Lylla Younes, Grist

Despite war at home, Palestine arrives at global climate conference

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Hadeel Ikhmais left her home in the Palestinian city of Bethlehem at 5 a.m. on Tuesday to catch her 5 p.m. flight to Dubai. Ikhmais is the head of the climate change office at the Palestinian Environmental Quality Authority, or EQA, and for months she and her colleagues had been planning to attend COP28, the annual United Nations climate conference taking place in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, this year. Encouraged by the fact that an Arab nation was hosting the conference for the second year in a row, the Palestinian government had paid the United Nations tens of thousands of dollars to secure a pavilion for the first time ever. Pavilions serve as spaces for press conferences, delegate meetings, and venues to showcase a country’s climate priorities to COP attendees. Palestinian delegates spent months designing visuals for the pavilion, securing funds for travel, and preparing materials for the conference. Nearly 50 delegates planned to attend.

Then, on October 7, Hamas launched an assault on towns and villages in southern Israel, and the Israeli military responded with a bloody bombing campaign across Gaza.

Overnight, traveling to Dubai became more dangerous. Bethlehem is located in the West Bank, an area of Palestine that has been under Israeli military occupation since 1967. The region does not have an airport, and Ikhmais would have to make the trek to the Queen Alia International Airport in Amman, Jordan, about 60 miles away. The journey to Jordan had always been exhausting, but after October 7, the Israeli checkpoints that dotted the road to the border became treacherous. Lines were long, travelers were forced to wait for hours, Israeli soldiers conducted intrusive physical searches, and rumors were swirling that the Israeli government might close the checkpoints. Being out in the streets at all was frightening; In recent weeks, the Israeli military has killed civilians in raids on the occupied West Bank.

“I was scared to leave my house because to go to another city during these situations, it’s not an easy thing,” said Ikhmais. “You are going to travel somewhere that you don’t know what is going on.”

Ultimately, Ikhmais passed through the Jericho checkpoint and successfully made her flight to Dubai. In total, fewer than 10 Palestinian delegates made it to Dubai, each facing long and challenging journeys. Her colleague Ahmed Abuthaher, for instance, had a similar experience the previous day coming from Ramallah.

But both Ikhmais and Abuthaher said that despite the daunting travel challenges, it was important to have Palestinian representation at COP28. Gaza is experiencing the impacts of sea-level rise on its Mediterranean coast, and Palestinian farmers are contending with flooding, drought, and drastic fluctuations in temperatures. Additionally, Palestine’s recognition as a member under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC, and its subsequent participation in COPs is an assertion of its statehood.

The entrance to Palestine’s pavilion at COP28 in Dubai. Grist / Naveena Sadasivam

“Even with the difficulties that we face on the ground — the war in Gaza or the Israeli aggression in the West Bank — we are part of the world,” said Abuthaher, who is a director general at the EQA and Palestine’s lead contact on climate change with the United Nations. “And even though our emissions are very, very limited, we are part of this fight. We have to do our part to help others combat climate change.”

That Palestine is even a member of the UNFCCC is the result of a long and hard-fought battle. The government was interested in signing onto the treaty in the late 2000s, but its experience with a different arm of the U.N. held back its admission. It hit a roadblock in 2011 when UNESCO, the U.N. agency that aims to further international peace and security through the promotion of education and culture, voted overwhelmingly to admit Palestine as a full member. In response, the United States withdrew a huge sum of funding from UNESCO, citing a 1994 law that bars Congress from providing capital to any U.N. body that “grants full membership as a state to any organization or group that does not have the internationally recognized attributes of statehood.”

After the U.S.’s decision, “We were very reluctant to join any international platform,” so as “not to cause any harm to developing countries who were looking for that kind of financial support,” said Nedal Katbeh-Bader, who worked as an advisor at the EQA from 1999 until his retirement earlier this year.*

Nonetheless, the agency recognized the importance of joining the UNFCCC. Entering the treaty would afford Palestine equal recognition among the world’s countries and, Katbeh-Bader emphasized, unlock funding opportunities for climate adaptation efforts that the EQA was struggling to get off the ground. In addition to the restrictions imposed by the Israeli occupation, Palestine’s attempts to thwart climate change have been stymied by its location in the Eastern Mediterranean, where temperatures are rising at almost twice the rate of the global average. With the UNESCO fiasco a fresh memory, environment officials in Palestine began meeting with other governments to build a case for admission to the UNFCCC. They won the support of Arab states and, in the lead-up to COP21 in Paris, the French government.

Shortly after the Paris Agreement was adopted in December 2015, establishing the goal of keeping the global average temperature below 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels, Palestine was admitted to the UNFCCC. “The French presidency helped us a lot,” recalled Abuthaher. “After the finalization of the COP, we submitted our application, and there was no objection.”

Palestine was the first U.N. member from the Arab world to sign the agreement, and among the first 15 globally. When its membership was announced in early 2016, a State Department official said that the decision would not impact the U.S.’s participation in the UNFCCC. But upon joining, Palestinian officials immediately ran into challenges trying to secure funding.

Developing nations often rely on global institutions funded by wealthy nations to finance climate projects. One of the main climate funds is the Global Environment Facility, an intergovernmental body headquartered in Washington, D.C. The U.S. is its biggest shareholder. In the summer of 2016, EQA Chair Adalah Atteerah contacted the Global Environment Facility’s then-CEO, Naoko Ishii, to request funding, but months passed with no response. Repeated attempts to reach the organization over the following year were ignored. (The Global Environment Facility declined to comment in time for publication, citing time constraints.)

“We have two challenges facing us to be able to implement these climate action plans: the Israeli Occupation and the lack of financial resources,” wrote Atteerah in a letter to world leaders before COP24 in Poland in 2018. Palestine had signed onto the UNFCCC in “good faith,” she said, but the funding it needed to fulfill its duties to the convention was being withheld by “some entities.”

All UNFCCC members are required to develop a document called a Nationally Determined Contribution, or NDC, which outlines their annual greenhouse gas emissions and their plans to reduce them.

Palestine submitted its first NDC to the UNFCCC in 2017 and an updated version in October 2021. The document cites adaptation to climate change as its main goal, since Palestine contributes minimally to global greenhouse gas emissions. Both that report and Palestine’s National Adaptation Plan, which it submitted to the U.N. in 2016, name numerous challenges stemming from the Israeli government’s strict control over Palestinian land and natural resources. One of the focuses of both documents is the agricultural sector, which the vast majority of Palestinians rely on for their livelihoods. Rain-fed agriculture accounts for more than 80 percent of farming in Palestine, and increasingly frequent dry spells and soil evaporation from high temperatures are degrading the quality of the harvest. The National Adaptation Plan notes that the Israeli occupation has limited Palestinians’ ability to develop wastewater treatment plants, which could provide an alternative form of irrigation to save desiccated crops.

Another focus of the reports is the electricity sector, which currently only fulfills 2 percent of domestic demand, according to the EQA. The Israeli government effectively controls the lights in Palestine, with the majority of Palestinians’ electricity coming from the Israel Electric Corporation. As a result, electricity outages are common, particularly in times of heightened tension and violence such as the Israeli military’s ongoing campaign in Gaza. Before the war, approximately 25 percent of Gaza’s power came from rooftop solar, significantly more than in Israel. The NDC outlines multiple goals, such as the expansion of solar power and the establishment of a national high-voltage grid, but the authors cited complications to these ambitions, too. Israel has historically rejected most of Palestinians’ permit applications for solar development.

Abuthaher said that the EQA submitted a permit request about five years ago to the Israeli government for just 500 square meters of space — about a tenth of a football field — near Jericho to erect solar panels to power a few households. But the land was in Area C, a region in the West Bank administered by Israel, and the EQA was denied permission. “In Area C, we face huge difficulties,” Abuthaher said. “We need their permits.”

In some instances, Israel has also bombed solar panels. In 2018, Palestine received funding from the World Bank to build a 7-megawatt rooftop solar project in Gaza. But the $11.2 million project, celebrated as one of “Gaza Strip’s brightest beacons of promise,” was bombed by the Israel Defense Forces in May 2021. The airstrikes damaged 5,000 of the 21,000 solar panels and caused an estimated $5 million in damage.

Ikhmais and Abuthaher said that in the past, there was an informal understanding that the Israeli government wouldn’t target projects built with foreign funding. “It was a trust that Israel would not harm any project with donor funding,” said Abuthaher. “But that is not the case on the ground.”

The Green Climate Fund, which was established under the UNFCCC to help developing countries finance climate projects, has greenlit several projects in Palestine, including a water banking project in Gaza, a national platform for its climate initiatives, and making water infrastructure more climate resilient. Some of these projects — like the water banking project — were operational before the recent conflict, but Abuthaher said he doesn’t know whether they’ve been bombed in the last couple of months.

“Everything that helps to protect the environment is damaged and destroyed,” Katbeh-Bader said. “Whatever you can imagine in your worst dreams, you will find it in Gaza.”

When the current crisis ends, Ikhmais said the EQA will need to conduct a wide-ranging and detailed assessment of the damage. “We are just waiting for these horrible things to end,” she said.

Get caught up on COP28

What is COP28? Every year, climate negotiators from around the world gather under the auspices of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to assess countries’ progress toward reducing carbon emissions and limiting global temperature rise.

The 28th Conference of the Parties, or COP28, is taking place in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, between November 30 and December 12 this year.

What happens at COP? Part trade show, part high-stakes negotiations, COPs are annual convenings where world leaders attempt to move the needle on climate change.

While activists up the ante with disruptive protests and industry leaders hash out deals on the sidelines, the most consequential outcomes of the conference will largely be negotiated behind closed doors. Over two weeks, delegates will pore over language describing countries’ commitments to reduce carbon emissions, jostling over the precise wording that all 194 countries can agree to.

What are the key issues at COP28 this year?

Global stocktake: The 2016 landmark Paris Agreement marked the first time countries united behind a goal to limit global temperature increase. The international treaty consists of 29 articles with numerous targets, including reducing greenhouse gas emissions, increasing financial flows to developing countries, and setting up a carbon market. For the first time since then, countries will conduct a “global stocktake” to measure how much progress they’ve made toward those goals at COP28 and where they’re lagging.

Fossil fuel phaseout or phasedown: Countries have agreed to reduce carbon emissions at previous COPs, but have not explicitly acknowledged the role of fossil fuels in causing the climate crisis until recently. This year, negotiators will be haggling over the exact phrasing that signals that the world needs to transition away from fossil fuels. They may decide that countries need to phase down or phase out fossil fuels or come up with entirely new wording that conveys the need to ramp down fossil fuel use.

Loss and damage: Last year, countries agreed to set up a historic fund to help developing nations deal with the so-called loss and damage that they are currently facing as a result of climate change. At COP28, countries will agree on a number of nitty-gritty details about the fund’s operations, including which country will host the fund, who will pay into it and withdraw from it, as well as the makeup of the fund’s board.

Dive deeper:

The decade-old broken climate promise that looms over COP28

The world is careening toward 3 degrees of warming, UN says ahead of climate conference

*Correction: This story originally misidentified Nedal Katbeh-Bader’s former position at the Palestinian Environmental Quality Authority.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

Louisiana’s new governor is one of the fossil fuel industry’s biggest defenders

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Climate change looms larger in Louisiana than it does almost anywhere else in the United States. The state is facing down monster hurricanes as well as sea-level rise, and it still relies on a fossil fuel industry that pollutes the state’s air and erodes its wetlands.

But the state’s incoming governor, Republican Jeff Landry, doesn’t see it that way. Landry, who has served as Louisiana’s attorney general for almost eight years, is one of the most stalwart opponents of President Joe Biden’s climate policies, and he won election this fall after calling climate change a “hoax” and defending polluters.

He earned an outright majority of votes in the first round of the gubernatorial election last month, surprising many observers who thought the race would head to a second-round runoff. He will succeed the term-limited Democrat John Bel Edwards, whose commitment to climate action made Louisiana an outlier along the Gulf Coast. With a Republican-controlled legislature backing him, Landry could tug the state in a stark new direction, unwinding Edwards’ plans and bolstering support for industries with a long record of environmental issues.

Landry has made a national name for himself as Louisiana’s attorney general through aggressive litigation against the Biden administration, leading several lawsuits against Biden policies on everything from offshore oil lease sales to flood insurance to the cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline. His most aggressive fight has been against the Environmental Protection Agency, which has been trying to address air pollution in the state’s oil and gas industry.

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The latter years of Landry’s term as attorney general coincided with a major push by residents in the state’s main industrial corridors to curb the toxic pollution in their backyards. After years of regulatory rollbacks under former President Donald Trump, advocates finally saw an opportunity for systemic change after the 2020 election. During his first week in office, Biden signed an order that created two new executive bodies dedicated to addressing environmental justice, a term that refers to the disproportionate levels of pollution borne by low-income people and communities of color across the country. That same year, a federal judge ordered the EPA to begin responding to the civil rights complaints it receives, a responsibility that the agency had long ignored.

Encouraged by these developments, advocates filed two civil rights complaints against Louisiana regulators for their failure to reduce dangerous emissions in “Cancer Alley,” an 85-mile industrial corridor between Baton Rouge and New Orleans where more than 150 industrial facilities spew cancer-causing chemicals into the air of predominantly Black communities. A 2019 investigation found that many residents of the region inhale air that is orders of magnitude more toxic than the EPA’s safety standards. The EPA opened an investigation into these conditions in April 2022, and then brought together state officials, residents, and advocates to reach an agreement on how best to protect people living in the vicinity of the region’s hulking chemical plants.

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Documents obtained by Grist revealed significant progress at the negotiating table, but last spring things began to sour, and Landry may have been the reason why. Adam Kron, an attorney at Earthjustice who worked on the case, told Grist that the breakdown in talks coincided with Landry’s sudden attendance in the negotiation meetings. Then, in June, Landry sued the federal government, arguing that the proceedings represented a vast overstep of the EPA’s authorities. The case could have implications beyond the EPA’s handling of the Cancer Alley complaints: Landry’s legal argument took aim at the agency’s ability to enforce Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which states that no person should, on the basis of race, color, or national origin, be subject to discrimination under any program that receives federal funding.

By challenging state regulators’ permitting of plants in majority-Black areas, Landry wrote, EPA officials were “moonlight[ing] as social justice warriors fixated on race.” In a twist, he accused federal officials of being discriminatory, arguing that their actions implied that chemical plants should be concentrated in other, whiter areas. Shortly after Landry filed suit, the EPA dropped both civil rights complaints in Louisiana, dealing a major blow to Cancer Alley residents who had fought for years to overhaul the state’s permitting and regulation of big polluters.

Kron said that the case clearly laid out the governor-elect’s vision for addressing civil rights concerns in communities facing disproportionate exposure to toxic emissions.

“As attorney general with no direct authority over [state regulators] he managed to work these agreements, and now he’ll be the one with direct control over those agencies,” he said. “It really doesn’t bode well.”

Landry has also challenged the Biden administration’s efforts to adapt to worsening climate disasters. Earlier this summer, he sued the Federal Emergency Management Agency over its new flood insurance pricing system, which has resulted in higher insurance premiums for many homeowners in coastal states such as Louisiana and Florida. Experts agree that flood insurance prices under the old system didn’t reflect rising flood risks, but Landry and several other Republican state attorneys general argued that the federal government had exceeded its authority when it raised insurance premiums.

In addition, Landry and the American Petroleum Institute, an industry group, sued the Biden administration in August in an attempt to force the administration to hold larger oil lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico. He also led Republican states in a lawsuit against the Biden administration over its attempts to set a new standard for the “social cost of carbon,” a key metric for setting climate policy. The conservative-led Supreme Court sided with the administration in 2022 and again last month.

An attorney and former sheriff’s deputy who hails from the state’s central coast, Landry has always been an ardent supporter of the oil industry. He majored in environmental science at the University of Louisiana-Lafayette and started what his campaign calls an “oil and gas environmental service company” after graduating, then went to law school before winning a single term in Congress during the “red wave” election of 2010.

In 2011, the year after the BP oil spill, Landry pushed the Interior Department to restart drilling permits in the Gulf of Mexico and compared department employees to the Nazi Gestapo when they refused to meet with him on short notice. The same year, when then-President Barack Obama gave a speech to Congress announcing his jobs plan, Landry held up a sign that read, “Drilling = Jobs.” As attorney general, he served on the board of his top political ally’s oil services company, raising ethics allegations.

Louisiana’s outgoing governor, Edwards, also supported the oil industry, and has even feuded with the Biden administration over its attempts to limit new oil drilling, but he has paired that support with action on climate change. Louisiana’s climate action plan, which an Edwards-appointed council approved last year, calls for the state to halve emissions from 2005 levels by the end of the decade, the same as Biden’s national target.

In response to Landry’s gubernatorial victory, the Louisiana Oil and Gas Association, an industry trade group, called Landry a “friend of industry” and speculated that he will continue to support the development of liquefied natural gas export terminals in the southernmost parts of the state. In 2017, Landry worked with a Houston-based businessman to import more than 300 Mexican laborers to help construct a massive new liquefaction facility in Cameron Parish, Louisiana. According to the Times-Picayune, the venture involved two firms owned by Landry, and a third owned by his brother.

Landry has called climate change a “hoax,” arguing that the Earth’s temperature has risen and fallen in cycles “repeated long before civilization of man.” He has also criticized renewable energy, arguing that the Biden administration’s focus on solar and wind is an attempt to force Louisiana into “energy poverty” and that “the D.C. swamp must face the fact that the manufacturing of wind turbines and solar panels requires natural gas, crude oil, and coal.” The political organization Climate Cabinet expects Landry to rescind Edwards’ climate plan upon taking office. Neither Landry’s state office nor his campaign responded to Grist’s request for comment.

Even so, there may be one area where the outgoing and incoming governors have common ground. During his two terms as governor, Edwards helped implement a $50 billion coastal restoration program that will leverage money from a BP oil spill settlement to protect the state’s coastline from further erosion. These coastal restoration efforts enjoy broad support from Louisiana voters in both parties, and even politicians who oppose climate action have touted levees and marsh-creation projects in their towns. During his time as attorney general, Landry endorsed a settlement deal with the mining and oil company Freeport-McMoRan that would see the company spend $100 million on this kind of erosion control, despite industry objections.

Kimberly Davis Reyher, the executive director of the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana, a nonprofit advocacy group, says she’s hopeful that Landry will maintain investments in coastal restoration even if he unwinds other climate and environmental protections.

Coastal erosion is “not a partisan issue here, so you don’t have to argue about climate change,” she told Grist. “You just go down to the coast and observe the water going up and the land going down.” She added that the Edwards administration succeeded in building a bipartisan consensus around coastal restoration issues and said she’s “hopeful” that Landry will look for ways to supplement the BP erosion funding, perhaps by trying to get a larger share of lease revenue from oil and gas companies.

When it comes to other climate and environmental issues, though, she’s far less optimistic about a Landry governorship.

“We’ll see what happens,” she said.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

The EPA was on the cusp of cleaning up ‘Cancer Alley.’ Then it backed down.

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Pastor Philip Schmitter waited more than 20 years for the Environmental Protection Agency to do its job. In 1992, he’d filed a civil rights complaint to halt the construction of a power station that would spew toxic lead into the air of his predominantly Black community in Flint, Michigan. Decades passed without a response, so he joined four other groups around the country in a lawsuit to compel the agency to address their concerns.

The case hinged on the EPA’s duty to enforce Title VI, a provision of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. Title VI allows federal agencies to take action against state policies that discriminate by disproportionately harming groups protected by the Act — the discriminatory policy being, in this case, Michigan’s permitting of a plant that would pollute Black neighborhoods. After the EPA lost the suit in 2020, agency officials finally began timely investigations of civil rights complaints and made some of the EPA’s first-ever findings of discrimination.

That progress, however, could be short-lived.

Last week, the EPA abruptly terminated three of its highest-profile open civil rights complaints. The move deals a major blow not only to the majority-Black communities that filed them but also to the EPA’s own authority to enforce Title VI in places with some of the nation’s worst air quality. The cases originated in the region widely known as “Cancer Alley,” an 85-mile industrial corridor in southeast Louisiana, and were voluntarily closed after the state’s Republican attorney general sued the federal government for alleged abuses of power during the complaint negotiations.

Grist obtained copies of two draft agreements from the now-defunct negotiations, which reveal efforts by EPA officials to institute profound changes to Louisiana’s permitting process, which has historically concentrated chemical plants near Black communities. One of the most substantial terms of the resolution would have required state regulators to assess whether a community is already exposed to disproportionately high levels of pollution before permitting new plants there. With the cases closed, the prospect of those changes has all but vanished.

“This is basically the EPA not using the full power of its environmental laws,” said Adam Kron, a senior attorney at Earthjustice who worked on the case. He described Title VI as one of the clearest ways to advance environmental justice, a goal that Biden EPA has repeatedly called a priority. “It’s disappointing to see EPA acquiesce to what seems like a lawsuit that really doesn’t have much grounding to it.”

The Title VI statute states that no person should, on the basis of race, color, or national origin, be subject to discrimination under any program that receives federal funding. The provision is wide-reaching, covering hundreds of thousands of programs across the country and governing decisions as diverse as where a road can go or who can get treatment at a hospital. But in the environmental space, it’s been largely underutilized, with the EPA routinely failing to respond to dozens of cases within the 180-day period required by the law.

The 2020 federal court ruling on Schmitter’s case gave communities in Louisiana’s St. James and St. John the Baptist parishes hope that Title VI could finally help limit pollution in their backyards. Together, their complaints alleged a number of negligent actions by state regulators, including a failure to curb cancer-causing emissions that violate federal safety standards and to consider pre-existing pollution when permitting new industrial plants. A formal resolution of their cases would have likely addressed these concerns.

The draft agreements that Grist obtained include sweeping measures to change the way the state of Louisiana approves new industrial facilities, like folding community involvement into critical moments of the decision-making process and requiring officials to prove, both before and after plants begin operating, that their emissions will not disproportionately harm people of color. In Louisiana, majority-Black communities are exposed to at least 7 times the emissions, on average, as predominantly White communities in industrial areas.

“We were hoping to get systemic change,” said Kimberly Terrell, a research scientist at the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic, who worked on the complaints. “For decades, people have been fighting against individual polluters and individual facilities, but when the decision-making process itself is flawed, you need something that seeks to improve it.”

Louisiana officials did not respond to a request for comment.

Despite progress with the agreements, testimony in Louisiana’s legal filings suggests that, at some point during the negotiation process, things between state and federal officials began to sour. Then, in late May, the state’s attorney general, Jeff Landry, sued the EPA.

The case hinged on the EPA’s ability to pursue actions based on “disparate impacts,” or the idea that a policy or agency decision can disproportionately harm a specific group of people, regardless of whether or not that harm is intentional. These standards have always been unpopular with some state officials who view them as evidence of federal agencies meddling in matters beyond their authority. The Supreme Court’s conservative majority is sympathetic to these concerns, ruling in numerous landmark cases over the past few years to vastly restrict the powers of federal regulators.

But multiple lawyers that Grist interviewed argued that Louisiana’s legal arguments would have ultimately been unlikely to undermine Title VI, raising the question of why the EPA appears to have preemptively conceded on the matter.

“It was unripe — there was no action by the EPA that Louisiana could challenge,” said Kron. “So it seems like a strange lawsuit for [the federal government] to take as a serious enough threat to just undo this whole process that’s been going on for over a year.”

Environmental advocates and residents in Louisiana also decried the decision to close the complaints.

“I often feel like our communities are left to fight on our own,” said Joy Banner, an activist and long-time resident of the region. “It’s disappointing when we have organizations at the federal level who aren’t willing to step in to fight along with us for our basic human right to survive.”

EPA spokesperson Khanya Brann told Grist that the agency remains “fully committed” to improving the environmental conditions in the communities that filed the complaints.

“Community participation has been critical to identifying both problems and solutions, and we look forward to our continued partnership with the residents in both parishes as we continue our joint efforts to improve public health and the environment,” she said.

The EPA wrote in its letters announcing the closure of the complaints that it would address residents’ concerns through other means, like its pending litigation against one of the region’s most infamous chemical plants and its proposed rules for tightening standards for certain types of facilities operating in the region. But residents told Grist that those measures do not cover the totality of their concerns, and that a major benefit of the Title VI process is its speedy timeline: While court cases can drag on and emissions standards can take years to implement, a resolution of the complaints may have granted communities much faster relief from toxic emissions.

Claire Glenn, a criminal defense attorney with a background in civil rights law, compared EPA’s use of Title VI to other federal agencies’ more robust implementation of the law. The Department of Transportation, for example, requires regulators to consider whether a project will disproportionately impact a group of people before it’s ever constructed. However, she added, deciding where a transit line goes is often less controversial than approving a multi-billion dollar company’s new industrial complex.

“I think the reason EPA’s Title VI program is so hamstrung is because it is so directly butting up against corporate interests,” she said.

Advocates told Grist that they are exploring other options to advance residents’ concerns, and called the EPA’s actions this week a setback but not a roadblock. Residents said that they are determined not to give up.

“We come from a long line of people who fought,” said Banner. “This is just one little hill that we have to overcome — but ultimately I see us heading to the mountain, and victory is the mountain.”

Editor’s note: Earthjustice is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org