(CN) — Attorneys general from five states sent a letter to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Monday urging the agency to conduct a broader evaluation of a permit for the operation of a controversial proposed Formosa Plastics site in a predominantly Black community in St. James Parish, Louisiana.
The 17-page letter was signed by the attorneys general from New York, Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Massachusetts, and New Jersey and has to do with a permit for the operation of the Formosa Plastics plant that the Corps previously issued but suspended last November pending further review under pressure from a federal lawsuit that challenged the plastics complex.
“I’m grateful that these attorneys general understand the threat Formosa Plastics poses to us and are demanding action,” said Rise St. James founder Sharon Lavigne in a press release. The grassroots organization formed to advocate for racial and environmental justice in St. James and has been battling Formosa since it announced plans to move into the community.
“The Army Corps needs to listen and do a proper analysis of a project that would endanger our lives. Because I believe that if there’s an honest assessment of the environmental racism behind this project’s approval then it will never be permitted.”
The lawsuit, filed in January 2020 by four environmental watchdog groups, including the Center for Biological Diversity, Rise St. James, Healthy Gulf and the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, said the Trump Administration had “rubber-stamped the project” instead of “disclosing how Formosa Plastics would damage wetlands, poison communities and pollute water,” according to a statement announcing the suit last year.
Attorneys said that at the heart of the case is environmental racism and that the community whose population is 90% Black has been targeted to host a massive facility twice the size of Central Park to build small plastics.
Formosa Plastics’ site is one mile from an elementary school, and sits across 1,500 acres, including wetlands, along the Mississippi River in St. James — a low-income area that is dotted with other petrochemical factories. Besides 10 chemical plants, construction will include power-generating facilities and a wastewater-treatment plant.
In March, the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights called the project “environmental racism” and urged U.S. officials to reject it. The Army Corps’ initial permit also failed to address slave burial sites recently discovered on the property.
“While the Attorneys General are encouraged by the Corps’ commitment to reevaluating the permit decision, we strongly believe that the reevaluation must be broader in scope, both to protect the residents and natural resources of St. James Parish and to prevent public health and environmental harms across our jurisdictions," the letter released on Monday says.
For at least two years, since all state and federal permits were issued, essentially giving the plant the go-ahead in 2019, Formosa’s facility has faced fierce public opposition and lawsuits from local and national groups over environmental racism, excessive air emissions, the potential for single-use plastic pollution in landfills and the ocean, and now, added to the list, the attorney generals say the plant will threaten their vulnerable coastlines and will hurt migratory bird populations the individual states have promised their residents they will protect.
According to the letter, Formosa’s plastics complex would be the “largest greenhouse gas emitter in the State of Louisiana, and one of the largest in the United States, directly emitting more than 13.6 million tons of carbon pollution every year — equivalent to the annual emissions from 3.5 coal-fired power plants or adding 2.6 million cars to the road annually."
The attorneys general criticized the agency for electing not to prepare an environmental impact statement when it issued its permit. The Corps declined to prepare such a statement ostensibly because the project would not emit enough pollutants to warrant a review.
But “the magnitude of these emissions, coupled with the increasing urgency to tackle the climate crisis, plainly warrants rigorous review under [NationalvEnvironmental Policy Act],” the letter continues.
“But, in the Memorandum, the Corps merely characterized these emissions as ‘negligible’ compared to ‘global emissions,'" the letter adds.
Even while it has faced plentiful and harsh criticisms since the beginning, an additional many across the state have hailed Formosa’s proposed facility as an economic triumph since the start, with an anticipated 1,200 permanent jobs, thousands more temporary construction jobs and millions of dollars in sales and property tax revenue for local and state governments.
Governor John Bel Edwards and local officials celebrated the announcement of the plant in 2018.
“While the Corps concluded in the Memorandum that any climate-related impacts from the Plastics Complex would be outweighed by the ‘national goals of energy independence, national security, and economic development,’” the letter says. “In reality, construction of the Plastics Complex would increase the significant risks to national security and the economy caused by global climate change. (And because it would only consume massive amounts of energy, the Plastics Complex would hardly contribute to energy independence.)”
The letter sets out three criteria for any further review from the Corps. It says the Corps should reevaluate all environmental justice issues to comply with federal legal obligations and set a precedent for the protection of overburdened communities that are disproportionately impacted by environmental harms.
It also says the Corps must reevaluate the complex’s greenhouse gas emissions and contribution to the global climate crisis.
“Emissions from facilities like the Plastics Complex undermine our States’ laws and policies aimed at mitigating greenhouse gas emissions, leaving our residents more vulnerable to climate-related harms,” the letter says.
Third, the letter says the Corps should reevaluate what would be the complex’s detrimental impact on wetlands on which it would be constructed, other waterways, including the Mississippi River, that it would discharge pollutants into — which would in turn flow into the Gulf of Mexico — and migratory birds and other species that cross jurisdictional boundaries and constitute shared natural resources.
In addition to the discharge of pollutants into waterways, the letter recognizes the effect of greenhouse emissions on climate change dire effect sea level rise will have on all coastal areas, including New Jersey.
“As a coastal state, New Jersey is particularly vulnerable to climate-related harms," the letter says.
If sea levels rise one to two feet by 2050, approximately 28% of existing tidal marshes in New Jersey could be lost, exposing coastal communities to storm surge that is exacerbated by climate change, the letter says.
“Any serious analysis should cause the Army Corps to reject this major threat to public health and our climate,” Julie Teel Simmonds, a lawyer at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a press release. “We can’t let industry pollute another working-class Black community as it creates mountains of plastic the world doesn’t want or need. I’m hoping this letter will help convince Formosa Plastics to abandon this dangerous project.”
Neither the Corps of Engineers nor Governor Edwards could be immediately reached for comment.
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