My community deserves better than being an allowable environmental sacrifice zone. The state claiming that environmental justice has been achieved (“A Colorado clean air plan targeting dirtiest offenders is actually working. Here’s how.”; March 25) is grossly out of touch with what justice to my community really means here in Commerce City.
Right now, the state’s Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Energy Management for Manufacturers, or GEMM, regulations are being proclaimed as environmental justice being met, but justice for whom? Although the rules have succeeded in meeting statewide requirements for the industrial sector, the Suncor oil refinery’s pollution went up in 2024, reaching its second highest level ever. This means that those of us who live nearby are breathing more refinery toxins, not fewer, while the state celebrates a win for industry that can buy its way out from healing its multigenerational impact, because of carbon credits.
When I joined the Environmental Justice Action Task Force and co-commissioned the equity analysis of cumulative impacts, I helped define disproportionately impacted communities to find protections in agencies policies and regulations to eliminate any community from being a sacrifice zone for industry. In 2021, we fought for House Bill 1266, also known as the Environmental Justice Act, that required the state to create the GEMM rules.
However, the state has completely missed the intention, and instead of delivering a path to no more disproportionately impacted communities, the state is ensuring there will always be allowable sacrifice zones of environmental harms for industries gain. That is our families, schools and most vulnerable populations who deserve regulations that protect us from environmental injustice, and the GEMM rules fail that standard completely for them and future generations who will live here now.
Suncor recently published its plan showing that by 2030 the Commerce City refinery will only reduce its emissions by 3%. It might seem impossible that the state could meet its greenhouse gas reduction goals while its biggest polluter, the Suncor oil refinery, barely changes its emissions. But there are a few loopholes in the regulations that make this possible.
First, Suncor doesn’t have to comply with significant reduction requirements until 2030. Second, the rules include a trading system so that Suncor can pay other industrial facilities instead of doing on-site emissions reductions.
The facility will meet most of its reductions requirements by buying credits from other companies. Credits are issued to companies that have reduced their emissions below their 2030 goals. While these reductions are happening somewhere, they do nothing to alleviate toxic air releases from Colorado’s biggest polluter in current sacrifice zones.
Even more devious, it is now a pay-to-play game with egregious polluters like Suncor to buy our air and leave us with the deadly results.
When we advocated for the EJ Act in 2021, we foresaw this kind of unjust scenario in which the rules sacrifice some communities to achieve their goals. That’s why we made sure the law required that the state focus on greenhouse gas regulations that also reduce pollution in Colorado’s most contaminated neighborhoods.
The two goals work together because every burned fossil fuel that releases carbon dioxide also releases harmful air pollution like volatile organic compounds and nitrogen oxides. But the state of Colorado wrote GEMM rules that deny many of these benefits to Commerce City, Ellyria-Swansea, and the other areas around Suncor. Our communities — many of them in the top 10% most polluted areas in the state — will continue to carry much of the refinery’s toxic burden that plagues my community with cancers, respiratory and circulatory chronic illnesses.
We are all connected through our air, land and water, but my community and our state is tired of choking on toxic air. It’s worse when the state shamelessly declares victory for its regulations without noticing the classrooms filled with children who need inhalers to breathe, elders with shorter and shorter lifespans, and soaring health care costs from doctor visits and chronic treatments.
Our state does not deserve to say we have addressed environmental justice until the most vulnerable populations have their health protections met and disproportionately impacted communities eliminated. Anything short of this authentic accountability is just political lies allowing our worst polluters to slowly destroy my community and our state’s biosphere.
We have worked tirelessly to stop environmental degradation and health effects from pollution. Establishing the EJ Act was the legal record to recommend and implement a better way. Now is the time to protect human rights to a healthy biosphere. Colorado agencies: Require on-site emissions reductions for Suncor.
Renee M. Chacon, of Commerce City, is the cofounder of Womxn from the Mountain, an EJ Action task force member and former Commerce City councilwomen for Ward 3.
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