Texas Air Pollution

Texas Air Pollution

Houston’s East End looks and smells like hell or Mordor. Its small run down houses squeezed together on unpaved dirt streets hide in the interstices of land between one hulking oil refinery after another, built here because the area abuts the Houston Ship Channel. Texas Petrochemical, Goodyear, Shell, Monsanto, Exxon, and Mobil are here, 15 miles of flaring smokestacks, domes, train yards, and storage sheds.

A high school for poor Latino teenagers was recently built in the middle of this giant polluted complex, over strong local objections. It is named (ironically) the Cesar Chavez Environmental High School. Children living within two miles of this area have a 56 percent increased risk of contracting acute lymphocytic leukemia.

Port Neches, Texas is home to the nation’s largest producers of butadiene, the essential ingredient in synthetic rubber. The plants had been there since World War II, when the U.S. government set them up to produce synthetic rubber to replace the natural rubber that was increasingly in short supply. After the war, the plants were turned over to private corporations, and operated by the B. F. Goodrich and Texaco-Uniroyal companies. Gulf Oil owned a rubber plant in Port Neches that provided the butadiene feedstock. There are also oil refineries and chemical plants in the area.

So notorious is the cancer rate among graduates of the local high school that some residents refer to it as “Leukemia High.” Federal agencies have found butadiene to be a potent human carcinogen. The University of Texas Medical School in Galveston notes that the highest recorded levels of butadiene have been recorded in the Port Neches area.

Butadiene has not been removed from production because of politics and economics. "Because it is such a high production volume chemical, its removal would probably have a tremendous economic impact,” explains Dr. Ronald Melnick, the National. Institute of Environmental Health Science's expert in this chemical. A panel making recommendations to the U.S. EPA on regulating butadiene was stacked with so many members who had corporate connections that the situation triggered a Congressional investigation.

The legislators in Texas have historically been opposed to environmental regulation. In 2005, Representative Joe Barton, of Texas, introduced legislation to enable oil refineries to expand capacity and coal-fired power plants to upgrade their facilities without taking steps to curb air pollution. The bill would have weakened the Clean Air Act. “The entire bill is written for ExxonMobil,” said Representative Edward Markey, of Mssachusetts, who noted that refinery profits had doubled from the previous year.

Barton received $1.84 million in contributions from the nuclear, oil, gas and electric utility industries between 1997 and 2004, the most of any member of Congress.

The harm caused by pollution in Texas finds its most vulnerable victims in the children, whose lives may be shortened or irrevocably altered. You can read a story of one such child from Texas. Our book describes many similar problems across the United States.

*Additional detail and supporting evidence for statements above can be found in "Poisoned Profits", by Alice and Philip Shabecoff, published in 2008 by Random House.