Environmental Justice Initiatives

Ronald J. Shadbegian and Ann Wolverton write Chapter 5. Both authors are economists at the EPA with Shadbegian also serving as an adjunct professor of economics at Georgetown University. Given the authors’ economic background, it is not surprise that they acknowledge that the EPA has been criticized for not incorporating environmental justice more fully into economic analyses of rulemaking. This chapter focuses on five analytic issues related to the effects of regulation on disadvantaged communities, namely geographic scope, identifying potentially affected populations, selecting a comparison group, spatially identifying effects on population groups and measuring exposure or risk. The compare the treatments of the issues through academic literature
182) to study the effects of the environmental justice initiatives. They (1) identify the locations of major pollution sources, (2) characterize communities located within one mile from the pollution sources, and (3) observe the number of enforcement actions taken either by the EPA or state governments in each community from 1990 to 2008. They also control for demographic attributes, industrial sectors, air pollution severity, economic conditions, state political conditions, and presidential administrations because those variables might be correlated with the enforcement outcomes. The model estimates the probability of inspections and punitive actions for a target community (i.e., African-American, Hispanic, and low-income community) and a non-target community for both pre- and post-policy period. For example, EPA inspections in Hispanic communities are less likely to occur after the policy implementation. Similarly, during the pre-policy period, state actions are more likely to arise in African-American communities, whereas the state actions are no less likely to happen during the post-policy
Gross is a Colorado-based attorney practicing real estate law while Stretesky is a professor of criminology at Northrumbria University in Newcastle, England, focusing his research interests on issues of environmental justice and crime. In this chapter, the authors address the corrective justice dimension of environmental protection by analyzing federal environmental justice policies in the judicial system. They primarily focus on claims and their outcomes with respect to Title VI and the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), both legislative mechanisms which EO 12898 sought as mechanism to address environmental justice claims. The authors argue that claims filed under Title VI are few which suggests, according to the authors, “that the courts have played a very limited role in achieving environmental justice through Title VI” (p 208). Plan EJ 2014 again seems to unleash a more active role for the EPA in corrective justice issues. As the authors state, the Plan EJ 2014 Progress report calls for the EPA to lay “the cornerstones for fully implementing [the EPA’s] mission of ensuring environmental protection for all Americans, regardless of race, color, national origin, income, or education” (p 209). Similarly, the authors note, the EPA indicated in 2011 that NEPA would be used much more aggressively during the Obama administration. (this could use some recent research in this area as a comment). The authors