Trump EPA Kills Chemical Plant Lawsuit Because Black Cancer Victims Are 'DEI'
If you're Black and poisoned by toxic emissions, find some white plaintiffs, 'kay?
The Trump administration this month dropped a lawsuit by the Environmental Protection Agency against the owners of a huge petrochemical plant in Louisiana, which isn’t all that surprising, given the administration’s love of pollutants and the polluters who generously share them with the public. And while that will always be true, the Justice Department announced the dismissal of the suit as a great big victory in the administration’s fight against “DEI.” Yes really.
The case was scheduled to go to trial next month, but now the polluters have been saved by the Trump administration’s commitment to bring back institutional racism and call it “merit.”
Long story short, the plant is in Louisiana’s notorious “Cancer Ally,” the 85-mile industrial corridor between New Orleans and Baton Rouge where cancer cases are far higher than in the rest of the nation, and where the vast majority of the population in the risk zone is Black. The factory, Denka Performance Elastomer, produces the nasty chemical chloroprene, which is used in producing the synthetic rubber product neoprene. We have to have neoprene to make beer koozies and wet suits, so obviously an elevated cancer risk for people near the plant is a small price to pay. Chloroprene exposure near the plant — a now-closed elementary school was located just blocks away — had been measured at 400 times the level the EPA considered safe.
When the Biden administration sued the plant and its owners in 2023, seeking to stop emissions of carcinogenic chemicals, those radical maniacs at the EPA noticed that the victims were Black, and even used the words “environmental justice.” See, both those things are now completely illegal because Donald Trump said they were, and that’s why the lawsuit was dropped and we should all cheer this great advance for equality.
The DOJ press release said dropping the suit “fulfills President Trump’s day one executive order […] to eliminate ideological overreach and restore impartial enforcement of federal laws.” If the people in Cancer Alley wanted to be able to sue, they should have found some white families to move there and get cancer for generations, too.
In coordination with the DOJ dropping the suit, the EPA also withdrew its DOJ referral of the case against the plant, against Denka, the Japanese petrochemical conglomerate that now owns it, and against the plant’s original owner, DuPont.
Yr Wonkette first covered the Denka plant last year, when Joe Biden’s EPA Administrator Michael Regan announced new air safety standards that would sharply restrict emissions of chloroprene and dozens of other carcinogenic chemicals from some 200 plants in and near Cancer Alley, Denka among them. Trump’s EPA is poised to roll back those rules, of course; Zeldin announced last week that the EPA will reconsider rule as part of a larger war on pollution regulations. Remember how Donald Trump boasted during the campaign that he had “the cleanest air, the cleanest water,” and would keep things that way? He meant, of course, that as long as you can’t see the pollutants, it’s clean.
At the time, racist asshole Rep. Clay Higgins (R-Louisiana) called for Regan to be arrested next time he set foot in Louisiana, angry that the “arrogant prick” had tried to regulate chemicals while Black. Gosh, what could have triggered Higgins so badly?
Higgins said Regan should be charged with one count of extortion for every chemical plant worker who might lose a job, and sent to Angola, the state’s notorious maximum security prison, for a few decades. All very sane and not racist. He never said that word, after all. And now that Trump is in office, the only racists are people who notice that Black people are getting cancer more than anyone else in Louisiana and Texas and (list continues on page 42)
The thing is, the toxic history of Cancer Alley is inexplicably tied up in historic racism, because all those petrochemical plants in the area just happened to be built in and near communities that are mostly Black, and which had less political and economic ability to fight them. But according to Trump’s EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, there is now no such thing as environmental racism, and hence no such thing as “environmental justice,” since Trump’s first-day executive order banned all “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” initiatives.
Last week, Zeldin also shuttered the EPA’s Environmental Justice Division in the agency’s 10 regional offices, and shitcanned/placed on leave with intention to shitcan some 168 employees in the division. Never mind that polluters made a point of locating filthy plants in primarily poor and minority communities; it would be an unfair racial preference to try to compensate for that history now. That includes trying to seek damages for Black people who probably didn’t get that much more cancer than white people, but if they did, its still racist to notice they were Black.
Here’s an astonishing segment from last Wednesday’s Rachel Maddow Show about the whole depressing clusterfuck that the EPA has become.
According to DOJ Trumpfluffer and (acting) Assistant Attorney General Adam Gustafson, who’s in charge of Justice’s “Environment and Natural Resources Division” until it becomes the Our Friends The Petrochemical Industry Division, dropping the suit against Denka reflects Justice’s “renewed commitment to enforce environmental laws as Congress intended — consistently, fairly and without regard to race,” which is truly some impressive doublespeak that should qualify for a prize.
And don’t go expecting a revised EPA lawsuit against Denka devoid of any reference to the victims’ race, either, because the DOJ press release insists that the research identifying clusters of high cancer incidence in Black communities was itself racist!!! You see, the DOJ agrees with Denka’s pretrial argument that it’s been reducing its chloroprene emissions, and maybe there’s some other reason that entire families have seen horrible losses to cancer. Maybe they should have eaten more vegetables or not gotten childhood vaccines?
The DOJ also claimed that the EPA search tool (archive link) used to “identify areas experiencing disproportionate exposure to environmental hazards and impacts” somehow invalidated the lawsuit by being nothing but a big pile of DEI. The press release claims that’s because such areas were defined
partly by the percentage of “people of color” present — a clear example of the racial preferencing now prohibited by President Trump’s executive order.
Yes, “people of color” in scare quotes. And speaking of quotation marks, “partly” is doing some heavy lifting there; race is just one of seven “socioeconomic indicators” (archive link) included in the search tool, along with low income, high unemployment, poor education, and the percentage of folks who are under five, over 65, or have limited English proficiency. But it’s a factor, so no communities have in fact suffered from pollution more than others.
Oh, hell, why are we even getting into the weeds of showing the lies? All of that’s just a pretext, obviously: Polluters can now get away with almost anything short of dumping carcinogens directly into school lunch rooms. And if the victims are primarily nonwhite, so much the better for these fucks.
[AP / Justice Department / ProPublica / NPR]
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Alex Wagner was on a couple of times after her reporting on this story from LA. Folks have been fighting this for decades and were skeptical, but certainly pleased, when DOJ finally, FINALLY, decided to take action in 2023. What makes it even more heartbreaking is that this area was formerly plantations, and then became areas for sharecroppers, and then became chemical plants. Black people have been screwed there for generations.
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