China's Louisiana Purchase

[darnkatz]

I am horrified by this, and I 100% agree with this excerpt. If this were a wealthy white community, it wouldn't be happening.

Asked why the community wasn’t consulted, Ambrose said, “I think it’s
because we’re black. But I can’t put my finger on that alone to say
that was the only reason … Blacks are still somewhat second-class citizens.”

And I'm sorry, but I'm laughing that people think the US has 'environmental standards' that will keep us safe from disasters. Especially when the gas station owner who said that lives in LOUISIANA.


China’s Louisiana Purchase: Environmental concerns in ‘Cancer Alley’

Chinese company behind methanol plant in mostly black Louisiana town has come under fire for shirking health laws


January 28, 2015
5:00AM ET

by Massoud Hayoun

This article is the second installment of a three-part series on
China’s role in redeveloping southern Louisiana called China’s Louisiana
Purchase. The first part investigated links between Chinese government officials, Chinese gas giant Shandong Yuhuang and Gov. Bobby Jindal.


ST. JAMES PARISH, La. — No one asked Lawrence “Palo” Ambrose if he wanted a Chinese company with a controversial environmental record to build a methanol plant in his neighborhood. But if they had, the 74-year-old Vietnam War vet would have said no.


A town hall meeting about it in July at St. James High School, which
is close to the site of the plant, in a sparsely populated area with
mobile homes and a few farms, took place only after the St. James Parish
Council approved the project.


“We never had a town hall meeting pretending to get our opinion prior
to them doing it,” said Ambrose, a coordinator at St. James Catholic
Church. “They didn’t make us part of the discussion.”


The St. James Parish Council did not respond to interview requests at time of publication.


Edwin Octave, 92, who lives with his family in the area, agreed with
Ambrose. “I don’t think the way they went about getting the plant was
right. They bought the property before they tell people it’s going to
happen.”


Ambrose used to be a member of the parish council, from 1992 to 1996.
He said his neighborhood of St. James Parish where the plant will be
built is 90 percent black. “The only ones
that are white are the farmers,” he said, and there aren’t many of
those in the area, part of a district that the state government hopes to
industrialize. Exxon is among several energy companies with facilities
in a zone between Baton Rouge and New Orleans that
locals, following cues from environmentalists, have started calling
“Cancer Alley” because of burgeoning health concerns that they say are
due to the past few decades of industrialization.


Environmental scientists told Al Jazeera in late 2013 that the 150
petrochemical companies and 17 refineries in the area were releasing dangerous levels
of toxic chemicals into the air and water. In Mossville, a
predominantly black community a few hours west of Baton Rouge in
southern Louisiana, 91 percent of residents said they were experiencing
health complications they believed to be related to more than a dozen
industrial plants in the area. Fourteen facilities that manufacture,
process, store or discharge toxic or hazardous substances are in the
small area.


Asked why the community wasn’t consulted, Ambrose said, “I think it’s
because we’re black. But I can’t put my finger on that alone to say
that was the only reason … Blacks are still somewhat second-class citizens.” 


Most of the council’s nine members are white. A little over half the
parish’s residents are black, and most of the rest are white, according
to official statistics.


Kenny Winchester, 54, who owns a nearby gas station and is black,
agreed with Ambrose that race likely played a role in why the the
council didn’t consult the community before approving the project. 


Advocates said it’s not unusual that communities in the area aren’t asked to weigh in on projects.


Darryl Malek-Wiley, an environmental justice organizer in New Orleans
for the Sierra Club, said the Louisiana Department of Environmental
Quality (DEQ) doesn’t disseminate information clearly. “You have to know
to read the legal pages and superfine print,” he said.


“We have talked about the need for the community to be noticed right
at the beginning [of negotiations],” he added, but it’s not a legal
requirement. “They don’t know about something until they get a press
story saying it’s a done deal.”


DEQ spokeswoman Jean Kelly said community members are given notice
during the company's application process. “A proposed permit is public
noticed, and the community has an opportunity to comment on it," she
said. Information on the proposed methanol plant can be found, he said,
on the DEQ website using the agency interest number for it, 194165.


Asked if the information is available anywhere else, Kelly said in an
email, “I’m not sure on this, as it has not been public noticed yet,
but for an air permit, it is a local public library, the DEQ public
records room and in EDMS [the DEQ electronic document management
system]. It could also be procured through a public records request.”


Still, many locals say they heard nothing about the project before
the July 2014 announcement that the various parties involved would move
forward. 


Raymond Zeringue, 60, a worker on a nearby sugar cane farm who is
white, said, "Really, I haven’t heard a lot about it,” said. “Other than
there’s a methanol plant that’s being built, no information has been
made public. They should have had better information handed out — more
pros and cons to it.” 


The company slated to run the plant, Yuhuang Chemical Inc., is a
subsidiary that Chinese natural gas giant Shandong Yuhuang formed in
2012. In recent months Shandong Yuhuang has received some press
in China for reportedly shirking environmental regulations — letting
off toxic emissions in the northeastern city of Heze, which local
environmentalists have said is grappling with rising cancer rates and
undrinkable water. Yuhuang Chemical says it will send the lion’s share
of its product back to China, even though the People’s Republic already
has a surplus of methanol.


Yuhuang Chemical, Shandong Yuhuang and the CEOs of both companies,
Charlie Yao Chaoliang and Wang Jinshu, did not respond to interview
requests at time of publication.


The St. James plant is one of a slew of new Chinese energy deals
being touted by Chinese press and being negotiated with Louisiana
development authorities. The state is set to give Yuhuang Chemical an
incentive package of $9.5 million over the next five years if the
project goes ahead. The administration of Gov. Bobby Jindal did not
respond to a request for comment.


Yuhuang Chemical has filed for expedited permits to construct and
operate the plant on 1,100 acres — situated between a high school, two
churches and an assisted living facility for senior citizens — from the
DEQ, which is set to study the impact on the local environment and
deliver its decision on March 6. Steel and iron production plants in the
area have already drawn criticism from local environmentalists.

At the July town hall meeting, Ambrose said the company and officials
were “dishing up a good bowl of soup. They tell you only what
ingredients in it are good enough to eat.” He felt his questions on
potential contamination of the nearby Mississippi River were not
adequately addressed.
















Sign of things to come


New Orleans–based economic development nonprofit Greater New Orleans
Inc. (GOINC), which is 25 percent government funded, helped select the
site.


“St. James benefits from its location on either side of the
Mississippi — deep water access,” said GOINC’s president and CEO,
Michael Hecht.


“When you have our labor rates, the abundance of cheap natural gas as
a feedstock, we’re becoming — if not a low-cost — a good-cost,
high-convenience location for foreign companies.”


Hecht said he’s talking to a Chinese company “once a month now” in a
variety of industries, including the energy sector. “I wouldn’t be
surprised if we had one major Chinese announcement per year in coming
years in the New Orleans and Baton Rouge markets,” he said.  


How to maximize the benefit for Louisiana remains to be seen. He
said, “The challenge we have in Louisiana is to figure out how to engage
… Chinese investment in a way that not only benefits the Chinese
investor but the Louisiana community.

That is still a question to be
determined. What type of investment do we want? What requirements do we
want to put on it? That’s a question to answer as a community.”
He was uncertain how many jobs in the Yuhuang project would be
sourced locally. “You would assume a good portion of those 400 are going
to be local,” he said. “It’s going to create, I believe, 400 direct
jobs, it’s expected. The question is how many of those jobs will be
sourced locally. The incentive package they received from the state was
dependent on the expectation that a sizable portion would [go to
locals].”
Ambrose said he wasn’t confident the project would create a
significant number of jobs for locals.

Malek-Wiley said that with
petrochemical company projects like this, “most plants will create just
50” long-term jobs. “It’s very capital intensive but doesn’t take many
people to operate,” he said, adding that it will only add to the
environmental burden on the St. James community.


‘Environmental racism’

St. James Parish gas station owner Kenny Winchester said he
hopes U.S. environmental standards will be enough to prevent any abuses
too detrimental to the health of his community. “There shouldn’t be a problem if they follow the rules,” he said. “If they take shortcuts, we’ll have a problem.”


But Malek-Wiley said that hope isn’t realistic. “It’s
not feasible to just hope they will abide by regulations. Most of the
industry environmental reporting requirements are done by companies
without a secondary check with the Department of Environmental Quality
or EPA,” he said. “In effect, if a company was doing wrong, it
would have to write itself a ticket. I know every time I’m going down
the interstate too fast and there’s no cop, I pull over and write myself
a ticket … No, it doesn’t happen that way.”


The only way to tell if a company breaches regulations, he said, is
“after the plant’s built, unfortunately.” An environmentalist nonprofit
focused on opposing petrochemical pollution in the region, the Louisiana
Bucket Brigade, could “teach folks how to take air samples in their
community,” he said, and that tactic has led to “a number of companies
to be fined for air pollution, but that’s after the fact.”


After successfully organizing legal bids around black communities not
consulted on energy projects, Malek-Wiley believes that “with St. James
Parish, they could have brought up concerns about environmental
racism.”