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Reducing Toxic Releases and Community Risks

Michael E. Kraft, Mark Stephan, and Troy D. Abel

in Coming Clean: Information Disclosure and Environmental Performance

This chapter reviews the strengths and weaknesses of the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) program. It reports the analysis of quantitative data, which reveals the changes made in the sample of ... More

This chapter reviews the strengths and weaknesses of the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) program. It reports the analysis of quantitative data, which reveals the changes made in the sample of facilities using different methods to measure environmental performance while releasing TRI chemicals over time. It also explains key dependent variables, which include indicators of changes in releases of toxic chemicals and their risk levels and the reasons why these variables were selected. These variables are measured by the US Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Risk Screening Environmental Indicators (RSEI) model. Some states and facilities in the United States have made more progress in pollution reduction than others.Less

The Crop Protection Industry

Jill Lindsey Harrison

in Pesticide Drift and the Pursuit of Environmental Justice

Technological and institutional innovations have helped investors and growers to transform Californian agriculture and make it exceptionally profitable. The major concern for growers for having high ... More

Technological and institutional innovations have helped investors and growers to transform Californian agriculture and make it exceptionally profitable. The major concern for growers for having high yield had been pest control, and to control pests they embraced chemical technologies and started using pesticides. Toxic chemical pesticides are common in use for agricultural production in California and cause pesticide drift that affects humans, animals, and the environment adversely. This chapter identifies actors such as chemical manufacturers, investors, distributors, farmers, and others who play different roles in the agricultural industry and shape the pesticide drift by keeping pesticides widely available and promoting the use of pesticides for their profits. It further mentions that these actors have made some significant efforts to avert the problem of pesticide drift, but these efforts in the name of environmental sustainability are essentially circumscribed by the imperative of the industry to maximize profits.Less

Living and Dying on the Fenceline: Response to Industrial Accidents

Robert D. Bullard and Beverly Wright

in The Wrong Complexion for Protection: How the Government Response to Disaster Endangers African American Communities

This chapter examines government response to disasters by presenting presents case studies of industrial accidents and other incidents that have affected African Americans dating back to the early ... More

This chapter examines government response to disasters by presenting presents case studies of industrial accidents and other incidents that have affected African Americans dating back to the early 1930s. It first discusses the risk of toxic chemicals in the United States before analyzing each of the cases, including the Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, mine disaster in 1930; the Gaylord Chemical tank car accident in Bogalusa, Louisiana, in 1995; the Norfolk Southern Railway train wreck that released toxic chlorine gas in Graniteville, South Carolina, in 2005; the ExxonMobil Baytown, Texas, refinery gas spill in 2006; and the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. The chapter also explores the role of race and race-based decision making and industrial practices in responding to threats from locally unwanted land uses and risky facilities in African American communities.Less

States of Green: Regional Variations in Environmental Performance

Michael E. Kraft, Mark Stephan, and Troy D. Abel

in Coming Clean: Information Disclosure and Environmental Performance

This chapter examines some of the factors that influence state variations in environmental performance among facilities in the United States. It emphasizes the variability in environmental ... More

This chapter examines some of the factors that influence state variations in environmental performance among facilities in the United States. It emphasizes the variability in environmental performance in all states across the country and among companies that report through the TRI program over a period of time. Some facilities deserve more attention than those that exhibit a slight improvement in environmental performance, with a state’s contribution in such performance varying significantly. The state’s scale allows a more detailed scrutiny of the impact of information disclosure programs on companies’ environmental performance. Many states have exceeded the expectations of the federal TRI program, with additional efforts being made to distribute and share toxic chemical data among the public.Less

The Judiciary

in The People's Agents and the Battle to Protect the American Public: Special Interests, Government, and Threats to Health, Safety, and the Environment

This chapter begins with a discussion of cases involving the Occupational Safety and Health Administration's attempts to regulate toxic chemical exposures in the workplace, in order to illustrate the ... More

This chapter begins with a discussion of cases involving the Occupational Safety and Health Administration's attempts to regulate toxic chemical exposures in the workplace, in order to illustrate the harm caused by unwarranted judicial interference. Next, it explains the evidence demonstrating judicial bias. It examines the incentives that motivate judges to discover why such bias arises. It discusses how ideological judging creates regulatory dysfunction. The chapter concludes with a series of recommendations for arresting these trends by defining the appropriate role of judges as last-resort or “border patrol” overseers.Less

Something Is Missing

David Sarokin and Jay Schulkin

in Missed Information: Better Information for Building a Wealthier, More Sustainable Future

Consumers have access to substantial information on the products they buy, but much information is missing. “Sustainability information” – about traits like greenhouse gases, child labor, toxic ... More

Consumers have access to substantial information on the products they buy, but much information is missing. “Sustainability information” – about traits like greenhouse gases, child labor, toxic chemicals – is not part of the flow of information. In its absence, the market cannot reflect consumer values about sustainability. New sources of information could integrate our collective values into day-to-day consumer transactions, and make ordinary shopping a path to a more sustainable future.Less

Introducing Environmental Justices

Jill Lindsey Harrison

in Pesticide Drift and the Pursuit of Environmental Justice

Pesticide illness is one of the major environmental problems in the world today. Use of pesticides in agriculture is common, but the health-related consequences related to this get widely unnoticed, ... More

Pesticide illness is one of the major environmental problems in the world today. Use of pesticides in agriculture is common, but the health-related consequences related to this get widely unnoticed, unreported, and unaddressed in the thick of maximizing productivity. Agriculture in California, famous for its industrial character, turns out highly toxic chemical pesticides, which brings about pesticide drift in the region. The airborne movement of agricultural pesticides into human habitats such as residential areas, schools, and other spaces is known as pesticide drift. The problem of agricultural pesticide drift is reported to have made hundreds of Californians ill, and it continues to be an environmental concern for different actors from industry, the state, and activists groups. These actors have consistently been investing in innovative efforts to make the agriculture environmentally sustainable in the region. This chapter draws attention to the issue of pesticide drift and political conflict over it in California.Less

Environmental Health

Barry S. Levy

in Social Injustice and Public Health

This chapter describes the adverse impact of social injustice on environmental health. Environmental pollution is a social injustice for all people, with a disproportionate impact on low- and ... More

This chapter describes the adverse impact of social injustice on environmental health. Environmental pollution is a social injustice for all people, with a disproportionate impact on low- and middle-income countries and, within countries, low-income people, minority groups, and other marginalized populations. The chapter describes the evolution of the environmental justice movement and the studies that have demonstrated disproportionate exposures and the disproportionate occurrence of pollution-related diseases among low-income people, minority groups, and other marginalized populations. A separate section describes the environmental and health consequences of global climate change. Three text boxes focus on childhood lead poisoning, the impact of natural disasters on social justice, and on the new interdiscipilinary field of planetary health.Less

The National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, the Rise of Environmental Protection in the 1970s, and the Political Drama of the Next Three Decades

James K. Conant and Peter J. Balint

in The Life Cycles of the Council on Environmental Quality and the Environmental Protection Agency: 1970 - 2035

The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) was approved unanimously in the Senate and with near unanimity in the House of Representatives in December 1969. President Nixon signed the act into law ... More

The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) was approved unanimously in the Senate and with near unanimity in the House of Representatives in December 1969. President Nixon signed the act into law on January 1, 1970. The new statute was both brief and farsighted. In fewer than 3,500 words the congressional authors of NEPA articulated for the first time a national policy on the environment, set in motion an innovative regulatory process centered on environmental impact statements, institutionalized public participation in federal environmental decision making, and introduced the requirement that the president report annually to Congress on the nation’s environmental status and trends. NEPA also included a provision that established a new agency, the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), in the Executive Office of the President. The CEQ’s assigned statutory role was to implement the environmental impact statement process, prepare the president’s annual environmental report on the condition of the environment, develop policy proposals for solving environmental problems, and coordinate efforts across the federal government to address environmental concerns. As stated in the law, NEPA is designed to “encourage productive and enjoyable harmony between man and his environment”; to “promote efforts which will prevent or eliminate damage to the environment and biosphere and stimulate the health and welfare of man”; and to “fulfill the responsibilities of each generation as trustee of the environment for succeeding generations.” The references to promoting harmony between people and the environment, protecting the biosphere, and affirming the nation’s responsibility for environmental stewardship illustrate an understanding of the scope, scale, and significance of environmental matters that was significantly ahead of its time. The language in NEPA quoted above anticipated by twenty years the concern for the Earth’s biosphere and the concept of environmental sustainability that would become more widely articulated in the run-up to the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. Moreover, NEPA has had an enduring global impact. By the law’s fortieth anniversary, a majority of U.S. states had established their own environmental impact statement requirements and more than 160 nations worldwide had adopted similar legislation. Less

Flexible Bayesian modelling for clustered categorical responses in developmental toxicology

Kottas Athanasios and Fronczyk Kassandra

in Bayesian Theory and Applications

Developmental toxicity studies investigate birth defects caused by toxic chemicals. This chapter develops a Bayesian nonparametric modelling approach for risk assessment in developmental toxicity ... More

Developmental toxicity studies investigate birth defects caused by toxic chemicals. This chapter develops a Bayesian nonparametric modelling approach for risk assessment in developmental toxicity studies. The model is built from a mixture with a product Binomial kernel, to capture the nested structure of the responses, and a dependent Dirichlet process (DDP) prior for the dose-dependent mixing distributions. The resulting nonparametric DDP mixture model provides rich inference for the response distributions as well as for the dose-response curves. Data from a toxicity experiment involving a plasticizing agent were used to illustrate the scientifically relevant features of the DDP mixture model with regard to estimation of different dose-response relationships for different endpoints, including non-monotonic dose-response curves.Less