Air Polluters Can't Ignore Citizen Science Anymore

really cruel mathematical concept. Think about it. If the average temperature of your microwave pizza is perfect, that sounds great, but it could also mean that parts of the pizza are still frozen and other parts are tongue meltingly hot. That's a lesson that I've learned the hard way multiple times.

Along those same lines, you may live in a state that meets the federal air quality standards on average, but if you live right next door to a factory that spews pollution twenty four seven, you might be getting exposed to wag way more toxins than the average person. The Federal Clean Air Act is supposed to account for this type of disparity, but it's the kind of law that's only as good as the data that you feed into it.

So now, as Bloomberg Laws Jennifer had Jazzy recently reported, some people who live adjacent to big sources of pollution in places known as fence line communities are taking matters into their own hands in using new inexpensive air monitoring devices to find out exactly how much pollution they're really exposed to. This has the potential to open up a Pandora's box of legal liability for the companies that operate

these industrial sites. And we'll get to that in a bit, But first I ask Jennifer to explain to me what fence line communities actually are and who lives there. Yeah. I mean these could be communities that are in proximity to a factory, industrial metal shredder plant. They could be on the border of an oil refinery. They could also be on the border of a highway. Fence Line communities, as a term of art, can mean any type of

community that is neighboring a major source of pollution. And as we know, these communities are largely low income, low wealth communities of color. That's interesting. I didn't realize that that it's not just communities next to a factory. So it could also be a highway, which, yeah, is a really big source of pollution, right. So I always thought that the Clean Air Act was really really strict in terms of like requiring the EPA to monitor these pollution

levels really closely in these communities. But you spoke with some people who said that it's actually not as strict as you would think, and not nearly strict enough. Can you explain that. Yeah, So the Clean Air Act has done marvelous things for our air quality, you know, since it was crafted, since it was finalized in the seventies, But it really only manages criteria air pollutants and hazardous air pollutants up to a certain degree. So it regulates

pollutants in the ambient air for states. So national ambient air quality standards will track criteria air pollutants like particulate matter and things like that on a statewide level, or hazardous air pollutants on a permit to permit level. But in terms of regulating hazardous air pollutants for certain fence line communities that are right on the border of these facilities, that's where the Clean Air Act kind of stops short.

So for a lot of these communities that may be in a state that is meeting ambient air quality standards national air quality standards. A lot of these communities are still arguing, well, yes, so our state might be in compliance, but we are on the border of a facility that's still emitting all of these toxic pollutants into our general facinity vicinity. So even though they may be within their permit requirements, they're still releasing a lot of stuff that's

affecting the surrounding community. Well right off the bat, I mean, I can just see some really obvious problems with that. Like for a state that's really big geographically, let's say Montana or something like that, it'd be really easy to meet air pollution standards for the entire state. But if you're living next to a huge emitter, that's still going to be a really big problem. And the according to the Clean Air Act, everything's fine. Am I getting that right?

Or am I mischaracterizing it? Yeah? It's It's more like, according to the Clean Air Act, you know, a state and or on a facility level, could be meeting their permit requirements to their national ambient air quality standards, But for these communities right on the borders of you know, facilities, refineries. Everything is not fine, even though you know, on a surface level, on a legal level, the Clean Air Act

is doing its job. And when we say everything is not fine, let's actually define what we're talking about here. I mean, you know, you mentioned particular matter. That's one air pollutant, but there are a lot of others. What are these pollution What are these air pollutants that we're talking about and what can they do to your health if you are exposed to too much of them? Yeah, there's so Under the Clean Air Act, they're kind of

pollutants are split into two major categories. There's hazardous air pollutants like benzine, things like that, and then criteria air pollutants particulate matter, ozone, smock, things like that. Depending on the pollutant, it does different things. So communities that are living on the fence line of facilities that say are emitting you know, particulate matter and benzine, like, we're looking at long term health effects and short term health effects

depending on what the chemical is. So long term health effects, we're looking at pulmonary problems, heart disease, things that you know folks go to a hospital for and you know, on a death certificate it says heart disease. But at the end of the day, they've been exposed over a long period of time to these chemicals that are regulated, but you know, within a certain community are still really concentrated.

That's a that's a really good point that you don't you don't read a lot of obituaries that say so and so died of air pollution. Yeah. Absolutely, And you know, as we know now, like air pollution kills millions of people a year all over the world, and short term health effects can range from stomach aches, nausea, headaches, trouble with vision, all kinds of all kinds of nasty stuff.

And you know it's also again you already mentioned this, but it bears repeating that the communities that live in these fence line areas are typically lower income, often minority communities that already have issues with access to healthcare. So this just can kind of compound those issues, right, absolutely,

cumulative effects. So let's get into your story. You know, we've talked about on this podcast before a very long time ago that air monitoring technology is getting cheaper and cheaper and more sophisticated and more sophisticated, and it sounds like communities, some of these fence line communities are taking this matter into their own hands and are gathering their own data. Can you talk a little bit about that. Yeah, So I spoke to Juan Floras, who's managing an air

monitoring network for airlines Houston for example. So that's an organization that's run out of Texas, and he is at the helm of this program where they're actually installing different types of purple air monitors and APIs air monitors all over all across five communities and like the Pasadena area Galena Park in Texas that are particularly Pasadena right on the border of refineries and you know, really polluting facilities.

And I think he would there was a quote in your story where he said that, you know, when he was growing up, they called Pasadena stinkad here, right, Yeah, And he mentioned that, you know, these facilities that are permitted to operate in this area under the Clean Air Act. You know, the all of the legal checks are, all of the legal boxes are checked. But you know, one day there's a flare or a big chemical release and the surrounding neighborhood can literally smell the chemicals in the air.

It's giving them headaches, it's giving their kids nausea. But you know, by the time he said that, by the time an official comes out sometimes oftentimes days later, there's no proof that, you know, a pollution spike occurred. And so this is kind of their way, he said, of putting the data back into their own hands and not only being able to use them for like future legal challenges.

That's all down the road, but you know, putting it into a dashboard where community members can actually see what's in their air and for them to be better informed themselves about what kind of things they're being exposed to. This opens up a whole host of questions. Let's start

with the legal questions. Can this be admitted into court like cold Could the people who live in these areas and are gathering these this data with their own error pollution monitoring, Could they go to court and either sue the companies who own the factories or sue the EPA and say the Clean Air Act is being violated here? Is that a thing? It could possibly be a thing,

but not quite the thing you just mentioned. I think we haven't well, we first of all have not seen this type of case or this type of data being used for that kind of thing. Yet one of the lawyers I spoke to is just like, this is a case by case basis kind of thing depending on how people use it. Theoretically, people could sue under nuisance law under the Clean Air Act. So this, you know, factories or facilities emissions are creating a nuisance in the surrounding area.

That's infringing on my quality of life kind of thing. Theoretically, you could have a community that is using really sophisticated monitoring technology on the fence line of these facilities and could compare that data that they were measuring ambiently in their own community with federal ambient air data, which is required under the Clean Air Act, like we discussed, and you know, if a facility was trying to come into the a new facility was trying to come into the

area and be like, we'd like a permit here, Theoretically they could bring that data to the EPA and say, well, you know, we're already faced with a lot of cumulative pollution impacts already. Here's the data we have compared, you know, our ambient data compared with federal ambient data. Yeah, I mean I think that it just seems like it's a whole new world now that getting air monitoring data doesn't

require like numerous PhDs. It's you can almost even like buy off the shelf technology and just sort of profit where you want it to be and get some pretty good quality data. That's what it sounds like, right in some cases. Yeah, but you know that's that is also the problem of it. Like you can, like people are more and more exposed to what they are exposed to. But quality control, I think in terms of the legal check challenges to bringing this kind of data, you're looking

at quality control challenges. A lot of lawyers that I spoke to mentioned, you know, how do you parse out attribution of these emissions in like the soup of ambient air. You've got a facility in between like a freeway and a refinery, and they're measuring ambient air in the community, and it's just all of the pollutants from both sources. How do you use that data against like a single source when a lot of sources are contributing to a

pollution in an area. So there are a lot of challenges and that will need to be worked out, I think in court for this kind of thing. That's a really good point that I hadn't thought about that a lot of times. We're not just talking about a fence line community. We're talking about a fences line community because there are multiple sources of pollution that are affecting this one community. So yeah, that can be really really hard

to say this is the cause of the pollution. Tell me about the reaction to this from the indust from from industry. I guess you know, I think you quoted one person is saying that, you know, this is just going to be a new normal. Like we have this, people are going to be able to get this data. We can't stop them. We're just going to have to sort of address it and live with it. That the idea that we can dismiss this data out of hand

is ridiculous. Yeah, it's well, you know, EPA, for its part, is has mentioned community air monitoring as a an initiative that can be pursued as part of its environmental justice goals. So they just released I think like twenty million dollars in grant funding this week for community air monitoring projects for instance. I can't speak for industry, but you know, the lawyers that I spoke to said, you know, this

is kind of an inevitable problem people are already. One lawyer mentioned that he's had folks bring in like wristband monitor data that actually like cold data from their personal ambient air and brought that into litigation things like that.

But you know, and yet another source I spoke to is like it kind of behooves industry to just start doing this work themselves, not only because it's an inevitability, because it's just something that a lot of people are doing now you can get purple air monitor sensors on Amazon, but it's also just you know, being good stewards of the area that you're in by you know, having a firm handle on your emission's profile and not contributing to

these cumulative effects that are you know, devastating communities that are again in areas that maybe under Clean Air Act compliance but are really suffering like from source specific pollution that's just not going anywhere. And then finally, one last thing I wanted to ask you about is the Biden administration. You just mentioned that the EPA has released some grant money for to help sort of citizen scientists do this

kind of thing. Does that indicate that the Biden administration is in favor of this, that they want more data out there, they want more local monitoring. Because I could also see that the EPA would not be thrilled with this because they do not they no longer have the monopoly on data about air quality. What is the EPA and the Biden administration's stance on all of this data.

I am not going to speak for EPA and the Biden administration on their stance, but I think in supporting this kind of work, it's it's not any kind of violation of the Clean Air Act because again, the Clean Air Act doesn't cover this kind of like source by source specific monitoring. It's not that they're, you know, relegating their legal duties under the Clean Air Act to someone

else kind of thing. So, in terms of good ways to enforce environmental justice priorities, community air monitoring, particularly with an emphasis on letting people know what is in their air, like giving citizens like more an idea of what they're exposed to on a day to day basis, makes total sense.

So I think, yeah, initiatives like the community air monitoring funding, and I think part of some of that funding is also going to go to like local air agencies doing that kind of work and you know, cooperating with tribes and communities and organizations to do that kind of stuff. So that makes sense. I guess it's, you know, from the EPA's perspective, it's like, we don't need to be

the only ones who can monitor air quality. In fact, it actually takes a lot of the burden off of us if we can have you know, everyone monitoring their quality, even on their with wrist watches you know that monitor air quality. So it's I guess EPA is is you know, maybe their perspective is the more the better, the more people know the better. Certainly I think everyone can agree on that. All right, Well, that was Jennifer Hejazi speaking

with us here at Bloomberg Law World headquarters. Thank you Jennifer talking too. It's a really pretty sure Thanks David. And that's if today's episode of Parts Pervilion. If you want more environmental news, check us out on Twitter. We use a pretty easy to remember handle. It's just at environment Just that I am at David B. Schultz. That's b as in burning your tongue on pizza. Today's episode

of Parts Pervilion was produced by myself, David Schultz. Parts Pervilion was created by Jessica Coombs and Rachel Dagle and is edited by Rebecca Baker and Sean McCutcheon, and our executive producer is Josh Block. Thanks everyone for listening. You don't need to be a judge to be interested in our nation's laws and legal institutions, just like you don't need to have a law degree to be curious about the inner workings of courts, law firms, and law schools.

That's where we come in. My name's Adam Allington and I'm the host of Uncommon Law, a podcast from the Bloomberg industry group. Uncommon Law is where public policy, storytelling, and the law are combined. We explore big topics ranging from tech policy to free speech, to race and gender diversity. So please give us a listen. You can subscribe and download today. Just search for Uncommon Law wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks so much.