Tag Archives: inequality

Season 1, Episode 25

On this episode of Free Range, Mike Livermore speaks with Jonathan Colmer, an Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia’s Department of Economics and the Director of the Environmental Inequality Lab. His research interests are in environmental economics, development economics, and the distributional impacts of environmental policy.

Colmer begins by discussing a recent paper of his that examines the distributional characteristics of air pollution in the United States and how they have changed over time. Tracking exposure temporally and spatially, they concluded that while there have been air pollution reductions in the last four decades, the disparities have persisted in the same affected areas. (0:40 – 4:15)

Livermore and Colmer discuss the implications of this work for understanding environmental inequality. Colmer explains that the proportional reductions have implications on the allocation of resources we expend on reducing pollution. He also note that reducing total pollution levels also reduces absolute disparities of racial gaps in air pollution. (4:16 – 13:00)

Livermore notes that addressing harms in areas with the highest pollution concentrations would provide the cheapest reductions and the most harm reduction benefits. The two discuss different policies to cut pollution and their distributional effects. (13:02 – 18:35)

Colmer notes that one limitation of his prior work is that they are measuring place rather than individual exposure. The Environmental Inequality Lab, which he directs, has the goal of moving from a place-based to a person-based understanding of environmental inequality. The lab is building a data infrastructure that provides detailed information on the distribution of exposure from many different environmental hazards. Colmer explains how they use confidential data from the U.S. Census Bureau and I.R.S. to deeper understand environmental inequality and the causes of these disparities. (18:40 – 26:15)

Livermore and Colmer discuss the idea of ecological fallacy in Colmer’s research, observing whether or not the inferences made about individuals using place-based data still hold strong when they move to the individual level. (26:20 – 30:57)

Colmer discusses the questions that arise about the causes of these air pollution disparities from an economic standpoint – is it income? Is it racial discrimination or other considerations? He discusses work in progress that shows how results on disparities differ between geographic-level results and individual-level results. (31:02 – 40:55)

The conversation segues from discussing the descriptive to the causal relationships with pollution. Colmer discusses a core causal question they are examining: how much does environmental inequality contribute to income inequality? (40:56 – 56:35)
Livermore closes the discussion by pointing out how historically, we focus on the primary benefit of air quality improvements by the reduction of mortality risk which affects a small concentrated category of people. However, the work Colmer is doing focuses on effects that are more widely shared over a larger population, which may have important consequences for how policies that address environmental pollution are perceived. (56:36 – 1:01:18)

Season 1, Episode 15

Transcription

On this episode of Free Range, Mike Livermore speaks with Kimberly Fields, who is an Assistant Professor at the University of Virginia’s Woodson Institute of African-American and African Studies. Her recent work has focused on environmental justice, race, and inequality at the state level.

The podcast begins with Professor Fields explaining why examining environmental policy at the state level is so important, emphasizing that many of the decisions that are made to implement federal policies are made by state legislatures. This results in a significant amount of variation between states not only in how aggressively they implement those policies, but also in the extent to which they are able to do so. Expanding on the variation between states, Fields finds that a number of factors can dictate how robustly a state will enforce environmental policies, from the prevalence of grass-roots activist groups in the state and the history of the state’s approach to environmental and social justice issues to the level of autonomy that a state regulatory agency has to implement federal policies. Fields also points out how disparities in equality and social justice often reflect disparities in environmental risk. (:44 – 16:30)

This leads to a conversation about how environmental advocacy compares with other forms of advocacy, and the challenges that smaller environmental advocacy groups have faced in their efforts to ensure that their concerns remain at the forefront of the legislative agenda. Important to this is the interaction between a state’s advocacy environment – how much support advocacy groups receive – and a state’s political attitude towards that advocacy – the extent to which the state legislature is open to working with advocacy groups. Professor Fields explains that partisanship has not, in her research, been a good indicator of how robust a state’s advocacy environment is. In fact, the more accurate indicator is the presence of significant minority populations in a state’s demographic make-up. Fields points to the Delta South as a region that has a strong culture of environmental justice advocacy, despite partisan politics that would suggest otherwise. This is the case for a number of reasons, from prominent politicians who are actively involved in advocating for environmental justice to a historical legacy of environmental advocacy in the South. (16:33 – 39:02)

Fields describes the state policy making process as one that is influenced heavily by local industries and the environmental concerns surrounding those industries. States also take differing approaches to race and environmental justice, with some states taking a very proactive approach to eliminating racial dimensions of environmental inequality and others adopting more neutral language. (39:08 – 46:59)

The conversation then expands into a broader discussion of the use race-focused language in environmental justice goals, why states might choose to utilize race-neutral language, and whether a race-neutral approach can adequately address the concerns of affected groups. (47:02 – 59:37)

The conversation concludes with a discussion of whether environmental justice issues at the state level reflect the same partisan polarization as is seen on so many issues at the national level. (59:41 – 1:05:29)