Abstract
Under Executive Order 12898, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) must perform environmental justice (EJ) reviews of its rules and regulations. EJ analyses address the hypothesis that environmental disamenities are experienced disproportionately by poor and/or minority subgroups. Such analyses typically use communities as the unit of analysis. While community-based approaches make sense when considering where polluting sources locate, they are less appropriate for national air quality rules affecting many sources and pollutants that can travel thousands of miles. We compare exposures and health risks of EJ-identified individuals rather than communities to analyze EPA’s Heavy Duty Diesel (HDD) rule as an example national air quality rule. Air pollutant exposures are estimated within grid cells by air quality models; all individuals in the same grid cell are assigned the same exposure. Using an inequality index, we find that inequality within racial/ethnic subgroups far outweighs inequality between them. We find, moreover, that the HDD rule leaves between-subgroup inequality essentially unchanged. Changes in health risks depend also on subgroups’ baseline incidence rates, which differ across subgroups. Thus, health risk reductions may not follow the same pattern as reductions in exposure. These results are likely representative of other national air quality rules as well.
Highlights
Must perform environmental justice (EJ) reviews of its rules and regulations
We focus on race and ethnicity in our EJ analysis of the Heavy Duty Diesel (HDD) rule, with the recognition that the method we describe could be used with other categorizations
EJ analyses address the hypothesis that environmental disamenities are experienced disproportionately by poor and/or minority subgroups
Summary
―Environmental justice‖ (EJ) has become a pressing social, scientific, and political issue in the U.S. The issue of location decisions by particular emissions sources is less relevant In this context, the questions of primary interest are whether the members of one EJ subgroup are exposed to higher ambient pollutant concentrations as compared to the members of other subgroups, and whether a national air quality rule will benefit some subgroups disproportionately. We extend the methods in these papers to demonstrate the insights that may be gained about the EJ questions relevant to benefits assessment of national air quality rules by carrying out a distributional analysis of exposures and health risks. This analysis consists in comparing EJ subgroup-specific distributions over individuals. The methods that we propose for distributional benefits analyses of national air quality rules are not intended to answer the question of why there are differences in the levels of air pollution to which different subgroups are exposed, but only whether there are differences
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