Politics & Pollution: Trump Judges Take A Sledgehammer To Environmental Justice – CleanTechnica

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During his term as president of the United States, Donald Trump used the services of Leonard Leo, the head of the  Federalist Society, to appoint three extreme right wing judges to the US Supreme Court. That strategy led directly to the decision that overturned Roe vs Wade. It also brought forth an activist court that has severely restricted the ability of the federal government to function. A pattern in decision after decision has limited the power of the EPA and other federal agencies to lower carbon emissions, remove toxic chemicals from the environment, and protect the health and safety of the people of the United States.

That is well known. What is less well known is the impact the federal judges appointed by Trump have had on other cases that have attracted less notoriety. As a group, the Trump appointees all spout the same ideology that has become the hallmark of the extremists on the right. That is not surprising, since the purpose of the Federalist Society is now and always has been identifying and promoting the careers of young conservatives. It grooms them to embrace the ethos of the Federalist Society, which is that all government is bad, liberty means having no checks on corporate power, and that virtually everything the government does constitutes a breach of its authority.

Trump Judge Protects Corporate Interests In Louisiana

The latest example comes from Louisiana, one of the most polluted states in America, where oil, gas, and chemical companies are encouraged to desecrate the land with outrageous amounts of pollution to the point where a large chunk of the state where many of those corporations do business is popularly known as Cancer Alley.

Recently, the EPA has been trying to rein in some of that pollution under the authority of the “disparate impact” provision of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars racial discrimination by people and organizations that receive federal funding. The EPA had frequently used the disparate impact standard as the foundation for allegations that agencies in multiple states were violating civil rights with policies that worsened environmental harms in already overburdened communities of color.

In April 2022, the EPA announced that agency officials would investigate a civil rights complaint in the Reserve area of Louisiana in the heart of Cancer Alley. Jeff Landry, an ardent Trump supporter who was Louisiana’s attorney general at the time — he is now the governor — filed suit against the EPA, alleging that the agency exceeded its authority by working to assess discrimination claims involving disparate impact rather than “intentional discrimination.” The state of Louisiana in in its court filing, “EPA officials have lost sight of the agency’s actual environmental mission, and instead decided to moonlight as a social justice warriors fixated on race,” claiming that federal officials had developed “increasingly warped vision of ‘environmental justice’ and ‘equity.’”

Earlier this summer, US District Judge James D. Cain, who was appointed by Trump in 2019, issued a preliminary injunction that temporarily prevented the EPA from pursuing civil rights cases involving disparate impact while Louisiana’s suit was pending in the courts. On August 22, Cain made that injunction permanent.

Protecting Neoprene Over The Rights Of American Citizens

The EPA investigation focused on the activities of Denka Performance Elastomers, a company that operates the only industrial plant in the nation that emits chloroprene, a suspected carcinogen used in the production of the synthetic rubber neoprene. The Fifth Ward elementary school in Reserve, Louisiana, is located about 100 yards away from the plant. Virtually all of its 300 students are either Black or Latino and attend classes in an area with the nation’s highest cancer risk from air pollution.

Paul Nathanson, a spokesperson for Denka, said as the EPA “continues to extend its policy objectives beyond its legal authority, the courts continue to push back.” In its “politicized crusade” against Denka, “EPA has spent considerable taxpayer resources ignoring sound science and needlessly fomenting fears in the community. For EPA, its overly aggressive actions resulted in creating law that’s unfavorable to the agency for the long term. Louisiana’s governor and attorney general were right to advance these arguments in defense of the regulated community.”

Not everyone sees the situation that way. Patrice Simms, vice president of litigation for healthy communities at the environmental law nonprofit Earthjustice, which filed a complaint in January 2022 asking the EPA to investigate potential civil rights violations in the vicinity of the neoprene plant, warned the ruling might have a “chilling effect” on efforts to address environmental problems in communities of color around the country. “Louisiana has given industrial polluters open license to poison Black and brown communities for generations, only to now have one court give it a permanent free pass to abandon its responsibilities. Louisiana’s residents, its environmental justice communities, deserve the same Title VI protections as the rest of the nation.”

When she was told that a federal judge’s ruling will effectively prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from pursuing civil rights claims against chemical manufacturers in Louisiana’s Cancer Alley, local activist Tisha Taylor immediately thought of the Fifth Ward Elementary School, according to a report by Inside Climate News. “It makes it really difficult for me to understand how we can fight. When it comes down to environmental racism, racism in general — and how we can leave children to die, and say it’s OK to die — we don’t have an option,” she said.

Jobs Vs. Lives In The World Of Trump

Taylor said she was struck by governor Landry’s comments at a recent news conference in which he said part of his opposition to the EPA’s attempts to hold the rubber plant accountable under Title VI guidelines was that he wanted to preserve the jobs of the roughly 250 employees at the facility. Why, Taylor wondered, didn’t Landry mention the children at the Fifth Ward School? “He overlooked those children to talk about the people who are poisoning the whole community. There is just a heaviness in my heart right now. But it will not stop my feet from marching. We are fighting until the end, and this racist state and racist government are going to have to deal with us.”

In the days since the ruling was handed down last week, environmental justice advocates across Louisiana have wondered precisely how they might begin to move forward without the ability to use one of the EPA’s most potentially potent legal weapons to affect change. Debbie Chizewer, the managing attorney for Earthjustice at its  Chicago office, said after the ruling that its attorneys will be “considering all the strategies available to us” to protect the health and continue the fight of community members. “We’re not giving up,” she said, “just pivoting. Louisiana’s residents, its environmental justice communities, deserve the same Title VI protections as the rest of the nation.”

On the same day that Cain issued his ruling, the EPA announced a set of new standards for pursuing civil rights cases and “best practices for building strong and effective civil rights programs.” Even before last week’s decision, the EPA had begun scaling back some of its Title VI investigations. In recent months, the agency closed a civil rights probe in Texas and dismissed another investigation about the water crisis in Jackson, Mississippi.

In April, Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody announced that she was leading a 23-state coalition in filing litigation against the EPA’s Title VI regulations, seeking to block them nationally. At the time, Moody said in a written statement that “EPA should be focusing on enforcing the environmental laws passed by Congress, not so-called environmental justice, which is a euphemism for Biden’s extreme agenda.”

Despite the setback, Taylor said she and her fellow southern Louisiana activists would continue to seek remedies to the environmental damage that has been done in their communities, even if they were still uncertain of what avenues they might use to do so. “We’re going to fight until the end,” said Taylor. The EPA’s 2022 letter of concern about the environmental harms in the communities around the plant said that racial discrimination was likely to blame. “And Title VI should be used,” Taylor added.

The Takeaway

Astute CleanTechnica readers will recognize the code words that found their way into both the court’s decision and the statements from the governor of Louisiana and the spokesperson for Denka — government overreach, the mantra of conservatives for the past 50 years as they fought to undo FDR’s New Deal. The losers, of course, are people of color and women. The conservative manifesto, as embodied in the MAGA movement loyal to Trump, is heavily influenced by racism and sexism, making it the antithesis to the spirit of equality which is the foundation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. It is unfortunate how many Americans are comfortable with the idea of a white supremacist government that puts the wants of corporations ahead of the needs of the people. That will need to change if America is to fully realize the vision of its founders. So long as Trump-appointed judges are part of the federal judiciary, environmental justice will be little more than afterthought in America.