ENV-16-14 Environmental Justice Trends: Managing Risks to Refineries

Description:

Increasingly, industrial activity is scrutinized as a potential driver of systematic social injustice wherein minority and low-income populations disproportionately suffer the outcomes of pollution and environmental degradation. These burdens take compelling shape as inequities that ensure and exacerbate marginalized groups’ inadequate access to vital resources, healthy environments, and positive public health outcomes. Grassroots and non-governmental organizations’ efforts to draw attention to these issues have gained traction in public policy under the umbrella of “environmental justice” (EJ), achieving formal status as national policy in the 1990s. United States Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA), which has provided federal leadership in EJ issues for decades, defines EJ as “the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income, with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies” (USEPA 2016a). Further, fair treatment is achieved when “no group of people […bears] a disproportionate share of the negative environmental consequences resulting from industrial, governmental and commercial operations or policies” (USEPA 2016b). USEPA’s Environmental Justice 2020 Action Agenda is emblematic of the most recent iteration of environmental justice’s institutionalization in public policy. The Agenda frames an aspirational future wherein the agency “integrates environmental justice into everything we do, cultivates strong partnerships to improve on-the-ground results, and charts a path forward for achieving better environmental outcomes and reducing disparities in the nation’s most overburdened communities.” (USEPA 2016c). EJ regulations and advocacy alike considers a range of resources, activities, and issues, including air quality, water resources, climate change, wastewater treatment, pesticide use, and access to employment. Regulations typically address standard setting and permitting, reporting of data, public consultation and participation, and evaluation of potential EJ impacts. While consideration of these issues is important to safeguarding vulnerable communities, processes and outcomes of regulatory permitting compliance are less than straight forward. Assessing impacts and compliance reflect complexities such as imprecise or confusing data which support EJ assessments; unclear linkages of causality between exposure to pollution and health impacts; and the highly emotive nature of racially or socioeconomically defined disparities in environmental and health outcomes. These realities, and the dynamic and diverse interpretations of environmental justice by various stakeholders present refiners with material risks to their reputations, social license to operate, and permitting prospects. This paper focuses on key EJ regulations at the federal level and in key refining markets, evolution and trends in EJ advocacy, and offers case studies exemplifying the non-technical risks faced by industrial operators with respect to environmental justice. It concludes with tools and tactics for managing these risks.