San Joaquin Valley Air District protects polluters, fails to prioritize public health | Opinion

You know that bad dream when you’re hurrying to get somewhere but keep encountering obstacles that prevent you from reaching your destination? You wake up tense, stressed and likely unable to get back to sleep? That’s how it feels to work for more than two decades on a slew of air pollution clean-up plans that, time and again, fail to meet deadlines to clean up the air for Valley breathers.

One fundamental flaw lies with the very regulatory system responsible for protecting our communities from pollution: The San Joaquin Valley Air District is captured by the very industries it’s supposed to regulate, creating an inherent conflict of interest. Many board members have gotten to their positions due to development, oil or agriculture, making them inherently more sympathetic to these industries’ needs. Our communities have endured systematic environmental injustices over the last several decades. Not only do they have to deal with industries that are killing them slowly via polluted air, but they must also suffer the negligence of bureaucratic bodies such as the Valley Air District.

Opinion

Along with failed clean-up plans, the Valley Air District has spent billions of dollars on incentives to the region’s biggest polluters, including industrialized agriculture and the oil industry. Further, the Emission Reduction Credit program run by the Valley Air District has been proven insolvent, according to the state’s 2020 program review; this system created loopholes that subsidize the oil industry through cheap credits that are purchased instead of directly controlling pollution on site, perpetuating harm in some of our most polluted neighborhoods.

Despite these egregious issues, the Valley Air District keeps pointing the blame for bad air quality at everyone but themselves, blaming mobile sources and emissions traveling into the Valley from the Bay Area or across the ocean from China.

Do these things contribute to poor air quality? Of course. But that isn’t an excuse to ignore the ongoing pollution from stationary sources that fall directly within the Valley Air District’s authority to regulate. Whether through the state’s new Community Air Protection Program or updated lists of Best Available Control Technology, the district has missed opportunity after opportunity to do what’s right for Valley communities.

To add insult to injury, the Valley Air District regularly pays for television commercials and billboards imploring residents to “make one change” to clean up the air. But where is the accountability from the Valley Air District and the large polluting industries they regulate? The agency continues to perpetuate misinformation or partial analyses that present scientific data — like the contributions of soil to nitrogen oxides, a precursor to ozone and particle pollution — as inconclusive. The Air District fails to use regulatory monitors or the network of monitors deployed under the Community Air Protection Program to test their assumptions. Instead, they move monitors to new locations when the readings at a site get too high.

The San Joaquin Valley Air District is fundamentally failing to prioritize public health and instead is protecting polluters.

The Governing Board of the Valley Air District should more closely reflect the population it serves: Black and Indigenous Peoples, people of color and low-income communities. The Central Valley Air Quality Coalition has worked for years to make the board more inclusive, but more reform is needed. Youth and environmental justice community members should be added.

The Valley Air District must account for and correct historical failures with their Emission Reduction Credit system. They should shift to an enforcement rather than an incentive-based approach to regulation, and improve their analysis of impacts, including civil rights in their decision making. These steps are not a cure all, but would be crucial steps in the right direction — steps that are urgently needed given rapidly accelerating impacts from human caused climate change such as extreme heat and drought.

The San Joaquin Valley can have a healthy, sustainable and caring economy that benefits low-income households by investing in strategies that improve quality of life in the most impacted priority neighborhoods. The Valley Air District and local governments across our region could invest more funding into things like building electrification and weatherization, urban greening and ecosystem restoration and the development of affordable and accessible public transport and electric vehicles. The district and partner agencies could focus on enforcement at the largest stationary and area-wide sources of pollution. Public health impacts and social costs of pollution could be included in analysis of any proposed expansions of or newly permitted projects in the region.

Help Valley communities stop reliving this bad dream and take action so we can wake up with cleaner air for all.

Catherine Garoupa, PhD, is the executive director of the Central Valley Air Quality Coalition. Juan Flores is a community organizer with the Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment