Cal/EPA Issues Environmental Hazard Scores for 8,000 Census Tracts

New map could refocus state's pollution battles 
Tony Barboza, Los Angeles Times, April 22, 2014

The California Environmental Protection Agency (Cal/EPA) has released a statewide assessment of census tracts most burdened by pollution, providing a powerful tool to pressure regulators to clean up neighborhoods with long-standing health risks.

The environmental health assessment, published in draft form this week, was a major update to an initiative that includes an interactive online map and is being refined over time by Cal/EPA. The state's first such report last year assessed the state by ZIP Code and yielded broadly similar results, showing that Latinos and African Americans make up a disproportionately high percentage of the population in areas most affected by pollution. But the previous list was criticized by environmental justice groups and researchers who complained that ZIP Codes were too large and arbitrary to reveal much.

The screening and ranking tool, called CalEnviroScreen, was developed to pinpoint the communities with the highest exposure and vulnerability to multiple environmental hazards, including polluted air and water, waste facilities and contaminated soil. The rankings are not based only on measures of environmental exposure: they also take into account socioeconomic characteristics and health data on residents to assess the overall vulnerability of communities. Those factors include poverty, education, unemployment, rates of asthma and low-birth-weight infants. In total, 19 criteria are considered.

State Sen. Kevin de León (D-Los Angeles) wrote a 2012 law that requires the state to spend 25% of the auction proceeds from California's GHG-cutting cap-and-trade program to benefit disadvantaged communities that face disproportionate effects from pollution and climate change. Governor Jerry Brown's proposed budget for 2014-15 would set aside $225 million of $850 million in proceeds. Budget documents say projects could include energy-efficiency upgrades for homes in low-income areas, improvements to bus and rail systems, urban forestry projects and programs to fund cleaner trucks and equipment near ports, rail yards and distribution centers.

Read the complete article here.

Is Environmental Contamination Responsible for Violent Crime?

America's Real Criminal Element: Lead
Kevin Drum, Mother Jones, January/February 2013 Issue

Across the US, violent crime peaked in the early 1990s and then began a steady and significant decline. Not unique to a particular city, this declining trend is seen nationwide, including in New York, Dallas, Los Angeles, Washington DC, and Newark.  This article explores the reasons behind this trend, and in the process, researched a myriad of criminology theories: crime goes down when the economy is booming and goes up when it's in a slump; crime drops in big cities are mostly a reflection of the crack epidemic of the '80s finally burning itself out; demographics (as numbers of young men increases, so does crime); prison expansion; guns and gun control; family dynamics; race; parole and probation policies; raw number of police officers; and legalized abortion.

The author found a growing body of research linking lead exposure in small children with complications later in life, including lower IQ, hyperactivity, behavioral problems, learning disabilities, and juvenile delinquency. A large body of evidence suggests that the use -- and discontinuation -- of tetraethyl lead in gasoline may explain as much as 90 percent of the rise and fall of violent crime over the past 50 years. And this relationship seems to hold true for cities of different sizes, both within the US and internationally.

Read the article here.

And several of the cited studies:
How Lead Exposure Relates to Temporal Changes in IQ, Violent Crime, and Unwed Pregnancy
Environmental Policy as Social Policy? The Impact of Childhood Lead Exposure on Crime
Understanding international crime trends: The legacy of preschool lead exposure
The urban rise and fall of air lead (Pb) and the latent surge and retreat of societal violence
Association of Prenatal and Childhood Blood Lead Concentrations with Criminal Arrests in Early Adulthood