Signature Biden program won’t solve racial divide in air quality, study suggests

A new analysis has found that the White House’s signature environmental justice program has failed to narrow racial disparities in who breathes the most polluted air, in part because of efforts to ensure it can withstand legal challenges.

The program, called Justice40, aims to address inequities by directing 40 percent of the benefits of certain federal environmental investments to underprivileged communities. But the Biden administration, when designing the program, deliberately left race out of the process of calculating who might benefit. The Supreme Court recently rejected affirmative action on the basis of race in college admissions, a ruling that some say could impact federal environmental programs.

Unless carefully executed, the program may not work as hoped and could even widen the racial divide by improving the air faster in whiter communities, which may also be disadvantaged in some ways, than in communities of color, according to a peer-reviewed study published Thursday in the journal Science by researchers from several universities and environmental justice groups.

Investments in Justice40, which spans 19 federal agencies, are multibillion-dollar. “This isn’t just play money,” said Robert Bullard, director of the Bullard Center for Environmental and Climate Justice at Texas Southern University. The research of Dr. Bullard in the 1980s provided some of the earliest evidence that polluting facilities have been systematically placed near communities of color.

The new study predicts concentrations of one type of air pollution, known as PM 2.5, or particulate matter, across the country using a model of pollutants moving through the atmosphere.

The researchers compared the current “business as usual” trajectory of air quality improvements to two alternative scenarios in which air quality in underserved communities, as defined by the White House, improves two or four times faster. They found that even if PM 2.5 pollution improved more quickly in these broadly defined underprivileged communities, the pollution would remain significantly worse for people of color.

“The results we have here are evidence to suggest that if you don’t account for race/ethnicity, you’re not addressing racial/ethnicity differences,” said Julian Marshall, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Washington and one of the paper’s authors.

A spokeswoman for the White House Council on Environmental Quality said the study made assumptions that did not reflect how the Justice40 initiative is being implemented.

Air pollution has generally improved in the United States since the Clean Air Act of 1970, although the recent increase in wildfires has negated some of that progress. This summer, Americans across the country have been hit by wildfire smoke from fires in Canada, adding to the burden of communities exposed to poor air quality from other sources, such as transportation, power plants and industrial facilities.

People of color in the United States breathe in 14 percent more PM 2.5 pollution than the general population, according to Thursday’s survey. Low-income people, regardless of race, are also more exposed to this type of pollution than the general population, but only about 3 percent more. Underprivileged communities, as defined by the White House, face about 6 percent more of this pollution.

PM 2.5 consists of microscopic particles in the air, small enough to enter the lungs and bloodstreams of humans. In the worst cases, continued exposure can lead to lung cancer, heart attacks or strokes. Estimates of deaths from air pollution vary, but one Study from 2017 found that PM2.5 may be linked to nearly 90,000 premature deaths each year in the United States.

To do justice40 and direct environmental investment to underserved communities, the White House Council on Environmental Quality has established the Screening tool for climate and economic justice. The tool’s screening criteria include income and exposure to PM2.5, as well as other local pollution, climate change impacts, energy costs, health, housing quality, education and employment, but exclude race and ethnicity.

However, White House guidelines for individual federal agencies give them leeway to direct their program investments to more specific localities and populations within this broad category of “underserved communities.”

The spokeswoman for the Council on Environmental Quality said via email: “This study analyzes a fictional scenario where investments in air quality are made haphazardly and without consideration of actually reducing pollution from upwind sources of communities.”

Yet the omission of race from the primary screening tool has been criticized by activists and researchers. Race isn’t just one of many factors that determine air quality in America, it’s “the most important indicator,” said Manuel Salgado, a research analyst with WE ACT for Environmental Justice, a nonprofit organization. Mr. Salgado was not one of the authors of Thursday’s paper, but his organization was involved in research for the analysis.

Dr. Bullard, who serves on the White House advisory board but was not involved in the study, said the new review was “probably the most comprehensive analysis I’ve seen to date” of the Justice40 screening tool.

Francesca Dominici, a data scientist at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health who has researched the uneven effects of air pollution but was not involved in this study, said the research was rigorous and based on “state of the art modeling.”

The White House screening tool is planned to be updated every year. WE ACT’s Mr. Salgado suggested that the administration could use the existing screening tool in a more sophisticated way, not just dividing the population into two separate categories of “underprivileged” and “non-disadvantaged”, but by considering a spectrum of pollution and identifying which communities are most burdened.

This may be closer to the approach that individual federal agencies ultimately take anyway, as they decide how to manage the hundreds of smaller climate, energy, and pollution control programs that fall under the umbrella of Justice40.