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CRPE's CAMPAIGNS
The Central
Valley Air Quality Project:
CRPE Protects the Valley’s Most
Vulnerable Residents by making Corporate Agriculture Abide by the
Clean Air Act
The San Joaquin Valley of California ranks among the most polluted
air basins in the nation, creating an environmental justice crisis
on a grand scale. State and Federal air quality regulators, captured
by powerful agro-industrial interests, have failed to provide the
three million residents of the Valley with air quality that meets
Federal health-based standards. Skyrocketing air pollution-related
asthma and death rates combine with a general lack of access
to health care subject low-income rural communities to an unmitigated
environmental assault.
In the San Joaquin Valley, State, Federal and local politicians
have failed miserably to deliver clean air by the deadlines Congress
set forth in the Clean Air Act. The Valley Air Quality Project
seeks to force these captured regulators to adhere to their duty
to protect public health, and not polluters. CRPE works with community
groups to enhance their participation in the political process,
seeks out allies to fight some of the most entrenched and powerful
interests in the state, and brings lawsuits on clients' behalf
when government fails the people.
With deadly particulate matter pollution actually rising, and
the Valley leading the nation in terms of the number of days when
air quality violates the new Federal smog standard, CRPE provides
legal and technical assistance to grassroots groups who seek to
breathe healthy air. Working in a coalition of local and national
organizations, CRPE represented the Association of Irritated Residents
(AIR) and Communities for Land, Air, & Water (CLAW) in a series
of cases which have had the historic result of ending California’s
exemption of agricultural sources from Clean Air Act permit programs.
CRPE wrote the historic legislation – SB 700 – that regulates agricultural air pollution, and provided assistance to the grassroots campaign that beat the most power industry in the state.
The Project uses grassroots-based advocacy and strategic litigation to attack the greatest threats to air quality and environmental health: unregulated pesticide emissions, expansion of the Valley’s massive dairy industry, and captured regulatory agencies that do the polluters’ bidding. The Project’s current docket includes suits against the Department of Pesticide Regulation under state and federal Clean Air Acts to force California to reduce pesticide use, against scofflaw dairy operators ignoring their obligation to control air pollution, and against the EPA for giving animal factories a free pass from federal enforcement of air quality laws.
CRPE also works with California air regulators as they implement SB 700's pollution reduction requirements and develop plans to meet the new federal standards for smog and fine particle pollution.
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