by David Wojick, CFACT, ©2021
(May 7, 2021 — Biden’s so-called environmental justice push is going to bring on a big wave of bogus research. A really big report just came out so I want to chop on it a bit. Not just for its specific fallacies, but also as typical of what we are going to see a lot of. As with the climate scare, there is a careful combination of bad modeling plus goofy statistics.
In fact the term “environmental justice” just means unhappy environmental statistics with a racial or ethnic focus. That the situation described is somehow deliberately unjust is assumed but often false. It certainly is false in this case. The concept of environmental injustice tends to be more emotional than rational.
In this case the Washington Post’s screaming headline is typical: “Deadly air pollutant ‘disproportionately and systematically’ harms Americans of color, study finds“. The fine print sub-headline summarizes the supposed science: “Black, Latino and Asian Americans face higher levels of exposure to fine particulate matter from traffic, construction and other sources“.
The research report in question is “PM2.5 polluters disproportionately and systemically affect people of color in the United States” by Assistant Professor Christopher Tessum et al. It appears in Science Advances, the open access adjunct to the once prestigious Science magazine, which is now fully climate alarmist. Environmental justice alarmism is the new wave.
There are three central issues here: (1) harm, (2) disproportionately and (3) systematically. Let’s look at each in turn.
The supposedly deadly pollutant here is not a substance, just a size. It is called fine particulates, or more technically PM2.5. Anything smaller than 2.5 microns is included, which is so small it is invisible. Natural cases include viruses, bacteria, and ordinary dust. Your dust cloths and sweeper bag are full of it. Human sources include soot from combustion and dust from construction. There are also a host of large molecules that form in the air via chemical reactions with emitted gasses. These can be either human or natural, such as the vast quantities of volatile organic compounds produced by forests.
Alarmists claim that PM2.5 is deadly, but skeptics say this is simply false. One of the leading critics is Steve Milloy, founder of the famous JunkScience.com blog. Milloy even has a great book on PM2.5, titled: “Scare Pollution: Why and How to Fix the EPA“.
Here is a succinct description: “The U.S Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) claims that outdoor air kills hundreds of thousands of Americans every year. EPA has used this claim to: wreck the coal industry; justify expensive and job-killing air quality and climate rules; and to scare Americans about the air they breathe. Milloy not only debunks the outrageous EPA’s claims and exposes them as rank scientific fraud in no uncertain terms, but offers a roadmap for fixing the rogue and out-of-control EPA.” Note that EPA funded the study in question here.
The reported research is not about harm, but the harm hype makes it potentially very dangerous as far as policy goes. What Tessum et al claim to do is look at exposure to human caused PM2.5, specifically exposure on the basis of race and ethnicity. They then claim to find that exposure levels are disproportionately high among the three nonwhite groups analyzed — Blacks, Latinos and Asians — when compared to Whites. They even do this for various specific types of sources of PM2.5.
Their goal is impressive but it is far from clear that they achieve it. Just as with a lot of climate studies, this looks more like speculation presented as established fact. I expect a lot of so-called environmental justice studies are going to look like this. Let’s look at some of the problems.
Read the rest here.
David Wojick, Ph.D. is an independent analyst working at the intersection of science, technology and policy. For origins see http://www.stemed.info/engineer_tackles_confusion.html For over 100 prior articles for CFACT see http://www.cfact.org/author/david-wojick-ph-d/ Available for confidential research and consulting.