Shocking: New Research Shows Pollution Inequality in America Even Worse Than Income Inequality

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http://www.alternet.org/environment/shocking-new-research-shows-pollution-inequality-america-even-worse-income-inequality



spoke to Boyce about his research and the impact of environmental inequality on politics, education, economics, and the shape of our society.

Lynn Parramore: What does your recent work add to the growing body of research on inequality and pollution?

James K. Boyce: We’ve been working with these data for several years now in a collaborative research project with researchers with University of Michigan, the University of Southern California, and several other institutions, and we’ve done a variety of studies that look, in particular, at patterns of environmental injustice in the U.S. along the lines of disproportionate exposure of people of color and low-income communities.

What’s new is that we developed three different inequality measures and applied these both at the level of individual states and at the level of the 435 congressional districts in order to get a sense of how unequally exposure to industrial air toxins is distributed in these two political jurisdictions. To the best of my knowledge, no one has ever done that.

In addition to looking the ratios of exposures of people of color versus whites and of people living below the federal poverty line versus the non-poor, we also developed an environmental version of the Gini coefficient, which basically ranks the population, in this case from the people with the cleanest air to the people with the dirtiest air, and measures how unequally air quality is distributed in the states and congressional districts. That was a new contribution.

LP: What stood out to you in the results?

JKB: One of the real take-home findings is that if you look at how unequally environmental quality is distributed in the U.S., it actually makes inequality of the distribution of income look relatively modest. I wasn't entirely surprised to find that air quality is distributed even more unequally than income, but I was surprised at the magnitude of the difference. It’s really striking.