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Environmental Racism

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Title: Environmental Racism


1
Environmental Racism
Reminder Midterm distributed on Tuesday No
groups work must be alone.
  • Do governments, firms, and individuals
    discriminate against the poor and racial
    minorities?

2
1. Introduction
  • Environmental Racism refers to those
    institutional rules, regulations, and policies of
    government or corporate decisions that
    deliberately target certain communities for least
    desirable land usesit is the unequal protection
    against toxic and hazardous waste exposure
    (Bryant, 1995)

3
Some definitions LULUs
  • LULUs toxic waste sites, bus depots, solid waste
    transfer stations, airports, sewage treatment
    facilities, recycling centers, etc.

4
Early movements
  • 1967 University of Houston riots over the death
    of an African American girl at a garbage dump
    that was located in the middle of a predominantly
    African American neighborhood
  • Early 1980s protests over the landfilling of PCBs
    and oil-toxics in Warren County, North Carolina
    (mostly African American population)

5
More recent action
  • The 1987 United Church of Christ Commission for
    Racial Justices Toxic Wastes and Race in the
    United States shows that communities of color
    are disparately impacted by the nations
    environmental, industrial, and land use policies
  • All of these events point to discrepancies in the
    local, state, and federal permitting process that
    allow facilities to locate and pollute
    (disproportionately,) in minority and low-income
    neighborhoods

6
2. Motivation
  • The Chicken vs. Egg controversy the
    traditional environmental racism model only looks
    at a point in time, developing correlations
    between pollution levels and racial composition
  • This doesnt answer the question, because firms
    may only be locating based on cost

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9
  • a) Research question
  • Is there discrimination, or are we merely
    experiencing an edogeneity problem where firms
    (and people) are locating in the least expensive
    places?
  • b) Policy questions
  • Have zoning regulations targeted (or allowed
    firms to target) minority populations, or those
    that lack a voice in the political arena?

10
Previous Literature
  • Alesina, et al, 1999 QJE article Public Goods
    and Ethnic Divisions Results show that the
    shares of spending on public goods in U.S. cities
    are inversely related to the city's ethnic
    fragmentation
  • Cutler and Glaeser 1997 QJE Article Are Ghettos
    Good or Bad They find that African Americans in
    more segregated areas have significantly worse
    outcomes than African Americans in less
    segregated areas.

11
3. Models (read how can we improve them)
  • Dependent Variable Pollution
  • Independent Variables Indices of Segregation,
    Socioeconomic variables, etc.
  •  
  • Pollution estimates Total releases (volume)
  • Toxicity-weighted releases (acute, chronic)
  • Additional characteristics (odor, color)
  •  

12
  • Indices of Segregation (from Denton and Massey
    Alesina)
  • Evenness (dissimilarity)
  • Concentration (people per physical space)
  • Centralization  
  • Exposure (potential for interaction, or
    isolation)
  • Clustering (spatial proximity)

13
  • Socioeconomic Variables
  • Income/Capita (by race, by age, by gender)
  • City Size (log of population)
  • Educational Attainment
  • Income Inequality
  • Poverty Rate
  • Foreign Born
  • Home Ownership and Age of Stock
  • Transportation (modes, access, and time needed)
  • Level of Aggregation City, County, MSA/PMSA

14
Spatial Improvements
  • Using U.S. EPA-Office of Solid Waste guidelines,
    Meteorological Data, and Digital Terrain Data,
    ISC-AERMOD software computes the risk receptor
    grid for multiple pollutantsIndustrial Source
    Complex AMS/EPA Regulatory Model
  • In short, the various pollution sources are
    modeled along with the surface contours, air
    dispersion. The model takes into account the
    dose-response assessment for the different
    pollutants, creates an exposure assessment, the
    risk characterization from that exposure.

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16
Theoretical Improvements
  • Traditional Env. Justice argument vs. Median
    Voter argument vs. Principle-Agent argument
  • How can we incorporate political representation,
    interest group practices, campaign
    contributions, etc. into the model?
  • How do we model perceived risk vs. actual risk?
    Do we need to?
  • Include non-homogenous (ubiquitous) mobile source
    pollution?

17
4. Conclusions
  • Multiple dimensions to segregation (spatial) as
    opposed to traditional measures which just look
    at of total population
  • Does our model differ from what the median voter
    model might predict? Perhaps the spatial
    distribution of races (and incomes) is a better
    predictor or pollution exposure and the provision
    of public environmental goods
  • With the goals of
  • a)Determining if environmental racism exists
  • b)Figuring out how it came about in the first
    place
  • c)Attempting to predict where it may occur in the
    future
  • d)Creating ways to prevent it from happening
    again
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