New research released on Tuesday shows that in a very short amount of time, communities in the shadow of the fossil fuel plants can begin to see health benefits—if those fossil fuel plants are closed down. Inside Climate News reports that a new study “found that the rate of premature births dropped from 7 to 5.1 percent after the plants were shuttered, between 2001 and 2011. The most significant declines came among African American and Asian women.” This study goes onto the mountain of accumulating evidence showing how air quality, amongst other things, is an enormous factor in our public health.
Using birth records from the California Department of Public Health, the researchers found mothers who lived within 5 kilometers, 5-10 kilometers and 10-20 kilometers of the eight power plants. The women living farthest away provided a control group, since the authors assumed their exposure would be minimal.
The authors controlled for many socioeconomic, behavioral, health, race and ethnicity factors affecting preterm birth. "That could account for things like Obamacare or the Great Recession or the housing crisis," Casey said.
The study found that the women living within 5 kilometers of the plants, those most exposed to the air pollution, saw a significant drop in preterm births.
A big part of that is environmental racism. Communities of color are usually on the front lines of our worst environmental abuses. Studies come out every few weeks showing how people of color are the first to receive the results of our country’s greed-driven deregulations. The majority of Californians living in close proximity to its oil industry are people of color.
The Trump administration’s insistence in attacking all of the clean air policies across our country is not simply craven because of its naked greed, it’s the beginnings of a public health crisis that the Republican Party is not interested in handling on any level. The importance of the study showing these health benefits in California is that Trump’s EPA has targeted the world’s fifth or sixth largest economy as the battleground for so much of its environmental rollbacks.
Environmental justice is social justice and racial justice. These things cannot be separated.