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The EPA allows polluters to turn neighborhoods into “sacrifice zones”

propublica.org

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Re: The EPA allows polluters to turn neighborhoods into “sacrifice zones”

#51

Post by function_seven »

frazbin wrote: post #19
chrisseaton wrote: post #3

Californians have watered down the phrase 'cancer-causing' so much that probably nobody cares! I guess being down-wind of a Starbucks counts as being in a sacrifice zone according to Californian regulations!

Yep, California has raised the bar, and to do so it had to take risks. In particular, it risked looking silly-- and in penis-politics looking silly in front of your opponents is an existential risk. The good news is, some of these risks paid off and became national standards. So, thanks to California, you are poisoned a little less every day. Speaking personally: fuck you for making fun of that effort!

I think parent is referring to the useless Prop 65 warnings that are plastered on everything. They're so ubiquitous as to be completely meaningless. No sense of scale or relative risk. The coffee carries the same warning as the jug of pesticide you spray on your fruit trees. Same warning is on an Ethernet cable as is on a can of paint.

The risk posed by these different items varies wildly, but they're all treated the same from a warning label perspective. And once you realize benign items get the label, you start to ignore it wherever you see it.

What California did for air quality is fantastic. I'm proud of my state for its leadership on that and related things. But that doesn't excuse the failure of Prop 65 warnings. They're worse than just "silly". They dilute real warnings and cause people to ignore the whole lot.

Re: The EPA allows polluters to turn neighborhoods into “sacrifice zones”

#52

Post by unethical_ban »

kaiju0 wrote: post #37

This is a pretty typical growth pattern. Industrial zone establishes and city is set far away in a safe area. City expands and resident need cheap housing. The cheap housing is built near the industrial zone as that is how economic forces work. People then see this and say they built industrial next to the poor people when the opposite occurred. Now the industry is giving cancer to poor people and needs to be punishe…

As someone who grew up in the Clear Lake area of Houston in the 90s and 00s, I can tell you that the La Porte and Deer Park areas were bad, but weren't this bad. People lived in the surrounding areas before some of those plants ramped up.

It isn't always one way or the other.

As someone who is seeing more and more how irreversible so much of our environmental damage is these days, I am leaning on the plant owners being responsible, not the schoolchildren who are getting rolled a 1:20,000 chance of cancer.

Perhaps, knowing how much pollution affects surrounding areas, we should force such chemical plants to purchase all the land around them that will be affected to a certain extent. Internalize the costs of their damage to the community, and prevent others from being exposed to it.

Re: The EPA allows polluters to turn neighborhoods into “sacrifice zones”

#53

Post by AnthonyMouse »

chrisseaton wrote: post #6
kybishop wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have evidence to back up this claim? I'm aware CA puts many warning stickers on various products... but isn't it possible that profit-seeking corporations are, in fact, using cancer-causing materials simply because they're cheaper?

People don't seem to change their behaviour due to those warnings. Nobody's going into a coffee shop, seeing that warning sticker and thinking 'ah whoops better get out of here' are they? The warning 'cancer-causing' has no effect.

> The warning 'cancer-causing' has no effect.

Devil's advocate, it has an effect on some minority of people. Then the company loses sales and has the incentive to stop using the carcinogen if possible.

Your lifetime risk of getting cancer from that thing might have been one in a thousand, so you don't really care, but the company has ten million customers and getting them to change prevents 10,000 cancers.

This is a pretty good alternative to banning the thing. Because if there is a reasonable way to stop using the carcinogen, you don't want to be the company that has the cancer warning when your competitors don't. But if there isn't, maybe the risk is low enough that people make an informed choice to take the risk for the benefit of the thing with no better alternative, and that's fine too.

Re: The EPA allows polluters to turn neighborhoods into “sacrifice zones”

#54

Post by nawgz »

chrisseaton wrote: post #48
nawgz wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think the behavior of people who do not read the article will be unchanged by yet another discussion of cancer, I think you will perhaps be surprised to learn that people who don't care about privacy don't care about yet another discussion of government overreach and people who don't care about politics remain unbothered by news articles decrying fascism or communism. The article was quite interesting, and sho…

> When you use words like "when people now see articles like this" to completely dismiss its very point I think you're misreading my comments. I'm not dismissing the article. It's the opposite. I'm saying that my fear is that other people will unfortunately dismiss the article, due to fatigue of being warned that things cause cancer.

You are strongly whitewashing your own comments. Your first comment - as mentioned re: personal agendas - was about 75% dedicated to to railing against California. The other 25% was where you expressed your opinion of the article: "probably nobody cares"

Please write more carefully if you mean what you say when pressed, because these thoughts are not without merit, but the top level comment was completely off-topic and derogatory to the article and has scarcely spawned a useful discussion.

Re: The EPA allows polluters to turn neighborhoods into “sacrifice zones”

#55

Post by leereeves »

AutumnCurtain wrote: post #38
pfortuny wrote: post #2

The map itself: https://projects.propublica.org/toxmap/

The Gulf Coast seems rife with these spots, and of course with all population-linked metrics the Mississippi is apparent as a dividing line.

There are quite a lot in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and around Chicago too.

What I'm wondering is why the shaded areas around the hot spots on the Gulf Coast are so much bigger than the shaded areas around hotspots elsewhere.

Re: The EPA allows polluters to turn neighborhoods into “sacrifice zones”

#56

Post by apocalyptic0n3 »

leereeves wrote: post #55
AutumnCurtain wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Gulf Coast seems rife with these spots, and of course with all population-linked metrics the Mississippi is apparent as a dividing line.

There are quite a lot in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and around Chicago too. What I'm wondering is why the shaded areas around the hot spots on the Gulf Coast are so much bigger than the shaded areas around hotspots elsewhere.

Looks like they're oil refineries and related industry, which makes sense given how much oil is pulled from the Gulf.

Pennsylvania has a bunch of metal processing industries. Given Pittsburgh's reputation for steel production, that makes sense too.

Looks like a big blend of different industries in Chicago. That one I can't explain.

Re: The EPA allows polluters to turn neighborhoods into “sacrifice zones”

#57

Post by throwaway5752 »

dontcare007 wrote: post #49
lettergram wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gonna have to side with city zoning being the wrong party here. It’s really the people who represent the tax base that should be protecting said tax base.

Yep, a failure on the part of the beaurocrats to deny the zoning changes.

That completely lets the companies off the hook for dangerous and unnecessary pollution. Even if nobody was around, they should have an ethylene oxide scrubber. That is a major source of teratogenic emissions per the article.

Also, it strikes me as extremely speculative on your part that this is a zoning issue. How do you know that these plants didn't shift product mixes or expand after there were established communities nearby, or that the companies provided incorrect information to regulators? Unless you want to fund armies of scientists for the regulator to validate the truth of claims made on submissions then you have to blame the companies that submit false data. That seems far more likely than your assumption.

Re: The EPA allows polluters to turn neighborhoods into “sacrifice zones”

#58

Post by slowmovintarget »

function_seven wrote: post #51
frazbin wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, California has raised the bar, and to do so it had to take risks. In particular, it risked looking silly-- and in penis-politics looking silly in front of your opponents is an existential risk. The good news is, some of these risks paid off and became national standards. So, thanks to California, you are poisoned a little less every day. Speaking personally: fuck you for making fun of that effort!

I think parent is referring to the useless Prop 65 warnings that are plastered on everything. They're so ubiquitous as to be completely meaningless. No sense of scale or relative risk. The coffee carries the same warning as the jug of pesticide you spray on your fruit trees. Same warning is on an Ethernet cable as is on a can of paint. The risk posed by these different items varies wildly, but they're all treated the…

That's the equivalent of software monitoring alerts that engineers can't do anything to fix.

  Alert! A new user has joined. 

  Alert! A user has logged in 47,000 times in the last minute
The second gets ignored because of the flood of the first kind of message. It's called Attention Fatigue and policies often don't take the effect seriously enough.

Better would be a warning with relative danger. Something like a how-cooked-is-your-goose measure: rare, mid-rare, medium, medium-well, well done, charcoal.

Re: The EPA allows polluters to turn neighborhoods into “sacrifice zones”

#60

Post by lotsofpulp »

Someone1234 wrote: post #29
redleggedfrog wrote: post #22

"Before there was climate denial, there was cancer denial." Cancer is just a risk. Having a job an earning money will always outweigh that risk. People will put up with a lot of crummy environment to put food on the table.

This pollution impacts people who don't work at these facilities, and if you start looking at them many employ less than the nearby Walmart.

The people employed by the facilities can afford to raise families, whereas the people employed by Walmart cannot.
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