The
torrential downpours and violent winds of Hurricane Harvey struck Houston,
Texas in August and September 2017. Harvey killed at least 68 people and
displaced over one million,leaving approximately 200,000 damaged homes along
its 300- mile trail. Damages from the hurricane tallied an estimated $125
billion. The aftermath is still being felt through the region.
Environmental
racism exacerbates the pain caused by natural disasters by disproportionately affecting low-income communities of color close to industrial
sites. In the wake of Harvey, these communities were exposed to increased
levels of toxic chemicals from Houston’s superfund sites, chemical plants, and
oil refneries during the storms. Houston is an industrial hub with a busy ship channel,
in a state that’s home to 30 percent of the country’s oil refning capacity.
According to the Environmental Defense Fund, Hurricane Harvey causeddamaged
refneries and chemical facilities to release nearly sixmillion pounds of
cancer-causing chemicals into the air.
Combining
petrochemical production with hurricanes is a deadly mix, as seen by the Arkema
plastics plant explosion during Hurricane Harvey. Harvey’s impact surpassed the
most extreme scenario the plant had prepared for and left it flooded with no way
to prevent more serious fres.
As the
toxic waters receded, these communities — who for decades have faced long-term
exposure to deadly pollution from the fossil fuel industry — found themselves
also grappling with the effects of the extreme
weather that this industry causes.
Moreover,
many of these environmental justice communities cannot get assistance to face
the damage wrought by these storms. In Houston, the city’s undocumented
immigrant population of half a million people feared seeking help from shelters
and public assistance.53 This serves as a reminder that climate change
mitigation must be paired with a just recovery for all impacted by the symptoms
of a warming climate, such as Hurricane Harvey.
As
global temperatures increase, storms like Hurricanes Harvey, Katrina, Irma, Maria,
and Sandy will become even more intense. It can take decades for communities
and municipalities to recover from these storms. The country pays a high price,
both in human lives and in dollars, for the effectsof climate change: the U.S. National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration deemed 2017 the costliest year for weather disasters
in U.S. history. The price tag was a staggering $306.2 billion, which broke
2005’s previous record of $214.8 billion.
Even as
the impacts of climate change become increasingly apparent, big banks poured
$345 billion into climate-changing extreme fossil fuels from 2015 to 2017. If banks
like China Construction Bank, RBC, JPMorgan Chase, and HSBC continue at these
levels of fnancing for extreme fossil fuel projects and companies, they must
reckon with their complicity in the increased social and economic impacts of
climate change, which hit certain environmental justice communities “frst and
worst.
DOWNLOAD E-BOOK: CLICK HERE
No comments:
Post a Comment