Biden’s other green promise

“There’s a lot of health issues in this area. It’s an exorbitant amount,” said Jodi Allen, a nurse practitioner who treats patients throughout Lake County.

She says she sees unusually high rates of breathing ailments, such as asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, in patients who aren’t smokers. People also suffer from high rates of obesity, high blood pressure and childhood asthma. “Where do you work? And where do you live?” are among the first questions Allen asks new patients.

Of course, other factors could be at work. Many neighborhoods lack grocery stores that carry fresh produce; factory workers pull night shifts that run counter to their bodies’ natural rhythms and make them more prone to obesity; and the region has high rates of smoking.

Data shows the county lagging behind the health scores in both other parts of Indiana and the U.S. as a whole. Based on a three-year average, for example, 2018 life expectancy was 76.6 years, slightly under the state average and more than two years below the U.S. figure, according to an Indiana University demographer’s analyses.

Still, aside from a handful of narrow federal studies looking at the exposures at the West Calumet homes site, little research has been done on the effects of the soup of various toxic exposures that confront the region’s residents across their lifetimes. For example, nobody appears to have studied how much of the lead released from the region’s smokestacks falls on the region’s backyards, playgrounds and parks. While the risks of individual toxins like lead, manganese and benzene that stream from the steel mills and other industrial facilities are well established, research into the health effects of the combinations that assail communities is rare — not just in Indiana, but in similar frontline areas across the country.

“No one has been able to or wanted to study it. Do we even want to know?” asked Allen. She’s now part of a research team from area universities trying to change that. The group hopes to get money for regional air monitoring to get a real-time look at what is entering residents’ lungs. The team also wants to collect samples of hair and baby teeth from residents.

The information could help health care workers anticipate and treat ailments. And, advocates hope, it could drive state and federal regulators to crack down on the pollution.

‘No administration has done what’s needed’

Protecting children and adults from airborne toxins has vexed Congress and EPA since passage of the Clean Air Act in 1970.

Originally, regulators were supposed to tie industrial emission standards to the level of risk that a specific pollutant posed. But gauging that risk proved daunting; during the following two decades, EPA got the job done only for mercury, arsenic and five other substances.

In 1990, lawmakers switched tactics by creating a landmark set of amendments to the act. This measure deemed almost 190 chemicals, metals and other substances to be hazardous because of their links to cancer or other serious health problems. Rather than dither about the potential harm each substance posed, EPA was supposed to regulate major sources of those pollutants by gearing emission limits to the “maximum achievable” controls that businesses could install — and to conduct follow-up reviews after eight years to account for technological advances and leftover risks.

That framework has unquestionably proved more effective. From 1990 to 2017, releases of air toxics nationally plunged 74 percent, according to EPA. Still, they totaled 550 million pounds in 2020, with grim inequities in how the burden was spread around the country, according to data reported to the agency’s Toxics Release Inventory, which also keeps tabs on emissions of compounds like ammonia not officially deemed hazardous.

In Gary, a city more than three-quarters Black, U.S. Steel’s Gary Works and a few other plants in just one ZIP code spewed almost 342,000 pounds of air pollutants in 2020, the TRI figures show. That total, down more than 10 percent from five years earlier, still amounted to roughly 50 pounds for every man, woman and child in the surrounding area. Add in the land and water discharges from the steel plant and other nearby facilities, and Gary as a whole ranked as the nation’s 15th-most polluted city.

Nationally, however, a cascade of blown deadlines has dogged EPA’s handling of both the original framework for setting the air toxics standards and the follow-up reviews. Many of the challenges stemmed from the task’s “relatively low priority within the agency,” Government Accountability Office auditors wrote in a 2006 report. Little has since changed, clean air advocates say.

“No administration has done what’s needed,” said Emma Cheuse, an attorney for Earthjustice, which repeatedly sued EPA over the delays during the Obama administration. In an agency with more than 14,000 employees, fewer than 100 work at the EPA office mainly responsible for overseeing the air toxics standards. The office’s approximately $17 million budget last year was almost one-quarter lower than a decade ago, according to figures obtained through a records request.

That represents a lost opportunity to better protect human health and the environment. Thanks to the vagaries of timing, Earthjustice’s legal challenges that led to court-supervised deadlines left the work of reviewing dozens of standards to the regulation-hostile Trump administration, which usually chose the status quo over tighter pollution limits. Among those were the steel mill rules: After a review that ended nine years behind schedule, the agency concluded in 2020 that its nearly two-decades-old limits provided “an ample margin of safety to protect public health” and made only a handful of changes.

That review didn’t factor in the potential health harm from the myriad other pollution sources in Northwest Indiana. While environmental groups sought beefed-up pollution controls for the mills, which they said would bolster air quality at modest expense, agency staffers repeatedly deemed those options not “cost-effective.”

The Trump EPA predicted at one point that the cost of cutting releases of dioxin and other pollutants that are extremely dangerous, but emitted in small quantities, would be $188 trillion per ton — roughly nine times the total annual U.S. economic output. After Cheuse — commenting on the proposal on behalf of several other groups — derided the figure as “meaningless,” EPA quietly revised it downward by a factor of 1,000.

Besides the Gary Works, the trio of Northwest Indiana mills includes Indiana Harbor, in East Chicago, and Burns Harbor, further to the east in a neighboring county. Both were bought in 2020 by Ohio-based Cleveland-Cliffs Inc. That year, the three plants cumulatively reported toxic air emissions of almost 437 tons, or more than double the amount from the nation’s half-dozen other integrated steel mills combined, according to the TRI numbers.

The Earthjustice analysis flagged another potential pitfall: Those figures don’t fully reflect “fugitive” emissions of lead that escape through leaks and other pathways. According to the group, releases from those unregulated sources are more than twice the amounts going up the stacks of the three mills.

A Cleveland-Cliffs spokesperson said she could not comment on emissions data before the acquisition. But she and other officials stressed that the region complies with EPA’s ambient air quality standard for lead and said the company is taking other steps to curb releases.

A U.S. Steel representative declined to comment specifically because of the active litigation over the standards but alluded to the importance of taking the Gary Works’ large size into account when assessing emissions.

EPA is working to gather more information, according to a spokesperson.

Can Biden change it?

Now, Biden is aiming to show that his administration can do better. Goffman, EPA’s acting air chief, stressed that “dealing with toxic air pollution as a public health issue, as an [environmental justice] issue, is a priority.”

But Goffman also worked at the Obama-era EPA. In the interview, he sidestepped a question about why under his former boss — who hailed from the South Side of nearby Chicago — the agency failed to prioritize air toxics regulations, including those governing steel mills.

That seemingly perennial challenge is gaining renewed urgency in light of the Biden administration’s focus on fair treatment. Under Regan, EPA in January voiced support for a new environmental assessment of a planned plastics plant expansion in Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley” that will consider the potential cumulative effects of adding its emissions to those already permitted in the region. More broadly, a new strategic plan highlights the importance of better understanding cumulative effects and risks. Another draft report looks at research needs.

But at a March gathering of an agency advisory committee focused on the draft, an EPA staffer conceded it was “the first step in a very long-term process that we’ll be needing to do and build on.”

Congress — hopelessly deadlocked on most environmental issues — is unlikely to help. Two years ago, however, Democratic New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy signed a widely noted law requiring the state’s environmental regulators to deny new air permit applications in communities considered already overburdened. But that law will have no immediate effect on existing industries, meaning any drop in pollution is likely to be gradual at best.

Increasingly, environmental justice advocates are beginning to think it’s inevitable that some neighborhoods will remain overburdened, even if EPA cracks down on industrial pollution. No matter how aggressively regulators pursue facilities in East Chicago, for instance, the sheer number of industrial sites could mean that toxic air emissions remain dangerous to nearby residents.

“I think that there will still be sacrifice zones, or hot spots, or however you want to say it,” said Mustafa Santiago Ali, who led EPA’s environmental justice program during the Obama administration and now works at the National Wildlife Federation.

Advocates like Ali are pondering what must be done then. Should governments help foot the bill to relocate residents, the way the Federal Emergency Management Agency buys out homes subject to repeated flooding? (That program has raised its own justice concerns by favoring wealthy and white homeowners, a recent analysis by POLITICO’s E&E News showed.) And what health services or educational support should they offer to residents who might opt to stay, be it for family reasons or access to jobs?

“Those are going to be extremely difficult conversations,” Ali said.

The tension is not lost on Northwest Indiana residents, for whom steel mill jobs offer a path to stability. Though their workforces have shrunk dramatically in recent decades, the three plants still employ about 10,000 workers, according to figures from U.S. Steel and Cleveland-Cliffs.