As the year comes to a close, here is my wish list and suggestions for all of us in the coming year who cover the environment.
First, a little constructive gripe: Can we please not deal in rhetoric that suggests all is lost on climate in 12 years?
I must point out that was 2018's rhetoric, so we'd now only have 10 and a half years to Doomsday. If the fossil fuel industry hasn't unconditionally surrendered by then, it slams the rhetorical door in climate advocates' faces. You have five years to stop saying this, or else.
Second, not long ago, we heard that natural gas from fracking will be the "bridge fuel" to clean energy; flame retardants always save lives; glyphosate is the harmless alternative to conventional pesticides; and vaping will be the solution to the scourge of lung cancer. Entering 2020, we know that none of these have proven true. Optimism toward finding solutions is still essential, but so is keeping a diligent and cynical eye on ourselves. Don't buy into perceived solutions that aren't—like when the Sierra Club's otherwise roaringly-successful Beyond Coal campaign accepted $25 million from frackers.
Next: Can we – please – see at least one prominent climate denier step back, take a deep breath, look at the science and on-the-ground evidence and concede that man-made climate change is real and desperately needs to be addressed? In recent years, very few, like think tanker Jerry Taylor and scientist Richard Muller, have made the mea culpa switch.
My nominee for climate convert is Sir Rupert Murdoch. His Fox News and other worldwide outlets still incorporate climate denial into both their editorial and business plans. Back in the day, before denial became de rigeur for conservatives, Sir Rupert was all in on making a carbon-neutral News Corp. Even today, as his native Australia burns itself to the ground, he and his media empire won't have any of this climate hoax. Before her death in 2013, Rupert's mum, Dame Elisabeth Murdoch was a 101 year-old climate activist.
And while we're at it, can we all do a better job of connecting the dots between climate denial and the other potent forms of denial impacting modern America and the world? There are overwhelmingly common bonds between climate denial and those who fail to see the mendacity and corruption of President Trump. Or the link between the horrifying death toll from guns in the U.S. and the tens of millions of fact-blind NRA members. Or the 2009 theft, allegedly by Russian hackers, of thousands of climate scientists' emails, used deceptively to discredit the science, and the subsequent hacks of political emails – not to mention voting data. It's a clear pattern, benefitting the same politically-interested few.
Also, let's support journalism at all levels as a key player in education on environmental problems. Industry mainstays like the New York Times, Washington Post, and the AP have upped their games. A legion of nonprofits, including this one, have offered a sharp focus on climate reporting.
Donald Trump's impeachment and related scandals are no doubt the biggest news stories on any given day. But climate change, its impacts and potential solutions, are the story of the century. In the new year, I hope we all show a better understanding of this.
Peter Dykstra is our weekend editor and columnist. His views do not represent those of Environmental Health News, The Daily Climate or publisher, Environmental Health Sciences.
“The number of stress-activated health conditions people reported was quite staggering."
PITTSBURGH — Engaging in public participation during permitting for oil and gas pipelines often harms mental health and creates distrust in government, according to a new study.
Numerous studies have examined physical health effects associated with living near oil and gas pipelines, but there’s little research on the mental health impacts associated with these projects.
The study, published in Energy Research & Social Science, was conducted through surveys and interviews with more than 1,000 people living near proposed natural gas pipelines in Virginia, West Virginia, Oregon and Pennsylvania. It documented a long list of mental health symptoms associated with living near pipeline routes, including anxiety, depression, Complex post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD) and suicidality.
“I live in Blacksburg, Virginia, which is one of the places the Mountain Valley Pipeline goes through,” Shannon Bell, a professor of sociology at Virginia Tech and lead author of the study, told Environmental Health News (EHN). “In conversations with community members who are affected by the pipeline, it became very clear there were some pretty significant traumas going on.”
By using screening tools to measure the severity of mental health symptoms, the researchers also determined that the more people engaged with public participation processes related to the pipelines, the worse their mental health impacts were.
“Having a pipeline built through your land is incredibly stressful for many people, but we were surprised to learn that the people who were the most engaged in public participation processes related to the pipeline had significantly greater mental health impacts than people who didn’t engage at all, regardless of whether the pipeline was actually being constructed through their land,” Bell said.
Karen Feridun, an activist who lives in eastern Pennsylvania, has fought two pipeline projects, the PennEast and Commonwealth pipelines, both of which were canceled following community resistance. She’s proud of those wins, but they were difficult for her and the community.
“The PennEast fight went on for seven years,” Feridun told EHN. “People were so dedicated. It was like they made fighting the pipeline their second full time job. Many people expressed how stressed this made them feel, the pain of seeing their property devalued and their beautiful community disrupted, and how unending it all was. It was a lot to endure.” stories like that.”
When the Commonwealth and PennEast pipelines were canceled, Feridun said, there was a lot of relief. “The state of everybody’s mental health improved to the extent that this was over and they could move on with their lives,” she said. However, many of the Pennsylvanians involved in those fights were soon faced with additional oil and gas-related projects in their communities, like fracking wells or related infrastructure, pulling many of them right back into fight mode.
“There’s this constant pressure and feeling of powerlessness that comes with not knowing what’s about to happen,” Feridun said. “For some people it just starts to feel like a never-ending nightmare.”
Bell’s study found that pipeline development and related public participation processes were associated with a long list of physical symptoms including insomnia, high blood pressure, heart problems, teeth grinding, headaches, tremors, irregular heartbeat, shingles, heart problems, chest pain, strokes and brain hemorrhages. At least one person said they were so physically sickened by the stress they felt about the pipeline and the public participation process that they had to move.
“The number of stress-activated health conditions people reported was quite staggering,” Bell said. “It was devastating to read some of the things people had gone through.”
Feridun shared a story about a community member who protested a FERC meeting and had a stroke afterwards. “The family’s feeling was that the pressure she was under contributed to her having a stroke at a very young age,” she said. “There were lots of stories like that.”
Performative public participation creates harm
Bell researched the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), passed in 1969, which heightened the public involvement requirements for federal agencies' decision-making on actions that could significantly affect the environment.
She found previous research that suggested NEPA’s public participation requirements are only intended to diffuse public outrage since government agencies don’t have standardized ways to incorporate public input into decision-making or permitting.
She also learned that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), the agency responsible for regulating pipelines, approved 99% of eminent domain cases between 1999 and 2020, allowing pipelines to be built through privately owned land despite widespread public opposition to many of these projects.
"Many people expressed how stressed this made them feel, the pain of seeing their property devalued and their beautiful community disrupted, and how unending it all was. It was a lot to endure.” - Karen Feridun, an activist who lives in eastern Pennsylvania
Other researchers had highlighted the flaws in NEPA’s public participation requirements and FERC’s apparent bias against landowners, but no one had measured how participating in performative public participation processes impacts residents’ mental health.
Bell and colleagues found that people who participated in these processes felt their input was dismissed, that their concerns were not addressed and did not have any impact on decision-making about the pipelines.These feelings created disillusionment and distrust. The more people participated in public feedback processes, the stronger their feelings of disillusionment were.
“Many people talked about feeling betrayed by their government,” Bell said. “A number of our respondents stated that up until this point, they had believed government agencies existed to protect residents. But after spending tremendous amounts of time engaging in public input opportunities, many of our respondents came to believe that these government agencies were actually just there to facilitate the construction of pipelines.”
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approved 99% of eminent domain cases between 1999 and 2020.
Credit: Karen Feridun
“The PennEast fight went on for seven years. It was like they made fighting the pipeline their second full time job," said Karen Feridun.
Credit: Tara Zrinksi
Feridun has seen this firsthand.
“In all my years fighting pipelines and fracking,” she said, “I’ve heard so many people say: ‘I thought the government was here to protect me,’ and it comes as this terrible blow to learn they’re actually representing someone else’s best interest, not yours.”
Bell’s research focused on natural gas pipelines, but she said these findings are relevant to any scenario where government agencies invite public participation during the permitting process for industrial projects. For example, permitting for fracking wells and petrochemical plants are often contentious and generally overseen by state regulatory agencies that may invite public input but also typically lack any ways to incorporate it into permitting decisions.
“People aren’t stupid — they realize when their comments aren’t making a bit of difference,” Bell said. “It’s incredibly disempowering when people spend hours and days writing public comments and attending public meetings, just to be ignored.”
“I don’t want to beat up on regulators because this is an institutional problem,” she added, “but wasting people's time and energy by asking for public input without providing a mechanism to act on most of their concerns not only brings substantial harm to these individuals' mental and physical health, but it also violates core aspects of environmental justice."
Feridun said that although she tells people joining pipeline fights that public participation is “just theater and a box regulators have to check,” there are important reasons to participate anyway.
The first is that pipeline route often travel through rural areas where impacted landowners feel isolated and alone in their discomfort about the pipeline, and joining with others who are in the same situation creates strong community bonds and fosters empowerment. During the PennEast fight, for example, municipalities all along the proposed pipeline route passed resolutions stating their opposition to the pipeline. Those could be ignored by FERC, but they made it clear in writing that many communities along the pipeline route were prepared to fight the project in court if needed.
The second reason Feridun encourages people to participate in the permitting process is that even if FERC won’t do anything with public comments, it’s critical to put them in the public record so that a judge can consider them in subsequent lawsuits, which can be a powerful tool in winning pipeline fights.
“That’s part of how we won against PennEast,” she said. “People put so many comments on that docket, they were relentless … and gave lots of ammunition to judges who might one day have to consider those lawsuits.”
No environmental justice without real public input
Under guidance from the Biden presidential administration, federal and state governmental agencies are working to improve environmental justice.
Many states, including Pennsylvania, are developing new environmental justice plans that include additional community input related to permitting for polluting industries, but Bell said few of these plans create ways for environmental justice communities to influence permitting decisions (though there are some indications that this is beginning to shift).
Traditionally, governmental environmental justice efforts in the U.S. tend to focus on “distributive justice” — ensuring equity in the allocation of burdens and benefits. But the principles of environmental justice also include recognition justice, which entails valuing the perspectives of historically marginalized groups; procedural justice, which involves providing these communities with equitable access and opportunities to influence decision-making; and reparative justice, which requires acknowledging past harms against these communities and working to repair them.
Environmental justice communities can’t achieve procedural justice or restorative justice until they’re actually empowered to decide whether new pipelines or polluting facilities should be built in their neighborhoods, according to Bell.
“Environmental justice is not possible if public participation is performative,” Bell said. “If we’re serious about environmental justice, there need to be consistent [ways] for public input to be incorporated into agencies' decision-making processes. It needs to be possible for public input to actually influence agency decisions."
CAMERON PARISH, La. — Late into the night, John Allaire watches the facility next to his home shoot 300-foot flares from stacks.
He lives within eyesight of southwest Louisiana’s salty shores, where, for decades, he’s witnessed nearly 200 feet of land between it and his property line disappear into the sea. Two-thirds of the land was rebuilt to aid the oil and gas industry’s LNG expansion. LNG — shorthand for liquified natural gas – is natural gas that's cooled to liquid form for easier storage or transport; it equates to 1/600th the volume of natural gas in a gaseous state. It’s used to generate electricity, or fuel stove tops and home heaters, and in industrial processes like manufacturing fertilizer.
In the U.S., at least 30 new LNG terminal facilities have been constructed or proposed since 2016, according to the
Oil and Gas Watch project. Louisiana and Texas’ Gulf Coast, where five facilities are already operating, will host roughly two-thirds of the new LNG terminals – meaning at least 22 Gulf Coast LNG facilities are currently under construction, were recently approved to break ground or are under further regulatory review.
Although the U.S. didn’t ship LNG until 2016, when a freight tanker left, a few miles from where Cameron Parish’s LNG plants are today, last year the country became the global leader in LNG production and export volume, leapfrogging exporters like Qatar and Australia. The
EIA’s most recent annual outlook estimated that between the current year and 2050, U.S. LNG exports will increase by 152%.
Allaire, 68, watches how saltwater collects where rainwater once fed the area’s diminishing coastal wetlands. “We still come down here with the kids and set out the fishing rods. It's not as nice as it used to be,” he told
Environmental Health News (EHN).
That intimacy with nature drew Allaire to the area when he purchased 311 acres in 1998. An environmental engineer and 30-year oil and gas industry veteran, he helped lead environmental assessments and manage clean-ups, and although retired, he still works part-time as an environmental consultant with major petroleum companies. With a lifetime of oil and gas industry expertise, he’s watched the industry's footprint spread across Louisiana and the Gulf of Mexico’s fragile shores and beyond. Now that the footprints are at the edge of his backyard, Allaire is among a cohort of organizers, residents and fisher-folk in the region mobilizing to stop LNG facility construction. For him, the industry’s expansion usurps the right-or-wrong ethics he carried across his consulting career. For anglers, oil and gas infrastructure has destroyed fishing grounds and prevented smaller vessels from accessing the seafood-rich waters of the Calcasieu River.
From the view of Allaire’s white pickup truck as he drives across his property to the ocean’s shore, he points to where a new LNG facility will replace marshlands. Commonwealth LNG intends to clear the land of trees and then backfill the remaining low-lying field.
“You see what’s happening with the environment,” Allaire said. “When the facts change, I got to change my mind about what we’re doing.”
Community bands together
John Allaire, left, purchased 311 acres in Cameron Parish in 1998, and has watched the oil and gas industry's footprint spread to his property.
Credit: John Allaire
During an Earth Day rally in April, community members gathered in the urban center of Lake Charles to demand local oil and gas industries help deliver a safer, healthier future for all. In between live acts by artists performing south Louisiana’s quintessential zydeco musical style, speakers like James Hiatt, a Calcasieu Parish native with ties to Cameron Parish and a Healthy Gulf organizer, and RISE St. James organizer Sharon Lavigne, who’s fighting against LNG development in rural Plaquemines Parish near the city of New Orleans, asked the nearly 100 in attendance to imagine a day in which the skyline isn’t dotted by oil and gas infrastructure.
Not long ago, it was hard to imagine an Earth Day rally in southwest Louisiana at all. For decades, the area has been decorated with fossil fuel infrastructure. Sunsets on some days are highlighted by the chemicals in the air; at night, thousands of facilities’ lights dot the dark sky.
“It takes a lot of balls for people to start speaking up,” Shreyas Vasudevan, a campaign researcher with the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, told EHN in the days after the rally. In a region with its history and economy intertwined with oil and gas production, “you can get a lot of social criticism – or ostracization, as well – even threats to your life.”
Many are involved in local, regional and national advocacy groups, including the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, Healthy Gulf, the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Turtle Island Restoration Network, the Center for Biological Diversity and the National Audubon Society.
“You see what’s happening with the environment,” Allaire said. “When the facts change, I got to change my mind about what we’re doing.” - John Allaire, environmental engineer and 30-year oil and gas industry veteran
But environmental organizers are fighting a multi-billion-dollar industry with federal and state winds at its back. And LNG’s federal support is coupled with existing state initiatives.
Under outgoing Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards — a term-limited Democrat — the state pledged a goal of reaching net-zero greenhouse emissions by 2050. Natural gas, which the LNG industry markets as a cleaner-burning alternative, is cited as one of the state’s solutions. Louisiana is the only state that produces a majority of its carbon emissions through fossil fuels refining industries, like LNG, rather than energy production or transportation. Governor Edwards’ office did not return EHN’s request for comment.
This accommodating attitude towards oil and gas industries has resulted in a workforce that’s trained to work in LNG refining facilities across much of the rural Gulf region, said Steven Miles, a lawyer at Baker Botts LLP and a fellow at the Baker Institute’s Center on Energy Studies. Simultaneously, anti-industrialization pushback is lacking. It’s good news for industries like LNG.
“The bad news,” Miles added. “[LNG facilities] are all being jammed in the same areas.”
One rallying cry for opponents is local health. The Environmental Integrity Project found that LNG export terminals emit chemicals like carbon monoxide –potentially deadly– and sulfur dioxide, of which the American Lung Association says long-term exposure can lead to heart disease, cancer, and damage to internal or female reproductive organs.
An analysis of emissions monitoring reports by the advocacy group the Louisiana Bucket Brigade found that Venture Global’s existing Calcasieu Pass facility had more than 2,000 permit violations.That includes exceeding the permit’s authorized air emissions limit to release nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, particulate matter and volatile organic compounds 286 out of its first 343 days of operation.
The Marvel Crane, the first liquid natural gas carrier to transport natural gas from the Southwest Louisiana LNG facility, transits a channel in Hackberry, Louisiana, May 28, 2019.
“This is just one facility,” at a time when three more facilities have been proposed in the region and state, Vasudevan said. Venture Global’s operational LNG facility — also known as Calcasieu Pass — “is much smaller than the other facility they’ve proposed.”
In an area that experienced 18 feet of storm surge during Hurricane Laura in 2020 — and just weeks later, struck by Hurricane Delta — Venture Global is planning to build a second export terminal Known as “CP2,” it’s the largest of the roughly two dozen proposed Gulf LNG export terminals, and a key focal point for the region’s local organizing effort.
Residents “don’t really want LNG as much as they want Cameron [Parish] from 1990 back,” Hiatt told EHN of locals’ nostalgia for a community before storms like Rita in 2005 brought up to 15 feet of storm surge, only for Laura to repeat the damage in 2020. Throughout that time, the parish’s population dipped from roughly 10,000 to 5,000. “But the wolf knocking at the door is LNG. Folks in Cameron think that's going to bring back community, bring back the schools, bring back this time before we had all these storms — when Cameron was pretty prosperous.”
“Clearly,” for the oil and gas industry, “the idea is to transform what was once the center of commercial fishing in Louisiana to gas exports,” Cindy Robertson, an environmental activist in southwest Louisiana, told EHN.
Helping fishers’ impacted by LNG is about “actual survival of this unique culture,” Cooke said.
In a measure of organizers’ success, she pointed to a recent permit hearing for Venture Global’s CP2 proposal. Regionally, it’s the only project that’s received an environmental permit, but not its export permit, which remains under federal review. At the meeting, some spoke on the company’s behalf. As an organizer, it was a moment of clarity, Cooke explained. Venture Global officials “had obviously done a lot of coaching and organizing and getting people together in Cameron to speak out on their behalf,” Cooke said. “So, in a way, that was bad. But in another way, it shows that we really had an impact.”
“It also shows that we have a lot to do,” Cooke added.
Environmental organizers like Alyssa Portaro describe a sense of fortitude among activists — she and her husband to the region’s nearby town of Vinton near the Texas-Louisiana border. Since the families’ relocation to their farm, Portaro has worked with Cameron Parish fisher-folk.
“I’ve not witnessed ‘community’ anywhere like there is in Louisiana,” Portaro told EHN. But a New Jersey native, she understands the toll environmental pollution has on low-income communities. “This environment, it’s so at risk — and it’s currently getting sacrificed to big industries.”
“People don’t know what we’d do without oil and gas. It comes at a big price,” she added.
Southwest Louisiana’s Cameron Parish is one of the state’s most rural localities. Marine economies were the area’s economic drivers until natural disasters and LNG facilities began pushing locals out, commercial fishers claim.
Credit: Xander Peters for Environmental Health News
Residents “don’t really want LNG as much as they want Cameron [Parish] from 1990 back,” James Hiatt , a Healthy Gulf organizer, told EHN. "But the wolf knocking at the door is LNG."
Credit: Xander Peters for Environmental Health News
For the most part, Cameron Parish’s life and economy has historically taken place at sea. As new LNG facilities are operational or in planning locally, locals claim the community they once knew is nearly unrecognizable.
Credit: Xander Peters for Environmental Health News
A disappearing parish
The stakes are seemingly higher for a region like southwest Louisiana, which is the epicenter of climate change impacts.
In nearly a century, the state has lost roughly 2,000 square miles of land to coastal erosion. In part driving the state’s erosion crisis is the compounding impacts of Mississippi River infrastructure and oil and gas industry activity, such as dredging canals for shipping purposes, according to a March study published in the journal Nature Sustainability. Louisiana’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority said Cameron Parish could lose more land than other coastal parishes over the next 50 years. A recent Climate Central report says the parish will be underwater within that time frame.
On top of erosion and sea level rise impacts, in August, 2023, marshland across southwest Louisiana’s Cameron Parish burned. The fires were among at least 600 across the Bayou State this year. Statewide, roughly 60,000 acres burned — a more than six-fold increase of the state’s average acres burned per year in the past decade alone.
But while the blaze avoided coastal Louisiana communities like Cameron Parish, the fires represented a warning coming from a growing chorus of locals across the region — one that’s echoes by the local commercial fishing population, who claimed to have experienced unusually low yields during the same time, according to a statement from a local environmental group. At the site of the Cameron Parish fires are locations for two proposed LNG expansion projects.
"The idea is to transform what was once the center of commercial fishing in Louisiana to gas exports.” - Cindy Robertson, an environmental activist in southwest Louisiana
It was an unusual occurrence for an area that’s more often itself underwater this time of year due to a storm surge from powerful storms. For LNG expansion’s local opposition, it was a red flag.
As the Louisiana Bucket Brigade has noted prior, the confluence of climate change’s raising of sea levels and the construction of LNG export terminals — some are proposed at the size of nearly 700 football fields — are wiping away the marshland folks like Allaire watched wither. Among their fears is that the future facilities won’t be able to withstand the power of another storm like Laura and its storm surge, which wiped away entire communities in 2020.
Amidst these regional climate impacts, LNG infrastructure has shown potential to exacerbate the accumulation of greenhouse gasses that cause global warming. For the most part, LNG is made up of methane — a greenhouse gas that’s more than 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Among the 22 current LNG facility proposals, the advocacy group Sierra Club described a combined climate pollution output that would roughly equal to that of about 440 coal plants.
The climate impacts prompt some of the LNG industry’s uncertainty going forward. It isn’t clear if Asian countries, key importers of U.S. LNG, will “embrace these energy transition issues,” said David Dismuke, an energy consultant and the former executive director of Louisiana State University’s Center for Energy Studies. Likewise, European nations remain skeptical of embracing LNG as a future staple fuel source.
“They really don't want to have to pull the trigger,” Dismukes added, referring to Europe’s hesitation to commit more resources to exporting LNG from the American market. “They don't want to go down that road.”
While there will be a tapering down of natural gas supply, Miles explained, “we’re going to need natural gas for a long time,” as larger battery storage for renewables is still unavailable.
“I'm not one of these futurists that can tell you where we're going to be, but I just don't see everything being extreme,” Dismukes said. “I don't see what we've already built getting stranded and going away, either.”
For now, LNG seems here to stay. From 2012 to 2022,U.S. natural gas demand — the sum of both domestic consumption and gross exports — rose by a whopping 43%, reported the U.S. Energy Information Administration, or EIA. Meanwhile, in oil and gas hotbeds like Louisiana and Texas, natural gas demand grew by 116%.
Throughout 25 years, Allaire has witnessed southwest Louisiana’s land slowly fade, in part driven by the same industrial spread regionally. Near where the front door of his travel trailer sits underneath the aluminum awning, he points to a chenier ridge located near the end of the property. It’s disappearing, he said.
“See the sand washing over, in here?” Allaire says, as he points towards the stretches of his property. “This pond used to go down for a half mile. This is all that's left of it on this side.”
Global warming poses a dire threat to public health, with effects ranging from extreme heat deaths to increased disease spread, says the director of The Lancet Countdown. But policies designed to combat climate change while protecting public health can build resilience.
Extreme weather and rising temperatures are linked to approximately 500,000 deaths annually, with projections indicating a potential fivefold increase by 2050.
The Lancet Countdown, a global research collaboration, provides evidence of climate change's current and future health risks, and urges immediate policy changes.
The organization points out multiple benefits from combating climate change: reducing pollution while improving health and quality of life through greener cities and better diets.
Key quote:
"When we talk about climate change, we’re not talking about the future. The cost of inaction is that we pay with people’s lives."
— Marina Romanello, executive director of the Lancet Countdown
HOUSTON — Fewer than 6% of more than 16,000 chemicals associated with plastic production are regulated worldwide, according to a new report from PlastChem.
PlastChem is a project funded by the Norwegian Research Council that identifies and seeks to address potential harm from plastics and polymers. The report released Thursday builds on growing evidence that suggests plastic production, use and waste is flooding humans and Earth with hazardous, or potentially hazardous, compounds, and that regulation to protect us from these compounds is not keeping up.
The report has big implications for places like Houston, Texas — nicknamed the “Energy Capital of the World” — which has more than 600 oil and gas facilities on the Houston Ship Channel. Many of those facilities are dedicated to processing fossil fuels and producing plastics.
The report found:
16,325 chemicals related to plastic production, whether used intentionally or as a byproduct of the plastic lifecycle.
6,276 chemicals have been studied with data available in the public domain.
More than 9,000 of these chemicals have publicly available data.
Fewer than 6% of these chemicals are regulated.
“Very few of these chemicals are regulated on a global scale,” said Martin Wagner, first author of the report and a member of the PlastChem project team, during a webinar discussing the report findings. “There’s simply too many out there.”
“Many [regulated chemicals] are only regulated in parts of their life cycle,” added Laura Monclús, ecotoxicologist and PlastChem project team member.
A new study highlights the significant underreporting of methane emissions by the oil and gas industry, revealing emissions approximately three times higher than Environmental Protection Agency figures.
Cristina Lazo starts the daily routine of washing her daughter Alina’s hands, changing clothes and rubbing an ointment on her irritated eyes after coming home from the outside. (Credit: Danielle Villasana for The Texas Tribune)
CLOVERLEAF — On a hot, humid October day, Cristina Lazo readies her youngest daughter for a bike ride and whispers in Spanish, I pray to God nothing happens to you.
Lazo, who wears a Rebelde band T-shirt and biker shorts, takes Alina, an energetic 7-year-old, outdoors for short periods because it only takes a few minutes before Alina’s eyes get red and her coughing starts.
“ Vámonos,” Lazo yells, lengthening the last syllabus as she begins pedaling through the streets of Cloverleaf, an unincorporated area about 15 miles east of downtown Houston. Alina starts coughing immediately.
Lazo, a 42-year-old mother of six, knows that tonight she’ll rub Vick’s Vaporub on her daughter’s chest, and in the morning Alina will still wake up with congestion and what Lazo calls "itchy spider webs” in her eyes.
Even though doctors haven’t been able to pinpoint what causes Alina’s symptoms, Lazo suspects the air outside, which she said often reeks of chemicals — she calls it a “poison-like smell.” So she limits Alina’s outdoor activities and buys an antibiotic ointment at a Salvadoran pharmacy for her daughter’s itchy eyes.
Cloverleaf, where 79.4% of its 24,100 residents are Hispanic, is one of a string of communities that sits in the shadow of the 52-mile-long Houston Ship Channel, one of the world’s largest petrochemical complexes where more than 200 facilities process fossil fuels into plastics, fertilizers and pesticides.
Lazo can’t see the smokestacks from her home, but most days they release dark clouds of chemicals that permeate Cloverleaf and nearby communities like Channelview, Galena Park and Pasadena.
The emissions include particulate matter — microscopic particles that can penetrate deep into the lungs and cause irregular heartbeats, aggravate asthma and other respiratory ailments — which some scientists call the deadliest form of air pollution. A recent air quality analysis by Air Alliance Houston using industry emissions data submitted to the state found a higher annual average concentration of particulate matter the closer people live to the Ship Channel.
The plants also spew cancer-causing chemicals like benzene that can irritate the throat and eyes when large amounts are inhaled.
In Cloverleaf and nearby communities, locals say the air often smells like rotten eggs, nail polish or burning tires. Many residents said they suffer from respiratory problems, asthma and skin ailments, and they wonder if the air they’re breathing is the culprit.
Yet information about what they're breathing every day is hard to find, despite the presence of 23 state air monitoring sites near the Houston Ship Channel.
People walk through San Jacinto Park as a tanker ship passes through the Houston Ship Channel in La Porte. Thousands of families live and play near the world’s largest petrochemical complex.
Credit: Go Nakamura for The Texas Tribune
Hundreds of chemical plants, refineries and terminals line the Ship Channel as seen in Pasadena, less than 15 miles southeast of downtown Houston. According to a report by Amnesty International, people living near the Houston Ship Channel, often low-income communities of color, have lower life expectancies than those living in wealthier, mostly white neighborhoods further from the industrial area.
Credit: Go Nakamura for The Texas Tribune
The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality’s decades-old air monitoring system does not measure many of the known pollutants coming from the nearby petrochemical plants. For example, the closest monitor to Cloverleaf does not measure particulate matter or sulfur dioxide — two of the six health-threatening airborne pollutants that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has strictly limited to protect human health.
Jeff Robinson, an EPA official who manages the air monitoring division, said federal law does not require states to measure all six criteria pollutants at every air monitoring site.
Each pollutant has a set of rules that helps states determine how many monitors they need to measure its presence in an area. The rules include installing air monitors based on population numbers and the number of emission sources in a region.
Robinson added that “there's nothing that precludes a state from over monitoring.”
The information that the TCEQ’s air monitoring system does collect is difficult for the average resident to understand and usually only in English. That’s a challenge for people in places like Cloverleaf, where more than 71% of residents speak Spanish at home.
“There's nothing that precludes a state from over monitoring.” - Jeff Robinson, EPA official
Federal law doesn’t say how the information should be presented to the public, Robinson said.
Dozens of residents told The Texas Tribune/Environmental Health News/Altavoz Lab they did not know that the state had an air monitoring network.
Deysy Canales, 34, a mother of three who likes to spend time outdoors relaxing in her hammock or tending to her aloe vera plants, has battled chronic asthma since moving to Cloverleaf. She was surprised to hear about the state air monitors.
"It is important for [TCEQ] to inform the population about air quality and pollution so that asthmatic people like me can take better care of ourselves," she said in Spanish.
Patricia Prado, a 43-year-old Cloverleaf resident, has asthma and regularly experiences congestion and severe allergies. Her daughter Jocelyn Prado, 21, said she deals with throbbing, uncontrollable migraines, allergies and a persistent skin condition that makes her itchy.
They also didn’t know about the state air monitoring system. Jocelyn Prado said it "was shocking to me and to my mom. It's something that we never knew. The government doesn't tell us."
She added that air quality information would be useful when she sees petrochemical facilities' towers burning like enormous candles from her home.
“With that information, I feel like we could put on a mask, limit the time of being outside or just be aware,” she said.
While TCEQ said it has worked to make their air quality data easy to understand, locals and advocates say it’s not enough. Data on the TCEQ’s public website does not connect the dots for residents, offering no explanation or context to help users decipher what they’re seeing.
“There is a need for broader ways of communicating what this means for health. What does this level mean?” said Natalie Johnson, an environmental toxicologist at the Texas A&M University School of Public Health. “That currently is hard to interpret.”
Erandi Treviño, who lives in a neighborhood 19 miles south of Cloverleaf and is a coalition organizer for the environmental nonprofit Healthy Port Communities Coalition, said the air monitoring network is essentially worthless for people in her community.
“A big problem still with TCEQ is that the information they do share is too dense and difficult to understand,” Treviño said. “They need to communicate in a clear way and with simple language that can be understood by the average person in the community.”
Victoria Cann, a spokesperson for the TCEQ, said in an email that the air monitoring network’s primary intent is to use the data collected to determine compliance with federal regulations, forecast air quality conditions, evaluate air pollution trends and study air quality’s impact to human health to inform regulatory decisions.
In response to critiques from advocates and researchers, Cann said in an email that the public can use information from the TCEQ air monitors “to assist them in making decisions about their personal exposure to current air quality conditions in their area” and added that the agency has improved accessibility throughout the years. Recently, TCEQ launched a dashboard that shows air pollution levels with a speedometer-style graphic, a tool Cann said the agency plans to further enhance.
“A big problem still with TCEQ is that the information they do share is too dense and difficult to understand." - Erandi Treviño, Healthy Port Communities Coalition
However, the state network’s blind spots were exposed in a yearlong study funded by EPA in 2021, when the Houston Health Department investigated air quality in Cloverleaf, Channelview and Galena Park and found high concentrations of formaldehyde, a colorless, flammable gas generated by plastics manufacturing that can irritate the skin, throat, lungs and eyes; repeated exposure can lead to cancer.
In Cloverleaf, the department analyzed air data from 2019 to 2020 and detected formaldehyde levels more than 13 times the EPA’s chronic health screening level, a limit that suggests long-term exposure to the substance may pose health risks. In Galena Park, the level was seven times higher, while in Channelview it was five times higher.
The study’s authors asked TCEQ to tighten its rules to reduce emissions of volatile organic compounds and ramp up monitoring of formaldehyde levels. At the time, only two air monitors near the Ship Channel, in Galena Park and Deer Park, measured formaldehyde. Three years later, Cloverleaf’s air monitor still does not measure formaldehyde.
TCEQ took no action. Cann said in an email that the formaldehyde levels found in the study fell below the agency’s threshold for further investigation and those levels “are not considered to cause any adverse health effects in the population.” She added that the agency’s threshold “is based on a more recent review of the science” than the EPA’s.
Steve Smith, chairman of the Houston Regional Monitoring (HRM), a network of more than 30 petrochemical companies that own the Cloverleaf air monitor and three others in the TCEQ network, said “there's certainly room for improvement in getting the word out, sharing with people, with the communities, what resources are out there, what data is available … that has always been a struggle, in terms of trying to translate that into something that all of us can understand,” he said.
Alina Lazo plays with her parents at Peter Piper Pizza in Houston. Due to her mother’s concerns about air pollution, she keeps Alina inside as much as she can. “But obviously, I’d like for her to get out, for her to be able to enjoy nature,” she said. “She loves to go to parks.”
Credit: Danielle Villasana for The Texas Tribune
Hector Rivero, president & CEO of the Texas Chemistry Council, an industry group representing over 200 chemical manufacturing facilities, added that the industry “remains steadfast in our support for air monitoring initiatives across the state.”
Environmental organizations like Air Alliance Houston — which has installed its own air monitors in some Ship Channel neighborhoods — and Fenceline Watch worry that the lack of air quality information in other languages is preventing residents from knowing when it's safe to go outside. They added that accessible, multilingual information about air quality would help residents pressure authorities to address hazardous air quality in their communities.
Back in Cloverleaf, Lazo said air quality information has not reached her community and people are dealing with the consequences.
“Cloverleaf is not being paid attention to,” she said. “Not as deeply as [the state] should."
Dirty air, silent costs in “sacrifice zone”
A few blocks from the Lazos’ house, Canales, a petite woman with curly brown hair pulled into a ponytail and sun-kissed skin, watches her kids playing with a ball outside their mobile home, which is surrounded by a chicken wire fence.
“There’s a lot of smells here,” Canales said in Spanish. “The smells that waft are like something burning, as if they were burning plastic.”
Her husband, her son and two daughters are healthy, she said, but she is not. Since moving to Cloverleaf from Honduras, Canales said she has developed allergies, asthma and a persistent sore throat.
“In my country, I never got anything. But now that I have come to live here, in Cloverleaf, I do get sick more often and I go to the doctor for asthma attacks,” Canales said.
The attacks are like “a gut punch to the stomach,” robbing her of air, she said. She fights the symptoms with Vicks VapoRub, chamomile tea and a bunch of medications she carries everywhere in her small squared-shaped purse.
Her two daughters tend to her during the attacks. “My mother gets asthma so bad she can’t even breathe, and it makes me feel really bad and sad because she is my mother,” 10-year-old Ashley said.
Deysy Canales kisses her 4-year-old son in the kitchen of their home. Since she moved to Cloverleaf, Canales says she is often sick, but she is grateful that her three kids remain in good health.
Danielle Villasana for The Texas Tribune
Deysy Canales carries her inhaler everywhere she goes in case of an asthma attack, which she says are frequent. “You become so tired that you can’t do normal activities,” Canales said.
Last year, Canales was hospitalized two times in three months for asthma attacks. During the most recent one, she went to Houston Methodist Baytown Hospital, where she was seated in a wheelchair and hooked up to a steam machine to inhale medication through a mask.
“I couldn't even walk,” she recalled.
When her symptoms appear, Canales said she goes to a nearby clinic, where she typically pays less than $20 for a consultation but close to $400 for tests and medications — more than what she earns in a week at their family’s business making wooden crates to transport produce. She said she hasn’t seen an asthma specialist because she’s uninsured.
Canales is among roughly 54% of Cloverleaf residents who don't have health insurance, according to a recent Harris County study. That’s more than three times higher than the statewide uninsured rate of 16.6%.
“There’s a lot of smells here. The smells that waft are like something burning, as if they were burning plastic.” - Deysy Canales, a mother of three in Cloverleaf
Studies show that the nearly 69,800 residents of Cloverleaf and Channelview — more than a third of them children under 18 — are breathing some of the dirtiest air in the country.
According to the American Lung Association's 2023 "State of the Air" report, Harris County has an "F" grade for having unhealthy levels of particulate matter and ozone pollution, which can damage the lungs and trigger respiratory problems.
A recent report by the human rights organization Amnesty International found that people living in communities near the Houston Ship Channel, primarily low-income communities of color, have life expectancies up to 20 years shorter than wealthier, predominantly white areas just 15 miles away. Labeling the Ship Channel area a "sacrifice zone," the organization criticizes both the petrochemical industry for spewing toxic pollutants and government agencies like the TCEQ and EPA for lax enforcement of their own regulations.
Harris County also has some of the state’s highest levels of cancer. Lazo’s 87-year-old father, who has lived in Cloverleaf for more than 20 years, is in remission from liver cancer, and Lazo cares for him while her mother goes to church.
An 18-month study published in 2007 by the University of Texas School of Public Health and the Houston Health Department found that children living within two miles of the Houston Ship Channel had a 56% greater chance of being diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia than children living at least 10 miles away from the Ship Channel. While the study did not directly link exposure to hazardous chemicals and increased cancer in kids, researchers suggested a second analysis.
Christopher Shackelford, a reverend at St. Andrew Catholic Church, blesses a churchgoer after mass in Channelview. Shackelford, who has severe allergies, takes medications daily to prepare himself for sermons in front of his almost 3,000 congregants. He believes pollution in the area has harmed his health and the health of those who attend his church.
Credit: Danielle Villasana for The Texas Tribune
Dr. Philip Lupo, an epidemiologist specializing in childhood cancer at Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children's Hospital in Houston, said genetics alone can’t explain the number of child cancer cases in the Houston area.
"It's so important to consider the environment,” he said.
Despite being the nation’s largest petrochemical corridor, Lupo said there aren’t enough studies in Houston that explore possible links between petrochemical air pollution and cancer — or enough money to make them happen.
"There are plenty of lines of evidence that suggests that pediatric cancer has an environmental component. But trying to target that has been a problem," he said. "If you have a child that lives in an area that's not as polluted, their likelihood of being exposed is just less by nature."
Studies in other countries have shown that residents who live near petrochemical plants releasing hazardous chemicals and particles have an increased risk of dying from cancers of the brain, bladder and lungs, as well as leukemia and multiple myeloma.
About 5 miles from the Ship Channel in South Houston, Erandi Treviño recalls the first time she heard about the 2007 UT leukemia study. She was a fifth grader living in Pasadena and she said hearing about how pollution could impact health led her to environmental advocacy.
Three years ago, she began working with EcoMadres, a Latina-led group that’s part of the national environmental nonprofit Moms Clean Air Force, which focuses on protecting children from air pollution. That led to her current job with the Healthy Port Communities Coalition, which helps teach communities about air quality and how to advocate for cleaner air.
The 32-year-old struggles with fibromyalgia, a muscle disorder that causes pain and fatigue. Studies show that people with low-level chemical intolerance are more susceptible to chronic fatigue. Treviño said her body has been working overtime since she was a kid because of the polluted air she has inhaled for decades.
“Kids can’t play outside if it smells bad. They can't be children,” Treviño said. “The physical, mental and neurological effect on the bodies of these children will follow them throughout their lives, when they are older.”
Heidy Garcia plays with Tiana Cruz at the North Shore Rotary Park in Cloverleaf. The small parks nestled in the neighborhood are some of the community’s few gathering spots.
Credit: Danielle Villasana for The Texas Tribune
Gas pipelines near the Houston Ship Channel in Pasadena. In nearby communities, locals say the air often smells like rotten eggs, nail polish or burning tires.
Credit: Go Nakamura for The Texas Tribune
State’s air monitoring gaps
In January 2004, a crowd of several thousand at Hermann Park's Miller Outdoor Theatre saw Bill White become Houston's new mayor. In his inaugural speech, White said he would improve the city’s air quality by addressing chronic problems such as ozone and benzene pollution.
“In Texas, we believe in property rights and nobody owns the air except the public. Nobody has a right to chemically alter it or to hurt somebody else, period. End of story,” White said in his slow, husky voice.
Air pollution had become so bad in the city — particularly around the fast-growing industrial zone along the Ship Channel — and accurate, understandable air quality information was so scarce that resident-led groups began constructing an easy-to-use air sampling device inspired by a California environmental engineering firm’s design that let residents capture air samples using pickle jars and plastic paint buckets.
The Houston Chronicle called them “a team of modern-day Nancy Drews” who recorded odors from nearby chemical plants on their kitchen calendars, writing smells like "turnip" or "nail polish" next to doctor appointments and church functions.
In 2004, White appeared before TCEQ commissioners and criticized the agency for the lack of real-time air quality data on its website.
The extent of the industrial pollution in the area was underscored in 2005 when a five-part series in the Houston Chronicle, "In Harm's Way," found elevated levels of 1,3-butadiene and benzene in four East Houston communities, sparking public debate about the city’s air pollution problems.
Following the newspaper’s investigation, White took legal action against Texas Petrochemicals Company, a Houston-based company with a history of violations that was believed to be the source of elevated hazardous air pollutants in East Houston. The company agreed to sign a pollution reduction agreement for 1,3 butadiene and install a fenceline monitoring system. After the agreement, the plant reduced butadiene emissions by 58%, according to reports.
In 2006, a TCEQ report reinforced what the newspaper’s investigation had found — historically high concentrations of benzene and 1,3-butadiene at monitors in Galena Park, Manchester and other communities near the Ship Channel.
Decades before White’s crusade, Texas state was considered a pioneer in air monitoring. In January 1972, a year after the newly created EPA adopted national air quality standards under the Clean Air Act, Texas installed its first continuous air monitoring station at the Jefferson County Airport in Nederland, which measured ozone on a near real-time basis. Later that year, the state added another one in southeast Houston.
“In Texas, we believe in property rights and nobody owns the air except the public. Nobody has a right to chemically alter it or to hurt somebody else, period. End of story.” - Bill White, former Houston mayor (2004-2010)
The new federal standards aimed to protect Americans’ health by setting limits on six airborne pollutants: ozone, sulfur dioxide, particulate matter, carbon monoxide, lead and nitrogen oxide.
Texas began its own monitoring network in 1974, five years before the EPA required them nationally. The Texas Air Control Board, TCEQ’s predecessor, launched a network of 214 sites with 36 continuous air samplers to measure pollution levels in Houston, Dallas, El Paso, Beaumont, San Antonio, Corpus Christi and Austin.
Today, the Texas air monitoring network is one of the largest in the country, with 228 air monitoring stations across the state, including about 47 in the Houston area. TCEQ said in an email that air monitoring stations are strategically placed across the state to assess air quality.
Four of those, including the one in Cloverleaf, are owned by Houston Regional Monitoring (HRM), a network of 30 petrochemical companies.
Smith, the HRM chairman, said that the industry-owned monitors were installed to help the industry obtain air quality information that would help them meet permit requirements and help cash-stripped TCEQ meet the need for more monitors.
The machines are expensive, some costing up to $500,000. And not all Texas counties have one — notably, few are located in the Permian Basin in West Texas, the nation’s biggest and most active oil-producing region — and not all measure the six pollutants targeted by the EPA, according to the TCEQ.
On the TCEQ’s website, a daily air forecast report shows ozone and particulate matter levels in Texas' metropolitan areas using a color-coded system — green, yellow and red. The agency’s geospatial database shows real-time data on the amount of pollutants in the air when users select an air monitor location.
But residents and environmental advocates say the state’s air information is hard for the average resident to interpret. The data is organized in spreadsheets and colorful maps — a sea of numbers with no context.
Ebrahim Eslami, a research scientist at Houston Advanced Research Center (HARC), points to air quality charts at his office in Spring, north of Houston. “It is really confusing,” Eslami said about navigating the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality’s website. “It’s a very, very tedious task even for me.”
Credit: Go Nakamura for The Texas Tribune
“Not even my wife, who has been exposed to several years of nerdy air quality talk during the last 10-11 years, knows how to read the quality data,” Ebrahim Eslami, a research scientist specializing in air quality at Houston Advanced Research Center, an independent research hub, said as he pointed to a number on TCEQ’s website. “The average person doesn’t know. There is no indication if 11 is bad or good or I don't know.”
Ebrahim Eslami said the local governments and environmental organizations are trying hard to cover a lot of gaps in air monitoring.
Credit: Go Nakamura for The Texas Tribune
In Cloverleaf, Lazo's home buzzed with energy on a December afternoon — all her children had gathered for the holidays and she’d put a towering silver and blue frosted Christmas tree in the living room.
Lazo was curious about how she could check the air quality outside. With guidance, she picked up her phone and entered the TCEQ air monitoring website for the first time, looking at the Texas map with raised eyebrows.
“I just see a bunch of little squares with colors,” Lazo said in Spanish. “I won’t know what it is if [TCEQ] doesn’t explain it to me.”
Lazo clicked on her neighborhood’s air monitor, then on a list of contaminants: benzene, 1,3 butadiene, ozone, toluene. The levels appeared on a graphic that looks like a speedometer, but they didn’t indicate whether those levels were bad or good.
“I don’t understand this at all,” Lazo said.
She said she has the right to this information and wishes it was presented like a daily weather report, something everyone can understand, “to be able to enjoy nature more with my loved ones. To be able to be in the fresh outdoors.”
Alina Lazo watches a video while her mother Cristina Lazo looks out her front door while talking on the phone at their home in Cloverleaf. Sometimes the wind brings “smells like chemicals” and “you can see the dust in the house and in the cars,” Lazo said.
Credit: Danielle Villasana for The Texas Tribune
The state’s air monitoring system has also failed Texans when they need pollution information the most — during industrial accidents near their homes. According to data compiled by the Coalition to Prevent Chemical Disasters, a group of environmental justice organizations, in 2023 Texas recorded 90 chemical incidents, including fires, explosions or toxic releases — the most of any state.
On March 17, 2019, towering flames and black smoke billowed from Intercontinental Terminals Company, a chemical tank farm in Deer Park, next to the Ship Channel. As firefighters struggled to extinguish the growing chemical fire, nearby residents wondered if it was safe to go outside.
City officials advised Deer Park residents to shelter indoors twice: for 18 hours immediately after the fire started and again three days later.
Harris County Commissioner Adrian Garcia wanted data from the state that could help answer residents’ questions. But the Deer Park air monitor closest to the fire, which TCEQ calls “one of the most comprehensive air monitoring stations in the TCEQ network,” did not gather data for cancer-causing chemicals during the first two days of the disaster because it was malfunctioning.
“Not even my wife, who has been exposed to several years of nerdy air quality talk during the last 10-11 years, knows how to read the quality data.” - Ebrahim Eslami, a research scientist at Houston Advanced Research Center
Cann, the TCEQ spokesperson, said a part of the monitor that reads and evaluates air quality was causing a series of data gaps and that system “required repair and quality control checks and calibrations to be performed.”
Garcia said the state left the county ill-prepared during a crisis and county officials didn’t feel they were being told everything they needed to know about the severity of the air pollution.
“I have absolutely zero confidence in TCEQ, regretfully,” Garcia said. “It's just been indicative that TCEQ tends to look out for industry more than they tend to look out for the community.”
About 11 hours after the fire erupted, TCEQ investigators began using handheld monitors to measure volatile organic compounds, hydrogen sulfide and carbon monoxide. In a timeline of events the agency submitted to state lawmakers a month later, investigators noted “slight odors, however, no readings of concern are detected.”
Five days later, EPA dispatched a mobile laboratory that roamed the area for the next two months. A 2023 Texas Tribune investigation found that dangerous levels of benzene remained in the air for weeks after public health measures were lifted, according to data captured from the mobile units.
Benzene is known to cause cancer after repeated exposure and can affect the central nervous system when inhaled in large quantities over a short period.
Hundreds of people went to mobile health clinics in Deer Park provided by the county, reporting symptoms including dizziness, a rapid heart rate and headaches — even after the fire was extinguished after four days.
On March 31, two weeks after the fire began, TCEQ and EPA inspectors with handheld devices recorded elevated benzene concentrations drifting through neighborhoods and near an elementary school.
The public was told nothing about the spikes until the next morning.
“Failures like that cannot happen during times of environmental disasters,” Air Alliance Houston, a local environmental group, wrote to TCEQ when ITC applied to renew its operating permit. “Community members must have a full understanding of what pollutants are in the atmosphere and the effects they can have on them.”
Residents turn to community monitoring
In Galena Park, Juan Flores, 46, said two major life events galvanized him to become an activist: his father died of a heart attack after years of working at a petrochemical facility and suffering from respiratory problems, and his only daughter, Dominique Soleil Flores, was born with teratoma, a rare type of cancerous tumor located around one of her kidneys.
Dominique had to go through rounds of chemotherapy and surgeries to remove the tumor. Today, the 8-year-old is cancer free, but Flores still worries about his family’s health — and the effects of living near petrochemical plants.
Flores, wearing a black polo with a gold chain around his neck, said he doesn’t trust government agencies to protect people’s health. When he’s called TCEQ or the city about strong chemical smells outside, he said it takes hours or days for anyone to respond — and by then the smell is usually gone.
Ten years ago, he joined Air Alliance Houston as an organizer teaching local residents about air quality. He and other organizers decided to install a community air monitoring network after the ITC fire, frustrated that TCEQ had not made air monitoring information readily available and accessible to the public.
An air quality monitor in a neighborhood in Galena Park. Organizers at Air Alliance Houston worked to install their own community air monitoring network because of frustrations with the public data provided by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality’s network.
Credit: Go Nakamura for The Texas Tribune
Community members prepare for a bike ride, organized by Air Alliance Houston, in Galena Park. The event is part of several educational tours to teach people about air pollution in the area.
Go Nakamura for The Texas Tribune
Flores and others asked homeowners, businesses, and churches in Galena Park if they could install monitors to measure particulate matter. The first was installed in 2020 and since then the group has installed nearly 30 in Galena Park, Channelview and other communities near the Ship Channel, spending about $300 on monitors that measure particulate matter and $11,000 on those that measure volatile organic compounds in the air, as well as nitrogen oxide and ozone.
Cloverleaf could be next.
“There's a big need in Cloverleaf to organize,” said Flores, who now works as the organization's community air monitoring program manager. “That community has been kind of neglected for years.”
The group posts the monitors’ data online using a color-coded system: green for good air quality, yellow for moderate — meaning it may be a concern for people with respiratory conditions — and red for very unhealthy.
“Education is the key,” Flores said. “They know there's a refinery there, but they don't know what it does. And they don't know what the health effects are.”
From April to December 2022, the organization's Galena Park air monitors recorded nitrogen dioxide levels more than 3,000 times above the EPA’s threshold for human safety. Nitrogen oxide can cause inflammation and damage to the respiratory system. The monitors also recorded ozone levels above the EPA’s ozone threshold more than 850 times.
“We definitely see red [high spikes] happening a lot,” said Anthony D’Souza, who works with Flores at Air Alliance Houston as a research and policy coordinator.
Flores leads residents and journalists on “toxic tours” in his pickup truck, driving through neighborhood streets where houses sit across a fence from towering refineries.
Last year, he led a tour where residents dressed up in their Halloween costumes and rode bikes through Galena Park and Jacinto City, visiting air monitors to learn about air pollution.
“[Air quality] is a hard subject,” Flores said. “When you talk to somebody about pollution, you're talking about ozone, you're talking about chemicals, people don't understand.”
Juan Flores’ only daughter was born with a rare cancerous tumor, an event that helped motivate him to become a community organizer. Now, as a program manager with Air Alliance Houston, Flores works with residents to teach them about air pollution.
Go Nakamura for The Texas Tribune
Participants of the bike ride make a stop on their tour at landfills created from dirt dredged during a ship channel expansion in the petrochemical corridor. There have been concerns about possible contaminants in the soil.
Go Nakamura for The Texas Tribune
Flores said the air data they collect is empowering, validating the concerns of many in his community. For example, at permit hearings where TCEQ seeks public comment on a company’s permit application, they can provide the number of times the community monitors have recorded red alerts and whether those correlated with the days they’ve felt sick.
Before, Flores said, they could only talk about their headaches, dizziness or shortness of breath. Now they can back up what they’re saying with numbers — although TCEQ dismisses their data because it doesn’t come from the state’s air monitors.
“It’s such an interesting thing to actually see data and to see the numbers, because it was always our word against [TCEQ],” Flores said. “Then we built this new air monitoring network, now we have our proof.”
Reporting team
Alejandra Martinez joined The Texas Tribune in the fall of 2022 as an environmental reporter. She’s covered the impacts of petrochemical facilities on Black and brown communities, including investigating a chemical fire at an industrial facility. Additionally, she has explored topics related to climate change, such as the health effects of extreme heat and how long periods of drought affect water resources in Texas. Alejandra was previously an accountability reporter at KERA, where she began as a Report for America corps member and then covered Dallas City Hall. Before that, she worked as an associate producer at WLRN, South Florida’s public radio station. Alejandra studied journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, and interned at KUT and NPR's Latino USA. She's a native of Houston and speaks fluent Spanish.
Wendy Selene Pérez is a freelance journalist with a two-decade career spanning various media outlets in Mexico, Argentina, and the United States. Her work focuses on social justice, victims of violence, government accountability, transparency, and immigration. Wendy’s articles have been featured in El País, Gatopardo, Proceso, The Baffler, Vice, and Al Día Dallas/The Dallas Morning News. She has held positions such as bureau chief of CNN Mexico, editor of Domingo magazine (El Universal), and multimedia editor of Clarin.com. Previously, she served as the chief multimedia editor of the newspaper Mural (Grupo Reforma). Wendy holds a Master’s Degree in Journalism from Diario Clarín-Universidad de San Andrés-Columbia University, with her thesis titled “La Tierra de las Fosas,” a data-driven journalistic investigation. She has been honored with the National Journalism Awards in Mexico (2019, 2022), the Walter Reuter German Journalism Award (2020), the Breach-Valdez Human Rights Award (2022, 2023), the Texas APME 2021 News Spanish-Language award, the ICFJ’s COVID-19 reporting story contest, and received an honorable mention in the Latin American Investigative Journalism Award (COLPIN, 2022).
Danielle Villasana is a photojournalist based in her hometown of Houston, Texas, focusing on human rights, gender, displacement, and health throughout the Americas. She’s the 2022 Alexia Grant Professional Winner, a National Geographic Explorer, Magnum Foundation awardee, Women Photograph grantee, IWMF fellow, and alumna of the Eddie Adams Workshop. With a strong belief in photography paired with education and community, she’s a co-founder of We, Women, and an Authority Collective board member, on The Everyday Projects’ Community Team, and a Photo Bill of Rights co-author. She’s also a member of Women Photograph, Diversify Photo, and Ayün Fotógrafas.
Go Nakamura began his photography journey as a wedding photographer in Honolulu, Hawaii in 2006. In 2009, he relocated to New York City and transitioned into news/documentary photography, freelancing with the New York Daily News in 2015. Since then, he has broadened his scope, freelancing for renowned outlets such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Thomson Reuters, Getty Images, Bloomberg Business, Texas Tribune, and Houston Chronicle.
Focused on addressing pressing social issues, Go's work aims to harness the power of visual imagery for maximum impact. His photography has garnered international acclaim, including awards such as Pictures Of The Year International (POYi) and Best Of Photojournalism (BOP). In 2021, he was part of the Getty Images team named as finalists for Feature Photography at the Pulitzer Prize.
Greta Díaz González Vázquez is an international multimedia journalist with experience reporting in Mexico and the U.S. She tells bilingual narrative stories through audio, video and photography with a focus on gender violence, science and marginalized populations. Originally from central Mexico, Greta has worked in public radio and has freelanced for nonprofit newsrooms. Her work has been recognized with numerous national and state awards in her home country.
Jimmy Evans is a documentary filmmaker and journalist as well as a graduate of the University of Florida. His films highlighting environmental issues have been featured at film festivals nationwide and on outlets such as PBS. Jimmy is currently an assistant video editor at Environmental Health News and his work focuses on environmental health stories in the Houston, Texas area.
A new report highlights the rapid expansion of petrochemical facilities along the Gulf Coast, drawing billions in tax breaks despite pollution concerns.
The Environmental Integrity Project found significant growth in plastics production facilities, with Texas leading in new developments and receiving substantial state tax abatements.
These facilities have repeatedly violated pollution permits, yet their financial incentives remain unscathed.
Public funds diverted to these corporations could have supported local education and public services, raising questions about the true cost of these investments.
Key quote:
"I think if companies can't obey the law they shouldn't be rewarded with taxpayer money,"
— Alexandra Shaykevich, Research Manager at the Environmental Integrity Project.
Why this matters:
A 2020 University of Texas study estimated that proposed petrochemical facilities could emit as much greenhouse gas as 131 coal-fired power plants by 2030, making up over 8% of U.S. emissions. Local residents face increased risks of exposure to air pollution, raising alarms among environmentalists and health advocates about the direction of energy infrastructure development and its implications for public health and safety
Los datos públicos de una red de monitores estatales del aire alrededor del Canal de Navegación de Houston son difíciles de interpretar y a menudo son insuficientes, dejando a vecindarios de mayoría latina, como Cloverleaf, sin saber si el aire que respiran es seguro.
While industry claims it could be part of a circular plastics economy, experts say that chemical recycling is extremely damaging to the environment and provides no real benefits.
Algoma Steel continues to exceed Canada’s standard air pollution limits for cancer-causing compounds and struggles with spills as it pushes toward a “green” makeover.