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The cost of condoning the disadvantage and disenfranchisement of, and the disinvestment in, Black people has exploded on us as Trump has mismanaged a virus into a massacre for the ages — and age-old police brutality has gone one bullet in the back too far. The question is whether white society is finally ready to pay the bill – to which COVID-19 has raised the stakes by illuminating the role environmental justice must play, adding it to decades-old concerns over education, employment, housing, policing, and political representation.
Now that white Americans claim to be on the clock against systemic racism, a primary task is to clock the systematic dismantling of air and water regulations that stand between Americans and breathing in or ingesting toxic fumes, harmful chemicals, and debilitating dust. Neither our education nor employment goals can be fully realized with perpetually sickened bodies.
With Trump a lost cause — and busy romancing the Lost Cause — people can still fight a rearguard battle on hypocrisy by calling out his industrial enablers. It is the perfect moment to do so as the Fortune 500 is stampeding over one another to issue the most “woke” press release claiming to be in the trenches fighting systemic racism.
For fossil fuel and chemical companies, claiming to be woke is tantamount to a taunt. You cannot possibly stand with Black people when your company mows them down in a hail of neurotoxins.
Take the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. It has orchestrated arguably the most grandiose display of lip service in corporate America, offering a textbook case of what many antiracist advocates criticize as “performative allyship.” The chamber last month hosted a national town hall on inequality, featuring African-American celebrities Gayle King and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, as well as Howard University President Wayne Frederick. Chamber President Suzanne Clark also wrote a July 9 op-ed in Fortune stating that, as the nation’s leading lobbyist, her organization bore the responsibility “to drive sustained action to eliminate systemic disadvantages.
“We have committed to put the collective muscle of American business behind an urgent nationwide push for equality of opportunity,” she claimed.
The day before the town hall, the chamber released a report titled “America’s Opportunity Gaps” with data on “six key areas” where there are racial disparities: education, employment, entrepreneurship, criminal justice, health, and wealth. The “Health” section of the report reads: “Health outcomes are driven by an array of elements, including underlying genetics, health behaviors, social and environmental factors, and healthcare. Health behaviors, such as smoking, diet, and exercise, and social and economic factors, are the primary drivers of health outcomes.” Nowhere to be found was the concept of systemic industrial pollution. (In contrast, in the Obama administration’s Healthy People 2020 program, “environmental health” included the quality of outdoor air, soil, and groundwater and exposure to toxic substances.)
Two weeks after the townhall, the chamber released an initial “Equality of Opportunity Agenda.” Suddenly there were only four areas of racial disparity: education, employment, entrepreneurship, and criminal justice. Health and wealth were gone.
It doesn’t take long to realize why.
In the last decade, the chamber has by far been at its most active fighting on behalf of industry against President Obama’s efforts on health reform, climate change, and toxics. During the previous presidency, the chamber recorded its four highest years of spending, much of it in an effort to defeat Obamacare and Environmental Protection Agency rules to curb greenhouse gases and poisonous emissions.
Though the chamber is legally allowed to be highly secretive about its funding, a 2017 Public Citizen analysis of voluntary disclosures placed Dow as the group’s top funder. (Hartford Financial Services was second, and Chevron was third.) The dark money watchdog group Issue One reported that from 2010 to 2016, Dow gave $13 million to the chamber, more than twice what the second-ranked donor Issue One identified offered up.
While its funding is mysterious, there is no secret about the chamber’s mission. Its CEO, Thomas Donohue, baldly said a decade ago that companies come to him with cash in hand to lobby on issues that are public relations nightmares — to “give them all the deniability they need.” The New York Times reported that Dow Chemical, for example, gave the chamber $1.7 million in 2009 to fight tighter regulations at petrochemical plants The same year, health insurers secretly funneled $86 million to the chamber to squash Obamacare, while publicly going through the motions of working with the new president and Democrats on health care reform.
But while the guts of Obamacare have largely survived industry and conservative attacks, the Trump administration is much more successfully ripping out the guts of environmental protection, with the chamber acting as coach, quarterback, and cheerleader.
During the Obama years, the chamber joined most energy companies in vigorously opposing the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, the United States’ participation in the Paris climate agreement, the Mercury Air Toxics Rule, the Waters of the US regulation (to protect more wetlands, tributaries and intermittent streams), executive orders to curb fine particulates in soot, and Obama’s decision to reject the Keystone XL pipeline. Donohue said Obama’s climate actions run “a serious risk of punishing Americans with higher energy bills, fewer jobs, and a weaker economy, while delivering negligible benefits to the environment.”
Never mind that the Obama administration calculated massive annual health and economic benefits of cleaner air and water: The Clean Power Plan would avoid about 150,000 asthma attacks and 500,000 missed school and workdays. Rules to cut mercury and air toxics would prevent 120,000 cases of childhood asthma. Tighter ozone standards would avoid 400,000 asthma attacks.
Never mind that we now know that fine particulate matter spewed by power plants, agricultural pesticides, and transportation kills at least 100,000 Americans a year — more than homicides and traffic accidents combined. While the consumption habits of white Americans disproportionately produce particulates, African Americans and Latinos disproportionately breathe the poison into their lungs. A 2018 federally-funded study found that non-white Americans bear nearly 30 percent more exposure burden to fine particulates than the overall American population; for African Americans, it is more than 55 percent.
Never mind that a new Harvard School of Public Health study found that if the United States adopted the World Health Organization’s recommended standards for fine particulate pollution, we would save more than 140,000 lives in a decade. That research came on the heels of another Harvard study that found that small increases in long-term fine particulate exposure correlate to large increases in COVID-19 death rates.
None of that was in the chamber’s call for “swift policy actions to address gaps negatively affecting Black Americans.” The chamber’s activity pierces a gaping hole in its sudden wokeness. After all, African Americans and Latinos disproportionately live closer to chemical plants, fossil fuel facilities, brownfields, and Superfund sites whose operators the chamber helps in skirting regulations.
When Trump nominated former coal lobbyist Andrew Wheeler to run the Environmental Protection Agency, the chamber heartily endorsed him as a “steady hand” in the months that he served as acting administrator after the scandal-induced departure of Scott Pruitt.
The steady hand has steadily delivered:
- Replacing of the Waters of the U.S., which removes many wetlands and tributaries from federal protection
- Rolling back Obama’s 54.5 mile per gallon fuel economy standard rule down to 40 mpg
- Replacing the Clean Power Plan with rules that the EPA itself admits could lead to 1,400 more deaths a year from fine particulates
- Refusing to tighten particulate soot standards
- Softening of the Mercury Air Toxics rule
- Leaving ozone standards in place, despite scientists saying tighter rules could avert nearly 2 million asthma attacks a year in children
- Planning a rollback of methane rules
- And most recently, gutting the 1970 National Environmental Policy Act by limiting public input and scientific rigor over proposed infrastructure projects
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The Chamber of Commerce says it’s woke. Its actions say Black lives really don’t matter. on Jul 21, 2020.