The refinery shown in your picture is just one of dozens along the gulf coast from Louisiana to Corpus Christi in south Texas. I’ve travelled the 225 corridor starting just outside downtown Houston where the petrochemical factories are. The take the chemicals from the refineries and process them further, making more dangerous stuff. The communities directly surrounding this area are poor, typically Latino and black. I’ve driven to Lake Charles Louisiana where many more petrochemical factories are, owned by US-Korean-Japanese-European consortiums. The five years before covid saw over one hundred billion dollars being built. Typically these areas are poor and out of site.
The problem is horrific toward the immediately surrounding communities, but bad for the planet in general. Yet impossible to dismantle, given that the tremendous amount of raw material is in everything. Fertilizer even comes from these such plants, so it’s a critical element for food. It can only be solved by the government offering to buy and install chemical scrubbing and injecting filters on the smoke stacks. Is the industry to blame? Partly.
But in this case the government has to not only regulate, since it has failed to, but intervene on behalf of the human race. We need to stop heaping blame on the industry who make all the stuff we demand and use. And instead be realistic and spend one hundred billion to just install the equipment to capture and clean the dirt air that is emitted. The industry has a “natural right” to resist regulations and solutions that are costly and hurt their bottom line. The government does not. One hundred billion may sound like a lot, but remember the Biden administration has spent one hundred and eighteen billion on the war in the Ukraine, and for some reason the Ukrainians are still short on weapons. If we have that much to spend on a foreign war, then we have that much to spend to become leaders in clean air technology.
Is this solution “government intervention”? Is air not a public good? We have no problem being taxed for local, state, and federal officials to build roads “for the public good,” or as the founders noted in an early document, “the general Welfare.” So why should we have a problem paying for one of the most precious resources of all, the air we breath?
Yes, we should pay also to move people damaged by this from these concentrated areas of poverty out and paying for lifetime health care for them. I don’t have a problem with that aspect of addressing the systemic racism they’ve been subjecting to. It’s just that I have a bigger problem, breathing clean air.
