Above: The Motiva oil refinery, the largest in the United States, looms over a residential neighborhood in Port Arthur, Texas.
But the movement Clinton’s order helped catalyze has struggled without significant federal funding over the three intervening decades. That finally changed under the Biden administration with passage of major infrastructure legislation in 2021 and the Inflation Reduction Act the following year. To be sure, the order didn’t rise out of thin air. Its issuance came more than a decade after a protest in 1982 that’s often cited as the start of the environmental justice movement: weeks of demonstrations and hundreds of arrests in predominantly Black Warren County, North Carolina, where demonstrators tried to stop the dumping of toxic soil at a landfill. It was there that the Rev. Benjamin Chavis Jr., who helped organize the demonstration, popularized the term environmental racism.
“In a lot of ways, the executive order provided a framework for communities to challenge permits and to challenge the way that policies were being pushed forward,” Bullard said.Ilan Levin, an attorney with the Environmental Integrity Project who represents Beard’s Port Arthur Community Action Network, said Clinton’s order has been “helpful in the court of public opinion, to have the stamp of the federal government’s approval on just the notion of the concept of environmental justice.
But, he acknowledges, the Clinton order served to introduce the concept of environmental justice more broadly across the government and country. “More than anything else, I think it just introduced and gave visibility to an issue that really had been a very niche issue before,” said Holmstead, an energy lobbyist and lawyer with the firm Bracewell LLP.
Inside Kelley’s Kitchen, a Port Arthur restaurant now used for private and community events, Hilton Kelley takes a seat with leftover “2024” New Year’s balloons floating behind him and party favors left on tables. Kelley was raised not far from here, then left for 20 years, serving in the Navy and working as an actor in California.
Among his accomplishments were negotiating a “good neighbor” agreement with Motiva that provided health coverage for the residents of the West Side for three years and established a $3.5 million fund to help entrepreneurs launch new businesses in the community. He also led a campaign that blocked Veolia Corporation from importing more than 20,000 tons of toxic, man-made chemicals banned from production in the United States in 1979, from Mexico for incineration at its Port Arthur plant.
Source: Law Daily Report (lawdailyreport.net)
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