Sec. 101. Findings
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Congress finds the following: According to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), 97 percent or more of actively publishing climate scientists agree that climate-warming trends over the past century are extremely likely due to human activities. Additionally, most of the leading scientific organizations worldwide have issued public statements endorsing this position. People of color comprise almost half of the 11,400,000 people nationwide who live near dangerous, polluting facilities, and are twice as likely to live in those areas as White Americans.
African-Americans are 79 percent more likely than White Americans to live in communities where industrial pollution poses the greatest health danger. The fact that people of color breathe 46 percent more nitrogen dioxide than White Americans, a pollutant that causes respiratory diseases and heart conditions, is one of the reasons why children of color go to the emergency room for asthma attacks at nearly triple the rate than White children do. Similarly, in the poor, mostly Latino community of Corpus Christi, Texas, the overall rate of birth defects is 84 percent higher than the rest of the State.
The city ranks number one in the State for benzene pollution generated by refineries and petrochemical plants—a serious concern, as benzene is a powerful cancer-causing agent. The odds are now an incredible 3 to 1 that a Latino immigrant will reside in an area with dangerously high levels of toxic pollution. It should come as no surprise, then, that Latino families have placed as much importance on clean air and clean water in their communities as they have on immigration issues.
Tribal lands are only 4 percent of the United States land base, yet of the 1,322 Superfund hazardous waste sites, 25 percent are in Indian country. The vast majority—75 percent—of abandoned uranium mines are on Indian lands, with little effort made to remediate the harms they cause. A full 20 percent of people living in First Nations communities located next to tar sands extraction sites were diagnosed with cancer—Keystone XL and the Enbridge Alberta Clipper expansion were one of many pipelines attempting to bring this tar sands, toxic and corrosive crude oil into the United States, directly through tribal treaty lands.
Federal leasing of public lands for fossil fuels extraction significantly impacts numerous American Indian Tribes, Alaska Native Tribes, Native Hawaiian communities and indigenous communities that share more than 3,000 miles of contiguous border with National Forest lands. The resource exploitation of fossil fuel energy extraction has run a long and deadly course in tribal lands. Fracking operations adversely impact public health through threats to water and air quality from multiple sources including leaks from pipes and related transportation of fossil fuel that results in disproportionate increases in hospitalization due to premature births, asthma and cardiovascular disease near fracking sites.
People of color living in proximity of truck traffic, fracking wells, and experience increased exposure to ultra fine particulate matter from exhaust and emissions near well pads. President Obama joined other world leaders from the Group of Twenty in 2009, and again in 2013, in pledging to phase out wasteful fossil-fuel subsidies. The Environmental Law Institute found that from 2002 through 2008, Federal fossil-fuel subsidies in the United States totaled over $72,000,000,000, while Federal renewable-energy investments totaled $12,200,000,000.
According to the group Taxpayers for Common Sense, the 5 largest oil corporations have made more than $1,000,000,000,000 in profits during the past decade. According to the Center for American Progress, the 5 largest oil corporations posted more than $89,700,000,000 in profits in 2014 alone. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the oil and gas, coal, utility, and other natural resource extraction industries spent more than $1,800,000,000 on lobbying during the period of 2010 to 2014, which was an effective investment in protecting their extraordinary tax loopholes and subsidies.