Which Came First, Coal-Fired Power Plants or Communities of Color? Assessing the Disparate Siting Hypothesis of Environmental Justice

Abstract

Although a considerable amount of quantities environmental justice research exists, most studies have focused on the current distribution of environmental hazards, leaving out discussion on how and why such injustices occur. Further, of the handful of studies that have examined the processes by which racial and socioeconomic disparities have emerged, the majority have focused e xclusively on the siting of hazardous waste Treatment, Storage, and Disposal Facilities (TSDFs), only a subset of all polluting facilities. This study is the first national - level longitudinal study using distance - based methods to examine the disparate siti ng hypothesis concerning coal - fired power plants (CFPPs) . The purpose of this study is to determine if there are current (2010) racial and socioeconomic disparities around U.S. CFPPs and if so, whether such disparities were present at the time of siting. I n particular, this study assesses whether there were differences in the patterns of disparate siting across decades prior to, during, and after the emergence of the modern environmental and environmental justice movements. Results show present - day (2010) r acial and socioeconomic disparities for existing CFPPs, and lend support for hypotheses that increased awareness and activism in the late 1980’s onwards, influence d CFPP siting in communities of color. However, race disparities independent of socioeconomic factors were found to be significant predictors of CFPP siting from 1965 to 1974 only, a smaller window than found by prior studies for TDSFs. Socioeconomic varia bles were significant independent predictors of facility siting in time periods between 1945 and 1954, 1965 and 1974, and 1984 and 1995. Keywords : siting, environmental justice, energy justice, coal - fired power plants