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The ruling all but kills a federal investigation of whether Louisiana broke the law by allowing petrochemical companies to build plants in a mostly-Black community.
A federal judge in Louisiana has blocked the federal government from investigating whether race should be considered as a factor in the enforcement of environmental laws, including the issuing of pollution permits.
The ruling from the U.S. District Court for Western Louisiana, issued late last month, makes permanent a hold on disparate impact assessments that was put in place back in January.
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The decision by Judge James Cain, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, effectively bars the Environmental Protection Agency from using Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, the agency’s best — and arguably only — enforcement mechanism for environmental justice issues.
At issue is the EPA’s action taken on a claim that Earthjustice, an environmental law organization, filed with the agency in 2022 on behalf of residents in St. John the Baptist parish — a community located in the heart of the state’s infamous Cancer Alley. Earthjustice wanted the EPA to investigate whether petrochemical corporations deliberately located a vast network of industrial facilities in a predominantly Black community, disparately harming the residents.
The landscape for the claim looked much more favorable then: the Biden administration and the EPA had taken a much more aggressive approach with environmental justice issues. A draft plan negotiated between the EPA and the state of Louisiana showed that there was the possibility of overhauling the pollution permitting process, so that the cumulative effect of an industry on a given area would be considered.
Things changed when then-state Attorney General Jeff Landry sued the EPA over its use of the disparate impact framework. He argued that Title VI should come into play only if an investigation found clear proof of overt racial discrimination.
In Landry’s argument, the federal government essentially would need to find indisputable evidence that a Louisiana official pushed the chemical companies to build in St. John’s Parish with the explicit intent of harming its Black residents.
After the lawsuit, the EPA dropped its investigation, as well as similar Title VI investigations in Republican-controlled states across the country. An April letter from 23 Republican state attorneys general called disparate impact “racial engineering,” and made it clear that Louisiana is not alone in its desire to quash Title XI investigations.
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While the new ruling only applies to Louisiana, other states will likely try to get similar protections from EPA investigations.
“Louisiana has given industrial polluters open license to poison Black and brown communities for generations, only to now have one court give it a permanent free pass to abandon its responsibilities,” Patrice Simms, Earthjustice’s vice president for healthy communities, said about the August ruling in a statement. “Louisiana’s residents, its environmental justice communities, deserve the same Title VI protections as the rest of the nation.”
Now, it seems more a question of whether environmental justice communities outside of Louisiana will be able to keep their Title VI protections too.
This story was published with permission from Word on Black.