Study: Minority Communities Suffer Most If California Suspends AB 32

If California’s greenhouse gas emissions reduction law, AB 32, is suspended or poorly implemented, communities of color and poor neighborhoods will suffer the most, according to a new report funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

This is in large part due to co-pollutants like PM10 (particulate matter of 10 micrometers or less), which can cause respiratory problems and come from the refineries and power plants that AB 32 will regulate.

As the report points out, suspending AB 32 puts much more at stake than halting climate change.

Several studies have established that people of color and the poor suffer greater impacts of climate change than other populations in the United States and that high toxic emissions in non-attainment areas in California, those not compliant with federal Clean Air Act standards, are costing the state, and its taxpayers, hundreds of millions of dollars in health care.

“There is a hidden pattern showing that the poor and people of color will suffer more economic and health consequences of climate change than other Americans. It’s called the climate gap," says Rachel Morello-Frosch, associate professor of environmental science, policy and management at the University of California, Berkeley.

The new report finds that some of the same Texas-based oil companies that are funding efforts to suspend the implementation of AB 32, Valero and Tesoro, operate oil refineries that cause some of the greatest adverse effects in low-income and communities of color. In fact Tesoro ranks first among refineries for adverse health impacts in the state and second for quantities of co-pollutants with their greenhouse gas emissions.

The study, conducted by researchers at Berkeley, the University of Southern California and Occidental College, also finds that co-pollutants at refineries cause far more harm in low-income and minority communities than those from power plants.

“Refineries and power plants emit the same CO2 and reductions make the same contribution to addressing global warming, but their co-pollutants are quite different,” explains Manuel Pastor, director of the Program for Environmental and Regional Equity (PERE) at USC.

“Take La Paloma [a power plant 35 miles outside Bakersfield] where there are fewer than 600 people living near the power plant, but the Exxon refinery in Torrance has 800,000 people in a six mile radius and emits seven times as many co-pollutants.”

The authors found that people of color, and not just those of lower income, are disproportionately living near greenhouse gas emitting facilities, as are children living in poverty.

Throughout the state, people of color experience 70% more PM10 pollution than whites. The bulk of the difference, say the study authors, has to do with petroleum refineries. The refineries contribute most to the racial disparity in terms of PM10 exposure. They also happen to be contributing the most to efforts to suspend AB 32.

Of the top 10 facilities on the pollution disparities index, eight are refineries, including Tesoro and Valero. These same refineries rank in the top 10 in terms of health impacts due to emissions.

Getting AB 32 Right

The authors of new study say that if AB 32 isn’t implemented right, or right away, we will all lose.

They warn against a “blind” market strategy for carbon trading that ignores the adverse effects of co-pollutants and suggest that reductions need to be focused on those facilities that cause the most harm in terms of public health costs and disparity. Carbon trading between sectors, they suggest, should be restricted and is a bigger threat to maximizing the positive impacts of AB 32 than allowance distributions and trading within sectors.