CASE STUDY: HOUSTON: HURT BY THE CAUSES AND SYMPTOMS OF CLIMATE CHANGE

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.

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