New EPA Plan Promises To Serve Low-Income Communities

In an effort to expand environmental justice to communities of color, the U.S. EPA recently unveiled a four-year plan to tackle lead poisoning, air pollution, and other problems.

The planned process “would be to take environmental justice considerations into account at every step in the EPA’s rulemaking and enforcement process, from going after violators to issuing permits for polluting industries,” reported Grist.

“That may sound like a small task, but it frankly is not,” EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy told Grist while previewing the agency’s EJ 2020 Action Agenda. “It required us to provide guidance, documents that we have completed, on how a permit should reflect our interest in environmental justice. We did the same thing for our rulemaking.”

The EJ 2020 Action Agenda is the EPA’s strategic plan for advancing environmental justice from 2016 to 2020. It functions as an important step in fulfilling the agency’s mission by focusing its attention “on the environmental and public health issues and challenges confronting the nation’s minority, low-income, tribal and indigenous populations.”

EJ 2020 has eight priority areas and four significant national environmental justice challenges, with objectives with plans for how to achieve them and how success will be measured.

To achieve their vision for EJ 2020, the EPA will focus on a set of priorities that have identified for high-level attention over the next five years. For instance, the details of goal three will focus specifically on the four areas of lead disparities, drinking water, air quality, and hazardous waste sites.

This is not the EPA’s first attempt to advance environmental justice. There was a Plan EJ 2014 as well. According to Grist, there are advocates who feel that the EPA’s new approach still falls short of expectations.

“These are goals, but goals have no teeth,” Elizabeth Yeampierre, leader of UPROSE, told Grist. Yeampierre added that “the plan doesn’t place enough emphasis on the impacts of climate change for communities at greatest risk, which she called a dated approach.”

Grist reported that under the agenda, the EPA wants to focus on a range of environmental justice problems and develop regulatory actions in order to address them.

In the agenda, the EPA has committed to “work to eliminate disparities in childhood blood lead levels.”

There are environmental rules that set “allowable amounts of a pollutant like lead in the air or water over a wide area.” However, there are some communities that can be faced with a lot of factors such as “living close to a coal-fired power plant or polluted industrial site — and suffer harmful exposures while others do not.” It is these communities, according to Grist, that are almost always inhabited by people of color.

The agency will be focusing on “actual levels of lead in children’s blood and developing stricter rules, such as potentially tightening the lead copper rule on drinking water, and then measuring its success at a five-year benchmark to help determine whether the new regulations are successful.”