Emissions Patterns In An Industrialized State: Overlapping Legacies of
Time, Space, Climate, Geography, Poverty And Race
Abstract
Understanding interactions among greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, air
pollution, race, and poverty is critical to developing strategies to
slow climate warming, and is socially important as large GHG-emitting
facilities often occur in poor and historically-marginalized
communities. We examined such patterns in the American South, where a
multi-centennial history of race and poverty coincides with a petroleum
and petrochemical industry that is >100 yr old using
open-access data to quantify emissions on a 0.1o x 0.1o scale annually
from 1970 to the mid-2010s. 26-55% of Louisiana’s emissions of several
dominant GHGs and air pollutants are concentrated along the Mississippi
River Industrial Corridor, which is < 5% of the state’s area.
Despite some statewide emission reductions, fluxes in this corridor, and
several parishes with large Black populations, have reduced more slowly
or increased, raising environmental justice concerns. Methods herein
provide a blueprint for future studies, particularly in marginalized
communities, where limited scientific resources have hindered efforts to
understand how climate change, air pollution and equity interact.