Dirty Kochs will dish out millions for polluting this Texas town

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http://grist.org/cities/dirty-kochs-will-dish-out-millions-for-polluting-this-texas-town/

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The U.S. Department of Justice just slapped another polluter around. Yesterday, Justice officials ordered the Koch brothers-owned Flint Hills Resources company to pay $350,000 in Clean Air Act fines for spewing thousands of tons of hazardous air pollutants from one of its chemical plants in Port Arthur, Texas. The company must also spend upwards of $30 million on equipment upgrades to reduce its emissions for particulate matter, nitrogen oxide, and carbon monoxide — agents of asthma, lung disease, and death, respectively.

This is no small matter for the Gulf Coast city, about 90 minutes east of Houston. This is the dirtiest of the dirtiest areas in America. It’s where where the Keystone XL pipeline is scheduled to dump tar-sands oil from Canada. The Koch bros’ plant is just one of a gaggle of petrochemical processing facilities, oil refineries, waste incinerators, and gas pipelines strangling Port Arthur, a city also beset by ghastly levels of lung disease and cancer. Then there’s the social asphyxiation of poverty and racism on the predominantly black and Latino city.

It’s for these reasons that Port Arthur has long been considered a priority environmental justice area for the Environmental Protection Agency. Meanwhile, grassroots activists like Hilton Kelley, founder of the group Community In-Power and Development Association, has been fighting these companies for decades. Kelley was awarded the coveted Goldman Environmental Prize in 2011 for his efforts.

The EPA and Department of Justice, in their press releases, hail this as a major victory for protecting an “overburdened community.” But given the dozens of others plants and factories still polluting to high heaven there, it’s difficult to celebrate this recent settlement too hard.