Environmental & Social Justice

Most likely the items in your home or office came from overseas. Today's report focuses on the question how those products got to you, and what is the impact on the environment and workers?

Standing ankle deep in black oil in a green field in Nigeria, Donna Vorhees was startled not by the pollutant inching up her boots, but by the two barefoot women inching past her.

Low-income neighborhoods are more often exposed to poor environmental quality when compared to wealthier communities, and scientists are saying this gap will increase as climate change is more widely felt.

Diesel-powered vehicles are a significant source of pollution, impacting health and contributing to climate change. The Ditching Dirty Diesel Collaborative, a coalition of community, environmental advocacy and public health departments, is working together with the Pacific Institute to reduce the impact of this pollution on low-income communities in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Public health advocates cheered when the Environmental Protection Agency approved a stricter standard for arsenic in drinking water in 2001. Arsenic, a naturally occurring element in the earth’s crust, contaminates water supplies when it migrates from rocks into groundwater. Chronic exposure to arsenic in drinking water can cause serious skin and digestive problems and has been linked to several types of cancer.

It is estimated that shipping produces 4 to 5% of global carbon dioxide emissions. In most cases, these ships are powered by diesel fuel. On today's report we learn about an innovative California technology aimed at reducing this pollution. 2007 Switzer Fellow Francisco Donez is an environmental engineer with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Region 9.

The evidence keeps mounting that people living in impoverished, Latino towns around the San Joaquin Valley are in danger if they drink water out of their taps. Researchers this year linked dirty drinking water with many towns, such as Seville, Orosi and Tooleville in Tulare County. The culprit is widespread nitrates, which come from fertilizers, septic systems, animal waste and rotting vegetation. This month, a new study reveals people living in similar communities also are at a high risk of drinking arsenic in their water.

One clear lesson in the wake of Hurricane Sandy is that extreme weather in the age of climate change and global warming knows no class, race and privilege boundaries. Many, many communities in the New York metropolitan area need help, but as David Rohde wrote this week in The Atlantic, "Sandy humbled every one of the 19 million people in the New York City metropolitan area. But it humbled some more than others in an increasingly economically divided city." Read more

On September 30, 2012, California Governor Brown signed the “Climate and Community Revitalization” bills – AB 1532 and SB535. The first of these sets up a process to allocate revenues from auctioning allowances (that is, emissions permits) under the new market-based system that is part of the implementation of the Golden State’s 2006 landmark legislation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs).