Subsidy Tracker new data released

One of the projects that I work on for the nonprofit group Good Jobs First is their Subsidy Tracker site, "the only national [U.S.] search engine capturing company-specific economic development incentive awards from the federal government, all 50 states and many localities." Here's the press release and the site itself.

You can search this site in all sorts of ways -- including finding all of the subsidies given to major parent companies -- but one of the basic kinds of searches is finding the subsidies to businesses in your home town. You can do this by going to the bottom of the search form, filling in a state, and then choosing a city from a list of cities that will be populated. Here's a search for Northampton, MA. You can see a subsidy for the Coca-Cola plant, a major industrial water user, and one to Kollmorgen (now L-3 KEO), a defense contractor, as well as some subsidies to development firms -- probably the three most controversial businesses where I live.

RTK NET is back up

RTK NET, the Right-To-Know Network is back up (sort of) at rtk.net or rtknet.org. By "sort of" I mean that it currently is up in the form of a page of backend links that I wrote in 2 minutes in vi. But those links do work and provide the previous RTK NET search capability, and the Houston Chronicle (which has taken over RTK NET) is working on putting a front end in place.

RTK NET provides public access to U.S. toxic release / chemical accident / hazardous waste data, including TRI (Toxic Release Inventory), NRC (National Response Center), BRS (RCRAINFO Biennial data), the rest of RCRAINFO (i.e. hazardous waste permits), and RMP (Risk Management Plan) data. Other than the RCRAINFO hazardous waste permits data, the databases are fairly up to date with last update dates as follows:

• TRI: 10/08/2015
• BRS: 10/27/2015
• NRC: 01/05/2016
• RMP: 12/30/2015
• RCRAINFO: 05/19/2013

RTK NET is the only online searchable source that I know of for NRC and RMP data (both chemical accident databases) and its interface to TRI and BRS has some advantages that other sites don't have. I've worked on the project since 1991 and I'm glad that it's going back up.

Toxic 100 Air and Water rankings released

The Political Economy Research Institute at Umass (PERI) has released the Toxic 100 Air and Water rankings of top corporate polluters for 2016, based on Toxic Release Inventory data as weighted by EPA's geographic micro data RSEI model and with facilities assigned to a regularized set of parent companies.

One of the things that becomes apparent in analyses of these kind of data -- whether it's a news story like this one on the super polluters that USA Today did with the Center for Public Integrity or an academic paper published by Mary Collins, Joseph JaJa, and Ian Muñoz -- is that pollution from fixed facilities is dominated by a small number of facilities. To reduce pollution overall you don't necessarily have to reduce it from every facility equally.

Here's an example from the Toxic 100 Air. DuPont, the company ranked second on the list, has 97% of its total U.S. score from a single facility, the DuPont Pontchartrain Works in La Place, LA -- emissions that affect a local population that is over 60% racial and ethnic minorities. So what's going on there?