL pipeline and block new oil and gas drilling leases on federal lands — could reverberate in the Pittsburgh region.
The new federal focus — combined with Pennsylvania officials’ review of the state’s 17-year-old environmental justice strategy — has environmental advocates hoping that marginalized communities will have a greater influence in blocking unwanted projects and that existing facilities will face greater scrutiny and penalties for unlawful pollution.
As federal agencies like the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and U.S. Justice Department carry out the executive order, they could face challenges in adding teeth to a movement that can sometimes be reduced to the catch-all “environmental justice” buzzwords in political discourse.
Cashing the check
Advocates in the region see environmental justice as encompassing street-level issues that arise in dealing with bigger-picture concerns such as air quality around coal-fired power plants, lead in public drinking water, and the safety of beauty products marketed to Black females. They fold in issues of affordable housing, racial justice and economic inequality.
“Getting to the root of environmental justice is not simply about having a case where a polluter is fined and has to do cleanup,” said Madeline Weiss, an environmental justice organizer for Pittsburgh United who focuses drinking water quality.
“Because then you have to look at the community and the impacts they have felt and [decide] how we best bring justice to that community,” she said. “It’s hard to say exactly what the solution is for one given issue because it could look like a number of different things.”
Real solutions, they said, will have to include all levels of government and bridge sometimes entrenched advocacy groups.
“In our region, there’s a lot of lip service that politicians pay to the environmental movement without the substance of policy to back it up,” said Matt Dean, a Pittsburghbased environmental justice organizer for New Voices for Reproductive Justice, which promotes the health and wellbeing of Black women and girls.
“I’ve sat at a table with environmental activists who have basically said climate change is the only issue and everything else is secondary,” Mr. Dean said, “which is not a conversation-starter when you’re talking about environmental justice .”
Late last month, New Voices hosted a virtual panel to discuss the opportunities.
Kerene Tayloe, director of federal legislative affairs at WE ACT for Environmental Justice, said the Biden administration “has more of a focus on us than we’ve ever seen.” She credited Black women as a key voting bloc that drove Mr. Biden to victory, and “we now have the ear” of the White House and, in particular, Vice President Kamala Harris.
“We have to take credit for that,” Ms. Tayloe said. “We havea check to cash.”
One aspect of Mr. Biden’s executive orders, she pointed out, says at least 40% of the benefits from federal investment goes to “disadvantaged communities.”
“So now we have to be very clear: Who is disadvantaged?” she said. “How do we articulate and make sure that it’s Black and brown people and indigenous communities, that have been forever the sacrifice zones?”
State Rep. Summer Lee, DBraddock, chimed in that well-intentioned Democrats and some in the environmental and labor movement have led marginalized communities to believe the economy would suffer without specific industries — “lazy narratives,” as she called it.
“When you’re Black and you’re brown and you’re poor, and you have been convinced that the only thing that you can have in your community is an industry that kills you, it becomes so hard to think of a future without it,” Ms. Lee said. “There is one.”
Putting pressure on DEP
The concept of environmental justice has its roots in the 1960s civil rights movement.In Pennsylvania, it was made official in a state policy in 2004 that automatically granted greater public participation for marginalized communities.
Today, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection labels census tracts and census blocks for environmental justice considerations when at least 20% of residents are at or below the federal poverty line or at least 30% of the population identifies as a non-white minority, or both. That wraps in 3,436 individual areas statewide, and 385 areas in Allegheny County alone.
As part of permit considerations, the DEP provides those communities informational meetings, summaries of the proposed application and increased outreach involving a regional coordinator who facilitates discussions between parties involved.
Because of the sheer number of communities, advocates have long wanted the state to dig deeper, beyond the broad race and income criteria, into specific communities that have seen a high rate of development.
Thestate’s current plan “is incredibly lacking,” said Ashley Funk, executive director of the Mountain Watershed Association.
Ms. Funk has pressed for more state outreach to communities around a proposed natural gas power plant in Elizabeth Township. The site is not considered an environmental justice community, though it has long experienced hard ship, she said.
Ms. Funk and other advocates said the DEP must consider the cumulative impacts on places where coal mining overlaps with natural gas drilling and power plants and steel mills and factories. Further, the state has excluded new shale gas wells, pads, compressor stations and pipelines from its environmental justice plan.
Mr. Biden’s plan could put pressure on the state to be more aggressive.
“On a federal level, they’re trying to take a more holistic approach to what environmental justice means,” Ms. Funk said, while the state has been “looking at it piecemeal.”
This year, the DEP’s Office of Environmental Justice is revising the plan.
In an interview, Allison Acevedo, a Pittsburgh native hired in 2018 to lead the office, said she is looking at “other ways we can expand policy beyond public participation,” including in grant-making.
“It’s really thinking about, as we move forward, how we build some type of infrastructure ,” Ms. Acevedo said.
Asked whether natural gas development could be included in the plan, she said, “We have to think that through. We haven’t really got that far yet.”
While the state eyes reforms, Mr. Biden’s climate agenda could lead to greater enforcement of pollution violations that affect environmental justice communities.
“Given the attention on this issue, they’re going to be under a lot of pressure to show results — and even make examples of people,” said Corinne Snow, an attorney who recently was counsel and chief of staff for the U.S. Justice Department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division.
Environmental cases, initially investigated by the EPA, are passed to the Justice Department if they contain more egregious actions.
Most immediately, Ms. Snow said, Justice Department lawyers could look at environmental justice cases and say: “Let’s move that to the front, and let’s really highlight that in the press releases we’re doing. Maybe we really drop the hammer on this company to show we’re being very active in this space.”
Rep. Conor Lamb, D-Mt. Lebanon, a former federal prosecutor, said he saw the environmental justice order as a matter of putting more resources into enforcement.
Mr. Lamb recalled receiving a phone call at the U.S. attorney’s office from an EPA investigator who needed help to serve warrants in the case of a natural gas contractor falsifying diesel emissions standards from its trucks.
“I was kind of wondering why, with all the drilling we have here — we’re like the Saudi Arabia of natural gas — I had never seen any cases like this brought in my time,” Mr.Lamb said.
The EPA had no criminal agent in Western Pennsy lvania, the EPA investigator told him.
“There are probably stories like that all around the country, of places that are just underregulated and underpoliced when it comes to the environment,” Mr. Lamb said. “And I think that may be one of the things he’s trying to fix.”
A Justice Department spokeswoman in Washington did not have specific information on how it would carryout the order.
The department “places a high priority on the all-of-government approach set forth in the executive order for the climate and environmental justice priorities of the administration,” the spokes woman said.