“Cancer Alley”: Louisiana Petchems Target Black Communities
Nicholas Cunningham | February 7, 2023 | Gas Outlook
Gail LeBoeuf lives in Convent, a town in “Cancer Alley,” Louisiana, a meandering stretch of the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge that hosts more than 150 petrochemical plants and refineries. LeBoeuf has seen too many friends and family members die from cancer.
LeBoeuf co-founded Inclusive Louisiana, a grassroots community organization that fights for cleaner air for the people of St. James Parish. In recent years, she and other residents of the River Parishes have fought to beat back the onslaught from the petrochemical industry, which continues to try to build new toxic facilities in Black communities along the Mississippi.
Now, she too is about to start chemotherapy. But her story is not unique.
“I’m just a typical person,” she told a group of reporters at a media briefing in New Orleans on January 26. “Either they move you out, or you die out. One of the two. That’s what the industry is counting on.”
A new study adds some scientific heft to that first-hand knowledge. In Louisiana, communities of colour are exposed to 7 to 21 times higher industrial emissions than their White counterparts, according to a peer-reviewed paper published in December in Environmental Challenges.
A study like this shouldn’t even be necessary, says Kimberly Terrell, a research scientist at the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic and one of the paper’s authors. For decades, oil refineries, chemical and petrochemical plants have been packed into and next to Black communities along the Lower Mississippi River. Those facilities emit enormous amounts of cancer-causing pollutants. Indeed, the nickname for the area, “Cancer Alley,” is widely known.
But Louisiana officials often hide behind a narrative that there aren’t specific studies linking particular communities in the River Parishes to poor health outcomes as a result of industrial pollution. Research with such a narrow focus and small sample size is difficult to do. That ends up working to the advantage of polluters, Terrell said.
“Believe it or not, Louisiana [Department of Environmental Quality] does not acknowledge that there are racial disparities in pollution burden in our state,” Terrell said. “What we see again and again is that DEQ is set up more to serve industry than to fulfil its mission of protecting the health and well-being of the people of Louisiana.”
In a statement to Gas Outlook, Gregory Langley, a spokesperson for Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality said that the racial makeup of the populations living near industrial facilities is “a matter of history.” Slave plantations were along the river, and heavy industry wanted to be near the river when they built big facilities throughout the 20th Century, he said. “The change to an industrial economy was inevitable. The facilities that have been built along the river are often near or adjacent to minority communities. LDEQ works with the facilities to make sure their emissions do not exceed protective standards set by state and federal regulations.”
But the study specifically looked at this explanation — that industry wanted to be near infrastructure and it just so happens that that’s where Black communities live — and found no evidence to back up that claim.
“There’s plenty of White neighbourhoods along the lower Mississippi River,” Terrell told Gas Outlook, responding to LDEQ’s explanation. But industry is highly concentrated in Black communities. “So, in addition to being pretty offensive, LDEQ’s explanation doesn’t explain why industrial emissions are higher in Black neighbourhoods.”
Her new study demonstrates what community members have long known.
Meanwhile, separate research published in January by the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit Environmental Integrity Project finds that water pollution from oil refineries around the country are also disproportionately impacting communities of colour. Out of 81 refineries that discharge toxic pollutants such as selenium, nickel, and cyanide into waterways that were analyzed, 36 of them (40 percent) are in communities where the majority of residents are people of colour or low-income.
Many of the top ten most polluting refineries analyzed in that study are located in Louisiana.
“There is unequivocal scientific support that there is a racial disparity in pollution exposure in Louisiana. And we know that those pollutants cause health problems,” Terrell said. “And now we also have, in addition to the first-hand knowledge, peer-reviewed scientific support demonstrating that those pollutants contribute to the state’s elevated cancer rates and likely cause other health problems as well.”
Petrochemical buildout
None of this is new. The petrochemical industry has been polluting Black communities along the Mississippi River in Louisiana for a long time. But the petrochemical buildout has come in a series of waves.
Since 2010, the fossil fuel and petrochemical industry has pumped more than $200 billion into 235 projects – new facilities or expansions – as companies sought to find a use for the flood of shale gas that resulted from the fracking boom.
Looking forward, the oil and gas industry sees that demand for its products in the transportation sector may peak and begin to decline, and the same is true for electric power. As a result, they are hoping to pivot into petrochemicals – which mainly means plastics, and often plastics products that are used once and discarded.
Fossil fuel companies are “masters at creating markets,” said Eric de Place, interim campaign director for Beyond Plastics, a campaign aimed at stopping the growth of petrochemicals. The industry is hoping to gin up demand for plastics because they are desperate to find new sources of growth.
“Left unchecked, global plastics production is expected to double over the next 20 years. That’s probably a direction we don’t want to go,” he said.
He said petrochemicals are a “triple threat,” posing climate, health, and environmental hazards for people and the planet.
The expansion of petrochemicals will “make it nearly impossible for the United States to meet its climate goals,” he said. “So, if we have the climate ambitions that we take seriously in this country, there is no way, realistically, that we can get to those climate targets unless we reduce our demand for and our production of petrochemical products,” he said. “That’s a challenge because the industry has different goals in mind.”
Beyond Petrochemicals has identified more than 120 petrochemical projects planned for the United States. Many of them are planned for Louisiana.
