EPA just detailed all the ways climate change will hit U.S. racial minorities the hardest.

[BumRushDaShow]

Source: Washington Post

Racial minorities in the United States will bear a disproportionate burden of the negative health and environmental impacts from a warming planet, the Environmental Protection Agency said Thursday, including more deaths from extreme heat and property loss from flooding in the wake of sea level rise.The new analysis, which comes four days after Hurricane Ida destroyed homes of low-income and Black residents in Louisiana and Mississippi, examined the impacts of the global temperature rising 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) compared to preindustrial levels.

It found that American Indians and Alaska Natives are 48 percent more likely to live in areas that will be inundated by flooding from sea level rise under that scenario, Latinos are 43 percent more likely to live in communities that would lose work hours due to intense heat and Black people will suffer significantly higher mortality rates. The world has already warmed 1.1 degrees C since the Industrial Revolution began, and is on track to warm by more than 1.5 degrees by the early 2030s.

Joe Goffman, acting head of the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, said the “first of its kind” comprehensive review amounts to a federal acknowledgment of the broad and disproportionate impact global warming is having on some of America’s most socially vulnerable groups. Just this week the Department of Health and Human Services established the Office of Climate Change and Health Equity, the first federal program aimed at specifically examining how the burning of fossil fuels and other greenhouse gas emissions affect human health.

Other studies have discussed climate impacts on socially vulnerable populations, the report authors said, “but few have quantified disproportionate risks to socially vulnerable groups.”The impact of Hurricane Ida, whose remnants on Wednesday released havoc in New Jersey and New York City, is still being calculated. But Goffman said many Black and low-income residents in Louisiana and Mississippi are now faced with the challenge of mustering the resources to replace living rooms drowned in floodwaters and rooftops ripped apart by powerful gusts of wind.

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2021/09/02/ida-climate-change/

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Full headline: EPA just detailed all the ways climate change will hit U.S. racial minorities the hardest. It’s a long list.

Here is a link to EPA's press release - https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/epa-report-shows-disproportionate-impacts-climate-change-socially-vulnerable

Link to the report page - https://www.epa.gov/cira/social-vulnerability-report

Link to a PDF of the full report - https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2021-09/climate-vulnerability_september-2021_508.pdf

[totodeinhere]

1. I didn't read the article you linked to but I am wondering why.

I do not doubt the report, but wouldn't a hurricane be just as likely to pass over a high income area? Do hurricanes only pass over areas populated by minorities, and if so why. Nor arguing, just wondering.

[EX500rider]

2. Not mention coastal areas ie beachfront property are very high value

And not minority majority I would think.

[totodeinhere]

3. And a lot of million dollar mansions have been destroyed in California fires.

I think that the effects of global warming will be seen by everybody, not just minorities. And that's the thing. We are all in this together. I am hoping that these shared problems can bring us all together in search of solutions.

[ananda]

4. I think it has to do with the ability to recover...

to rebuild, move, etc.

[OneCrazyDiamond]

6. Fewer than 4 in 10 people have enough savings to pay for an unexpected $1,000 expense in cash.

How could 6 in 10 be racial minorities? Poverty hits all races, just not equally.

[BumRushDaShow]

8. That "beachfront property"

is 9 times out of 10 a "vacation" home and not a "primary" residence.

I.e., if they lose that home to a hurricane, they just "go home" to someplace else.

When a minority loses a home or experiences major damage due to flooding by a failed levee like what happened in New Orleans after Katrina or due to creek flooding after the remnants of Hurricane Isaias blew through the Philly area this time last year and flooded out a neighborhood in South Philly (Eastwick) -



then you will find the ability to recover extremely impactful.

And in the case of Eastwick and Isaias, you had this issue - which is why the housing was cheaper to begin with -

EPA: Isaias flooding did not spread toxins from Eastwick landfill

By Catalina Jaramillo September 1, 2020

Eastwick resident Leo Brundage has lived next to the former Clearview Landfill, one of the nation’s most contaminated sites, for over 30 years. For the last three of those years, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has been remediating the toxic landfill, after finding pollutants in a city park next to Brundage’s home and in the yards of about 200 residents in the neighborhood.

“Every time we get a storm and get flooded, we will have some bit of contamination in our home,” said Brundage, a 76-year-old resident-turned-activist whose property has flooded more than 10 times since Hurricane Floyd in 1999. The city built Brundage’s neighborhood in a floodplain, next to a dump, in the 1960s as part of an urban renewal project that was never completed.

Last year, Philadelphia and the city Redevelopment Authority agreed to pay $8.4 million to help remediate the toxic dump. And even though most of the landfill’s waste had been removed and replaced by clean soil when Tropical Storm Isaias hit Eastwick earlier this month, Brundage and his neighbors remained concerned about floodwaters carrying contaminants into their homes.

But according to preliminary results of water samples collected by the agency from flood waters and Cobbs Creek during and after the storm, “little to no site-related contaminants” spread into the neighborhood.

https://whyy.org/articles/epa-isaias-flooding-did-not-spread-toxins-from-eastwick-landfill/

[BumRushDaShow]

5. Consider the resources that low-income folks DON'T have

compared to the high-income ones.

Many apartments or other types of rentals (which is the bulk of the type of housing where most minorities live because of lack of income and institutional racism that has kept them from getting mortgages, let alone to be able to own homes outside of the more impacted areas where housing is cheaper), don't "confirm" whether the tenants are even insured and many might not even be able to afford it. Thus when something happens, they are SOL.

And even if they had insurance, they often don't have the wherewithal to fight to get the insurer to pay any claims because in many of the cases, any tropical storm damage like Ida, that equals "flooding", is NEVER covered by run-of-the-mill insurers, and home owners/tenants generally need to get the flood insurance from the federal government (and it is costly).

I.e., minorities are often forced to live in the most undesirable areas due to those locations being cheaper, but it also exposes them to the impacts of any climate change when extreme events happen. For example, locations that are low-lying near creeks or rivers or like in the case of some California locales, many many miles away from their urban workplaces due to the high cost of living closer. So that results in them residing in small towns or unincorporated areas that might be prone to wildfires and/or landslides.

[totodeinhere]

7. Yes, high income victims can afford to rebuild more easily.

My point was that all areas including high income areas are subject to the negative effects of climate change. I am hoping that this realization can bring all of society together to fight climate change.

[BumRushDaShow]

9. See my post above

https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1014&pid=2795047

(ETA to add - no one isn't saying that ONLY one group gets impacted by climate change. They are talking about those who are MORE impacted than others due to a variety of circumstances that put them in a more disadvantaged position)

[Hugh_Lebowski]

10. Personally I think news of this nature is counter-productive

The more that EVERYONE thinks they could be a victim, the better the chances of a large, unified, effective effort.

MHO

[Cetacea]

11. And it gives GQP voters more reason to oppose Climate legislation

And it fosters the notion that Climate Change is mostly about sea-level rise in the year 2100, which utter BS. I heard someone from NASA say that we need to be off the planet by 2035...

[BumRushDaShow]

12. This is just one piece of an entire project that EPA has for looking at the impact of Climate Change

Denying that certain demographics don't get double and triple whammies from it continues the normal practice of environmental racism by stalling or defunding toxic cleanups, leaving them living in the most toxic areas of the country, not by choice, but due to the affordability (where no one else would want to or be forced to live, but this was pretty much all these folks had available thanks to being poor and a minority).

And so when Hurricanes like Ida excessively flood their neighborhoods, the toxins out of the old waste dumps that their houses were built on or were built near, that were never decontaminated because "it's not fair" to "society" to give these "deadbeats" who didn't "pull themselves up by their bootstraps" a freebie, end up flowing into their homes.

I posted above about an example here in Philly in this post - https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1014&pid=2795047 where an "urban renewal project" neighborhood constructed in the '60s under DEMOCRATS, was built on a flood plain near a toxic waste dump, and after 50 years, they finally started cleaning the nearby site up. But meanwhile you had people living there for decades absorbing toxins every time the area flooded, and the ones who had been there for years were concerned that the job wasn't really done the way it should have been last year, when the remnants of Hurricane Isaias flooded this area, .

With Ida, they were breathing a sigh of relief that they were spared (most of the heaviest rains and flooding happened further north of where they are located in the city).

This is an interesting history on that neighborhood - https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/06454d9c62e2453eaa38576728f406d5

[Hugh_Lebowski]

13. I do strive not to let pure pragmatism override my respect for facts and knowledge

In light of that, thanks for reminding me I may have just done so.

[BumRushDaShow]

14. When I was trying to actually find the document that the OP article was referring to

(since they had no direct link to it in the article) I had to really dig because EPA has a HUGE thing on "Climate Change" on their website here - https://www.epa.gov/climate-change

All of that was put on ice and hidden by TFG the past 4 years but has surfaced in all its glory!

[TheFarseer]

15. Bad marketing

We have to say it will hurt rich white people to get some action.

[BumRushDaShow]

16. This is just one part of their entire evaluation of the impacts of climate change

I know DU doesn't like to talk about other demographics outside of the majority-demographic in the U.S. population so it's not surprising the responses to this thread.

To quote SirusXM's Joe Madison's frequent mantra -

Link to tweet

TEXT

Joe Madison
@MadisonSiriusXM
We are culturally conditioned to believe that white is superior, and black is inferior. And the manifestation of that cultural conditioning is that black people are undervalued, underestimated, and marginalized.
9:09 AM · Jan 12, 2018

[marie999]

17. Eventually it will hit everyone hard except for the rich and the workers they hire.

The rich are buying up land that will sustain them. The world will end up with small dictatorial enclaves. Then the Earth will be able to regenerate.

[Ron Obvious]

18. Climate change is humanitarian disaster, not one that targets specific identity groups

Today on NPR Science Friday: An asteroid is on a collision course with earth. How will African-Americans be affected?

I don't think this sort of framing is useful.

[BumRushDaShow]

19. It's obvious that people are not realizing that this is just ONE part

of a comprehensive evaluation of climate change being done by the EPA. It's just like how the Census Bureau releases a variety of "reports" from household surveys regarding a number of different topics that impact the U.S. population.

The EPA's Climate Change site is here - https://www.epa.gov/climate-change is full of different "reports" where this impact report is just ONE of the things they have researched and are publishing. This is part of their "Climate Change Impacts and Risk Analysis (CIRA)" project where previous "risk assessment" reports are shown - https://www.epa.gov/cira



I know it's too difficult for people to actually go to EPA's site to actually see what else they do and just take a look around for information on their site.