The Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency has revoked a 2009 finding that concluded climate change poses a danger to public health, and public health experts said the change would likely worsen health risks for people who already face the highest exposure to pollution. In Louisiana, residents describe living alongside fossil fuel and petrochemical facilities as a routine health hazard, and advocates said the regulatory shift could deepen disparities in who bears the greatest consequences.
In a stretch of Louisiana described as home to about 170 fossil fuel and petrochemical plants, public health experts and local residents said premature death is an everyday reality for people living nearby, in an area widely known as “Cancer Alley.” Gary C. Watson Jr., a majority Black resident of St. John the Baptist Parish about 30 miles outside of New Orleans, described the toll on his family, saying “Most adults in the area are attending two to three funerals per month,” and adding that in recent years “at least five relatives have died” from cancer.
Experts and advocates said the endangerment finding’s revocation is likely to affect communities beyond Louisiana but will probably reinforce patterns that already leave some neighborhoods more vulnerable. They pointed to research showing that people who are poor and Black, Latino and other racial and ethnic groups often face higher exposure to pollution sources and have fewer resources to protect themselves or recover from health impacts tied to climate-driven extreme weather, heat and flooding.
The regulatory finding, made in 2009, treated carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases as a public health danger, which in turn supported tighter pollution regulation and contributed to cleaner air in some communities, experts said. This month, the EPA overturned that “endangerment finding,” according to the report, removing a cornerstone for regulations aimed at addressing climate pollution.
Public health experts said the finding’s repeal would likely mean more illness and death, particularly for “overburdened communities,” which Matthew Tejada, a senior vice president for environmental health at the Natural Resources Defense Council and a former EPA deputy with the office for environmental justice, described as “typically communities of color, Indigenous communities and low-income communities.” Tejada said the protections would not be replaced in a way that prevents the most exposed neighborhoods from suffering disproportionately.
Hilda Berganza, climate program manager with the Hispanic Access Foundation, also warned that the people closest to the sources of pollution would feel the effects first, saying: “Communities that are the front lines are going to feel it the most. And we can see that the Latino population is one of those communities that is going feel it even more than others because of where we live, where we work.”
The report also cited research that attempts to quantify uneven harm from pollution and heat. It described a study published in November finding that more than 46 million people in the U.S. live within a mile of energy infrastructure such as oil wells, power plants or oil refineries, and said the study found that “persistently marginalized” racial and ethnic groups were more likely to live near multiple such sites, with Latinos having the highest exposure.
The report further said that, in a 2021 EPA report no longer on the agency’s website, the agency estimated that for a 2-degree Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) rise in global warming, Black people would be 40% more likely to live in places with the highest projected rise in deaths from extreme heat, and Latinos would be 43% more likely to live where labor hour losses were expected to be highest because of heat. It also described research by Julia Silver, a senior research analyst at the University of California, Los Angeles’ Latino Policy and Politics Institute, finding that Latino communities in California had more days of extreme heat annually than non-Latino white neighborhoods, and that air quality in those areas was poor at about double the rate, with asthma-related emergency room visits occurring at twice the rate.
Armando Carpio, a pastor in Los Angeles, said he has seen health problems among his mostly Latino parishioners, many of whom he described as working outdoors in extreme heat or living near polluting freeways. Carpio said, “We’re regressing,” and added that the impacts “really affects us,” describing cases that included asthma in children and dementia among elders, which he linked to exposure to air pollution.
Experts told the Associated Press that quantifying the exact additional number of deaths or illnesses tied to the endangerment finding’s revocation may be difficult, but they said the impacts would be significant. Sacoby Wilson, a University of Maryland professor and executive director of the nonprofit Center for Engagement, Environmental Justice and Health INpowering Communities, said the rollback could produce “statistically significant increases in excess morbidity and mortality” tied to climate impacts and health effects associated with pollution that travels alongside climate-related emissions, known as co-pollutants.
In addition to health concerns, Beverly Wright, founding director of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice in New Orleans, said four Black communities in Cancer Alley no longer exist due to the expansion of industrial facilities, and she said the repeal would bring more pollution, higher cancer rates and more extreme weather, along with the disappearance of more historic communities. Wright said the rollback “has us going in the wrong direction, and our communities are now at greater risk.”
The Trump administration said the endangerment finding harms industry and the economy. It also described the finding as a “scam,” according to the report, despite studies that experts say contradict that characterization. The report said that on Wednesday, a coalition of health and environmental groups sued the EPA over the revocation, calling it unlawful and harmful.