Trump Pollution Exemptions Would Shield Lawbreakers, Endanger Millions – Inside Climate News

This story was published in partnership with Public Health Watch.

Late in the Biden administration, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced that it would clamp down on 218 of the nation’s worst chemical polluters, which put close to 10 million people at elevated risk of developing cancer. The EPA’s aim was to reduce that number by more than 1.2 million and improve air quality for high-risk communities by increasing monitoring and strengthening pollution controls at some of the country’s largest chemical plants.

But the regulation that would have set this effort in motion is in jeopardy. In March, the Trump EPA said it would re-evaluate the so-called HON rule—along with other National Emissions Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants (NESHAPs)—saying the rules placed “unnecessary burdens” on industry. The agency offered companies step-by-step instructions for seeking two-year exemptions from the president, and two industry groups requested blanket exemptions for the 218 chemical plants subject to the HON rule, which covers hazardous organic pollutants.

The White House won’t say whether Trump has granted any such exemptions. But a Public Health Watch analysis has found that any disruption of the HON rule could have severe consequences, protecting polluters that frequently break the law and worsening health risks for already-overburdened communities.

We analyzed data from the Census Bureau, the EPA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and found:

• About 1.4 million people—including 355,000 children and 61,000 veterans—live within two miles of chemical plants subject to the HON rule. This population—urban, suburban and rural—is disproportionately Black and Hispanic or Latino and has a poverty rate almost double the national rate.

• When compared to the estimated national rates, residents of metropolitan areas who live near HON plants are more likely to identify as having “fair” or “poor” health status and a disability, according to the CDC. They are also more likely to lack stable housing and reliable transportation, and feel socially isolated. 

• HON facilities contribute the majority of emissions nationwide for five carcinogens—1,3 butadiene, ethylene oxide, ethylene dichloride, vinyl chloride and chloroprene—and 49 other hazardous air pollutants. They are also more likely to commit serious Clean Air Act violations, be subject to enforcement actions and remain out of compliance for months or years at a time.

• Twenty-six percent of adults living near HON facilities in urban and suburban areas struggle to obtain adequate food, compared with 14 percent nationally. When compared to the estimated national rate, they are almost twice as likely to be threatened with utility shut-offs for overdue bills.

Tracey Woodruff, a former EPA scientist and policy advisor now on the faculty at the University of California San Francisco, has spent decades studying the impact of chemicals on health and childhood development. She said the Public Health Watch analysis is consistent with research showing that industrial facilities are frequently placed in communities that have fewer  resources and are more impacted by other stressors like food and housing insecurity. These factors make residents of such communities even more susceptible to the effects of pollution, Woodruff said.

Delaying or dismantling the HON rule, she said, would only exacerbate the health outcomes highlighted in the analysis, such as diabetes, high blood pressure and depression. HON plants discharge chemicals known to not only cause cancer but also affect the reproductive, cardiovascular, respiratory and neurological systems.

“Rolling back the HON Rule is only going to make people sicker,” Woodruff said.

She noted that Trump’s Make America Healthy Again commission correctly noted that children are most impacted by exposures to toxic chemicals, even as his administration moves to dismantle rules meant to protect them.

“It just shows who they care more about, which is the polluting facilities and their donors and not the people who actually are going to suffer from this,” Woodruff said.

The EPA did not respond to questions about Public Health Watch’s analysis. Instead, a spokesperson said in an email that the agency was “not surprised to see yet another ‘media outlet’ ignore the fact that we can protect the environment and grow the economy at the same time.”

“This Place Represents Violence”

Traci Donatto grew up in Deer Park, Texas, a city along the Houston Ship Channel surrounded by more than 20 HON plants. She remembers sitting in the backseat of her parents’ car as a child, driving over the bridge that crosses the channel and staring out at a sea of lights and flares that sprawled for miles.

“My dad would be like, ‘Isn’t that gorgeous, girls? That’s money. As long as those lights are on, we can eat,’” said Donatto, whose father and great grandfather worked in the oil and petrochemical industries. “At the earliest age that was our perspective of thinking of these refineries as a source of safety and security.”

Now—whenever she finds herself wheezing or turning off her air conditioner to avoid sucking in the rancid outside air—Donatto sees things differently. To her, the pollution is an assault on her body and that of her 10-year-old son, Russell. After being away for 20 years, she moved back to Deer Park in 2023 to care for her father, who is dying of prostate cancer and a rare form of throat cancer. He spent five decades working as a contract welder for more than a dozen chemical plants and refineries.

“For me this place represents violence. Deep, deep, violation,” Donatto said.

Deer Park is one of many Southern cities that are overburdened with petrochemical pollution and were supposed to benefit from the HON rule. EPA data show that 131 HON facilities—60 percent of the total—are located in Texas and Louisiana. Roughly three million people in those states live within about six miles of plants subject to the rule; one-third are Hispanic or Latino and a quarter are Black.

But industry and state regulators have resisted the EPA’s attempts to make the air in these places cleaner. For example, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, or TCEQ, and the chemical industry have tried to discredit the science behind one of the main carcinogens targeted in the rule—ethylene oxide.

Ethylene oxide is used to sterilize medical equipment and produce other chemical products like antifreeze. Releases of the chemical from HON plants are a major driver of cancer risk from air toxics for some 7 million people, according to the EPA. Ethylene oxide is known to cause blood and breast cancers. Because the chemical mutates DNA, children exposed to it early in life are especially at risk. A 2023 EPA analysis found that workers using the gas to sterilize medical equipment faced as high as a 1-in-10 cancer risk; the agency’s target is no greater than 1-in-10,000. 

The updated rule seeks to cut HON facilities’ ethylene oxide emissions by 80 percent.

But Texas has argued for years that ethylene oxide has not been “conclusively demonstrated” to cause cancer in humans, disregarding decades of research that says otherwise. In 2020, the TCEQ, the American Chemistry Council—an industry lobby group—and Huntsman Petrochemicals, which was one of the largest emitters of ethylene oxide in the country, petitioned the EPA to significantly reduce the risk value it assigned to the gas. Texas had commissioned its own study that concluded the value should be thousands of times lower than the one established by the EPA. The agency reviewed and ultimately re-affirmed its assessment. 

Although Huntsman had sold its ethylene oxide business to Indorama Ventures at the beginning of 2020, the company continued to challenge the EPA’s position. It appealed the agency’s assessment to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2023, but the court sided with the EPA—upholding the rule and denying any further review.

Huntsman did not respond to requests for comment.

Keeve Nachman, a researcher and professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, served on a National Academy of Sciences committee that weighed in on the debate last year. The committee found several holes in the TCEQ’s research—the exclusion of some key human breast cancer studies, for instance. 

Nachmann told Public Health Watch that the evidence of ethylene oxide’s carcinogenicity has only gotten stronger since the EPA assigned its risk value in 2016. A follow-up study of workers exposed to the chemical, for example, found a breast cancer mortality rate three times higher than a non-exposed group. Delaying implementation of the HON rule “doesn’t make any sense,” Nachman said. 

“Given [ethylene oxide’s] carcinogenic potential, this delay means fenceline communities will continue to be at a significantly increased risk of cancers,” he said.

A TCEQ spokesperson wrote in a statement to Public Health Watch that the agency’s “work to derive risk values is not outcome oriented. Rather, the work is to evaluate current science to determine the most appropriate risk values.”

The TCEQ said that it stood by its work and that there were “multiple errors and inconsistencies” in the National Academy of Sciences report.

The Sprawling Reach of Ethylene Oxide

While those living closest to the facilities face the highest health risks, experts say, winds can carry pollution miles from the plants’ fence lines. Over a lifetime, even smaller amounts of ethylene oxide can increase the odds of developing cancer for residents of these more distant areas.

A tool created by the Environmental Defense Fund illustrates the reach of petrochemical pollution. It uses EPA datasets from 2020, the most recent year available, to calculate cancer risk from specific facilities’ emissions.

According to the map, over half of Traci Donatto’s cancer risk from petrochemical pollution comes from the ethylene oxide emissions of a former LyondellBasell plant in Pasadena, about seven miles from her home. In fact, the map estimates that the facility, sold to INEOS last year, contributes to cancer risk in communities 30 miles away. According to the most recent Toxics Release Inventory, the plant was the fifth-largest emitter of ethylene oxide in the nation in 2023.

Neighborhoods closest to the INEOS plant are in the 99th percentile in the country for cancer risk from air pollution, according to the map. It estimates that the facility’s ethylene oxide emissions account for between 50 and 80 percent of the community’s cancer risk from petrochemical pollution.

A Pattern of Law Breaking

The INEOS plant exemplifies a common pattern among HON facilities—frequent violations of state and federal air quality laws.

Last year, Texas fined a LyondellBasell subsidiary, Equistar Chemicals, LP, $1.4 million for dozens of violations, including chemical releases, that took place at the Bayport facility in Pasadena between 2017 and 2022. One 163-day leak spewed thousands of pounds of the ethylene oxide into the air.

The facility also has two pending penalties. According to public records, the TCEQ proposed a $25,000 fine against Equistar in March for a three-month-long release of 27,000 pounds of volatile organic compounds, a class of chemicals that includes many carcinogens. The TCEQ declined to provide details on a second alleged violation by Equistar. 

LyondellBassell did not respond to requests for comment.

An INEOS spokesperson said in a written statement to Public Health Watch that the company bought the facility before the violations occurred. The company is “focused on integrating the site into its current operations, which includes a clear priority on safety, health, and environmental performance,” the statement said.  The spokesperson declined to comment on the status of the facility’s compliance with the HON rule and whether it has received an exemption. 

The EPA considers most HON facilities to be “major” sources of air pollution, a classification that means a facility releases tens of thousands of pounds of one or more hazardous air pollutants. Public Health Watch analyzed the enforcement and compliance history of the more than 18,000 major sources in the country and found that HON facilities are more likely to be habitual lawbreakers. Twenty-three percent of HON plants remained out of compliance with their air permits for eight or more of the past 12 quarters, compared to just four percent of other major sources.

HON plants are also seven times more likely than other facilities to have been hit with multiple state or federal enforcement actions for air violations in the past five years, which often come with large penalties. More than half of HON facilities were fined for breaking air-quality laws during that period; the group collectively received more than $110 million in penalties.

Cynthia Palmer, a petrochemical analyst for the environmental advocacy group Moms Clean Air Force, said it would be immoral for the EPA to grant exemptions to facilities that are already flouting the law.

“If a criminal is on a killing spree, our society doesn’t just shrug it off and say, ‘Let them be. Thugs will be thugs,’” Palmer said. “Just because these chemical manufacturers are already violators and are middle-fingering law enforcement and the communities they’re located in does not mean we should let them do what they want and exempt them from pollution controls.”

Palmer and other advocates were hopeful the HON rule would hold chronic violators accountable. The rule comes with an added layer of transparency: a requirement that companies regularly collect air-quality data at the edges of their facilities, a practice known as fenceline monitoring.

This would give communities more precise data than the EPA’s databases, where companies self-report annual pollution emissions. Studies have shown that actual pollution levels are often higher than what companies report.

One study captured emissions in Louisiana’s Cancer Alley, an 85-mile stretch of the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans with more than a hundred petrochemical facilities and oil refineries. In 2023, scientists monitored pollution levels outside the property lines of six ethylene oxide-emitting facilities for eight hours a day over 23 days. They consistently found ethylene oxide levels 10 times higher than the EPA’s estimates, which are calculated from companies’ reported annual emissions.

Peter DeCarlo of Johns Hopkins, an author of the Louisiana study, said this suggests that plants are emitting much more than they are telling the government, a widespread problem in regulating petrochemical facilities. The EPA’s “maximum” acceptable cancer risk from exposure to all toxic air pollutants is 1 in 10,000. Along some fencelines, DeCarlo and his team detected ethylene oxide levels that would result in a cancer risk 3,000 times greater than that maximum. They concluded that some plants could have “undetected leaks, underperforming pollution control equipment [or] intentional or scheduled releases,” DeCarlo wrote in an email to Public Health Watch.

DeCarlo said the fenceline monitoring requirement in the HON rule may help facilities identify leaks before they get out of control—and save money at the same time. He’s concerned about the prospect of blanket exemptions. 

DeCarlo said that removing pollution limits and monitoring requirements from companies that are already underestimating their emissions means pollution levels will continue to be much worse than expected.

“We’re going to be stuck in this problem where the cancer risk from breathing these chemicals is much higher than it should be for an extended period of time,” he said. 

The White House declined to answer questions from Public Health Watch about the status of HON exemptions or the potential for increasing health risks if the rule is delayed or weakened. Instead, Assistant Press Secretary Taylor Rogers responded with a written statement: “No matter what the so-called radical climate ‘experts’ say, the facts remain: US air quality is among the best of industrialized countries and our framework for environmental protection remains the gold standard across the world. President Trump’s commonsense policies are lowering energy costs for American families and businesses while removing toxic chemicals from our environment.” 

While it’s unclear whether Trump has granted any HON rule exemptions, the administration and the chemical industry appear to be well-aligned in their opposition to new regulation. When Trump’s EPA announced it would re-evaluate hazardous air pollutant standards, it questioned its own authority to make the rules as well as the science behind them. The agency also said that compliance would be too costly and “create unnecessary burdens” for manufacturers that are “a vital part of the economy.” 

A spokesperson from the American Chemistry Council, one of the groups that submitted the blanket exemption request, wrote in a statement to Public Health Watch that the HON rule “exceeds the EPA’s statutory authority, disregards relevant scientific evidence, and overlooks significant practical concerns.”

A Painful Dilemma

When Traci Donatto learned about the hundreds of petrochemical facilities trying to avoid reducing their cancer-causing emissions, she felt unbridled rage. 

Not only does she believe that industry pollution is responsible for her father’s cancer, she also sees it taking a toll on her child.

Six months after moving back to Deer Park, her son, Russell, was diagnosed with asthma. Now Donatto faces a painful dilemma: remain in a place where Russell is thriving emotionally and surrounded by family members, or move away to protect his health.

But Donatto said there may be a third option. 

Although she understands the allegiance people like her parents feel toward an industry that helps them put food on the table, she’s trying to convince her neighbors to fight for a healthy environment. She plans to hand out informational flyers and restart her podcast, which focuses on community organizing. She’s been reporting chemical leaks to the state and urging others to do the same.

“You making a living doesn’t have to be at the cost of my family,” Donatto said, “and it doesn’t have to be at the cost of your family, either.”

Public Health Watch analyzed four federal datasets for this story and consulted with data and public health experts for guidance. Read our methodology and access the data.