In southwest Philadelphia in August 2019, a young Black man sat down on a folding chair in a high school auditorium and clipped a lapel mic to a bright yellow T-shirt that read “Philly Thrive.” “So, how you doin’? My name is Ricky,” he said into a camera. “I’m a resident in the Gray’s Ferry community, and I’m hoping and praying the refinery gets shutdown.” The refinery in question was Philadelphia Energy Solutions (PES), up to that point the largest oil refinery on the Eastern Seaboard. It had operated just a stone’s throw from the Gray’s Ferry neighborhood until two months earlier.
In the early hours of June 21, 2019, Philadelphia was rocked by three explosions at the refinery and a fire that burned for more than a day. A week later, PES shut down the refinery. The next month, the company declared bankruptcy and announced it was looking for a buyer. Amid rampant speculation about whether a new owner would restart the refinery or redevelop the site for other uses, Philadelphia mayor Jim Kenney established a Refinery Advisory Group “to bring together people with diverse experiences, knowledge, and perspectives on the refinery” and inform the city’s planning for the future of the 1,300-acre site.
This could have been a moment for moral repair. City officials had set themselves up to learn how surrounding neighborhoods had been affected by the refinery over its 150-year history. By acknowledging the harmful legacy of pollution—which Ricky went on to describe as “a hundred years of overwhelming pain and agony for people”—they might have affirmed as a shared norm the protection of Philadelphian’s health and quality of life. They might have established the City of Philadelphia as a community that would rally around neighborhoods who were being treated poorly by industry and help them call polluters to account.
That’s not exactly what happened, as we’ll see. But the Refinery Advisory Group did create space for people to have their experiences heard. At its second public meeting, the group set up a Story Station and filmed short statements by residents of South Philadelphia, Ricky among them. He and others explained why he thought the refinery should remain shut. “I’m sick of the air pollution, the asthma epidemic, just like the health issues, man, is very bad.” The next speaker, a white woman who introduced herself as Carly, elaborated. She and her husband had lived in Gray’s Ferry for five years, she said, and “since the refinery has not been in operation, I have actually been able to take deep breaths outside my house comfortably for the first time since I moved there.” The refinery’s pollution was a problem for the whole neighborhood, Carly said. “We’ve lost hundreds of people to cancer, there are hundreds of people with asthma, and learning disabilities, that are a direct result of the chemicals that have been emitted from this facility. The science is very clear.”
Not everyone shared this view. After Carly, the Story Station was claimed by a bald white guy. He spoke fast and loud, with a South Philly accent. “Okay, my name’s Patrick, I work in the refinery seventeen years. All of a sudden, the people who work inside these walls, why don’t we have cancer? Where is the proof? These people come out with accusations, they wanna get paid, they want money, how about the cigarettes you smoke? Is that causing emphysema? I guess it is.” Patrick, needless to say, thought the refinery should go back to operating as a refinery. His job was on the line, and he blamed people like Ricky and Carly for keeping him from it. “I go to work every day. And I work hard. And I’d like to go back to work tomorrow, but I can’t because people are crying about air quality.”
Nothing here surprises you, I expect. You’ve heard the stories of refinery neighbors who say they’ve been sickened by pollution. You’ve seen them criticized and vilified by people associated with the petrochemical industry. “Jobs” versus “the environment” is a wearyingly familiar trope. You also likely suspect that Patrick and Ricky represent a racial divide among the speakers. As Story Station testimony continued, all but one of the refinery workers were white, and all of those who spoke against the refinery were Black, with the exception of Carly.
You may, in fact, be so familiar with this scene that you are tempted to stop listening. You already have an argument about what’s going on here. You could say that operating this oil refinery, seemingly without regard for the health and safety of the low-income, majority-Black neighborhoods surrounding it, is just one more example of state-sanctioned violence against people of color. If you took that approach, which has been developed by sociologist David Naguib Pellow, you could even say that the City of Philadelphia doesn’t appear at all inclined to repudiate that violence. If they were, the Refinery Advisory Group would have taken a more explicitly antiracist stance, rather than setting up a false equivalency between refinery workers’ concern for their jobs and Gray’s Ferry residents’ fear for their lives.
Alternatively, you could jump in with the argument that “jobs versus the environment” is a specious choice. No one can thrive unless we phase out extractive, polluting industries. Doing so will make us more able to promote economic and racial justice, which will include good jobs for workers displaced from refineries. This is the “just transitions” approach, theorized by scholars like Julian Agyeman and advocated by organizations such as the Sunrise Movement, the Climate Justice Alliance, and Philly Thrive, the grassroots organization that Ricky and other yellow-shirted Story Station speakers belonged to. One of them, Mark Clincy, expressed the position this way: “We can get sustainable energy, renewable energy, clean energy that not only provides jobs for our employees, but also make it better for everyone to live.”
Before you talk back to the Story Station, though, notice something. Advocating for a just transition and condemning state-sanctioned environmental violence are both ways of trying to shift widely accepted ideas about right and wrong, or shared moral standards. This is important work. We can’t persuade people or governments to stick up for communities living with outsized burdens from pollution if we don’t share a belief that it’s wrong to pollute. The environmental justice movement’s arguments also work at changing people’s understanding of who counts as part of the moral community when it comes to upholding those shared standards. We can’t persuade people or governments to stick up for mostly Black communities like Gray’s Ferry if society treats people of color as expendable—even if they are inhaling more than their share of pollution.
Now perhaps you can see the argument in the Story Station a little differently. Ricky, Carly, and Patrick weren’t just arguing about whether PES should reopen as a refinery or become something else entirely. They were arguing about whether refinery pollution, or job loss, was conscionable. They were arguing about whether the city should go to bat for people with asthma or for people suddenly on unemployment. That’s not all, though. In addition to these arguments over moral standards, participants in the Story Station were fighting over who deserved to be protected, who deserved to be defended against wrongs, and who deserved to be listened to about matters of right and wrong. They were fighting over who was really part of the moral community, or the set of people who share moral standards and count on each other to uphold them.
Keep listening to the Story Station and you’ll see: This was not a fair fight. Refinery workers had weapons that residents of the Gray’s Ferry neighborhood didn’t—namely, our prevailing moral standards for economic activity. Residents had more scientists on their side, to be sure. But the scientists and their evidence didn’t tip the balance. They couldn’t, because upholding their scientific standards kept them on the sidelines of the real fight over who deserved protection.
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Good people
When it was Sonya Sanders’s turn in the Story Station, she described “living in fear in my house” in Gray’s Ferry. “This refinery all the time, there’s gasses that’s being let go, spills has just been coming out, or we smell gas all the time. I have to put blankets at the bottom of my door.” She continued, making reference to the June 21 explosions, “When this thing blew up, I was scared to death. I don’t want to live like that. Jobs shouldn’t be based on people’s lives. I don’t want any money, I just want to live.” While she asserted how things should be, she was also on the defensive against Patrick’s charge that the refinery’s detractors “just wanna get paid.” She reiterated, “It’s not about a dollar with me. I’m getting paid with my life.” Yet she was equally insistent that “I don’t want to live in fear.”
This is a plea you might expect some sympathy for. A few speakers later, Jimmy McGee, a white man with tattoos snaking down his arms, returned to the idea of living in fear—but he made it sound like a choice. McGee had not only worked in the refinery for more than 20 years; he was also the United Steelworkers’ head of safety for the refinery. He stressed that workers followed procedures, looked out for each other, and made sure that everyone went home safe. “I know people are scared about different things happening in their community, maybe vapors coming over and stuff like that,” he said, but having just explained refinery workers’ commitment to safety, it was clear he believed that people were scared because they didn’t understand what was really going on. He continued: “You can’t live your life being scared and worrying about stuff like that. You can’t live like that.” Sanders and her neighbors, he seemed to imply, could suffer less if they only trusted refinery workers more.
Like Patrick, McGee was indignant that people like Sanders would call for the refinery to remain closed. “We’re going to lose our jobs. And, what, thousands of people are going to be affected by this? Over 800 union workers are going to be out of jobs that pay for the houses, the cars, the schooling, my kids went to Catholic school, now my daughter’s going to college, her first year. It’s not easy.” He accused refinery opponents of “look[ing] at us and say[ing], ‘It’s okay, they don’t matter,’” citing a barbeque that Philly Thrive had held to celebrate PES’s closure as evidence. “A barbeque on us losing our jobs! . . . That’s a bunch of crap for that to happen. That’s a disgrace. Look at the people being affected here. We all got families. And I understand you got issues you want, the environment. I love the environment, too, but I’m telling you, we lose these jobs, man, a lot of families are going to be messed up.”
Here is the problem with the usual way that scientists defend communities exposed to pollution. The facts they have to offer are no defense against the most biting criticisms that residents face.
Here’s the old jobs-versus-the-environment trope again. But pay attention to what else was going on. Jimmy McGee was accusing Philly Thrive members of bad moral relations. People—families—were going to suffer financially if the refinery shut down for good. In his opinion, that called for solidarity. Few Americans would dispute the idea that we should go to bat for families in financial straits. It’s a standard that we share, at least in principle, and by that standard, celebrating refinery workers’ financial ruin is a disgrace. It appears to undermine shared norms and send the message that no one cares if refinery workers are wronged.
Recall Patrick’s testimony, and you’ll see that he also told stories about how refinery opponents were violating shared standards of right and wrong. Wanting money is a serious transgression if you’ve done nothing to earn it. Patrick used this cultural norm to declare the behavior of refinery detractors out of bounds: “To me it’s a crime, a crime that these people are looking to get paid, when people just want to go to work for an honest day’s pay.” Blaming other people for your own poor choices is equally reprehensible, and it was a charge refinery workers frequently leveled against residents who accused the refinery of ruining their health. That’s what Patrick was doing when he asked, “How about the cigarettes you smoke?” He was saying to Philly Thrive members that they caused their own breathing problems by smoking. He was also reminding them of a shared norm, that blaming someone else for a problem that you caused is dishonest and irresponsible. Jimmy McGee’s comments about living in fear had a similar flavor. There was in fact nothing to be afraid of, in McGee’s telling. If people like Sonya Sanders were scared nonetheless, they could only blame themselves, not the refinery.
You could poke holes in all of these accusations. You could point out the ways they deploy negative racial stereotypes. You could turn the accusation of bad moral relations on refinery workers, for not sticking up for people’s health. Before you rush to the defense of Gray’s Ferry residents, though, imagine for a moment that all of the charges against them are true. Better yet, think of an acquaintance of yours whom these accusations would fit. They’re callous about other people’s suffering. Maybe they even revel in it. They’re always out for a buck. They make bad choices, but nothing is ever their fault. You know the kind I mean. If you’re lucky, such people are few and far between in your experience. If you’re kind, it takes a lot for you to conclude that someone really is that kind of person. But once you do, the implications are clear. You don’t rely on those people. You don’t go out of your way to help or defend them. You certainly don’t defer to their judgment on matters of right and wrong. They don’t have the same basic values that you or I do, and they don’t deserve the same standing in our moral community.
Now you see the work that refinery employees’ accusations were doing. People like Patrick and Jimmy McGee weren’t just saying that Gray’s Ferry residents were incorrect in their assessment of the refinery’s hazards. They were saying that residents were not living up to basic norms and thus didn’t deserve to be listened to or defended. This is how communities on the front lines of pollution get left to battle industrial facilities on their own. As part of telling ourselves that the harms they experience aren’t really harms, we tell ourselves that the people alleging the harms lack the integrity that would make them valued members of our moral community and compel us to act on their behalf.
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The high ground
To be fair, refinery workers clearly felt vulnerable to similar attacks on their moral standing. As McGee put it, “There’s too many misconceptions about the refinery being the boogeyman.” On the surface, workers responded to these perceived criticisms by defending their work practices. According to Patrick, “We work in a controlled, safe environment. We can’t just throw material on the ground because it’s convenient for us. That’s not how we work, that’s not how we do things.” But through their talk about safety culture, they also asserted their good character. “We do things right” evokes upstanding workers, even more than proper procedure. McGee, pleading to keep refinery jobs, made the case outright: “We’re not bad people, we’re good people, the only thing we want to do is provide for our families.”
No one in the Story Station actually questioned the character of refinery workers. In fact, Philly Thrive members went out of their way to affirm workers’ need for jobs. “Let me say this to everyone,” Sylvia Bennett began, after introducing herself as a resident of the Gray’s Ferry area, “It’s a sad day when people can’t work. That’s sad. But it’s a sad day when you lose family members and you know when your doctors tell you what it came from, fossil fuel. I love to see people with jobs. I’m all for people with jobs. But one can’t say that we want money. I want my daughters to live. My daughters are dying, do you understand?” Bennett sounded on the verge of tears as she explained that two of her three daughters had breast cancer; for one, chemotherapy had caused nerve damage so severe that she could no longer walk. Pointing to others in the neighborhood who were dying, or had already died, of cancer, Bennett called it an “epidemic.” She ended with a call for unity: “It’s a sad day when we pit each other against each other for something like this, life. Life. Life is important. We’re not against you guys for your jobs. We want the company to be responsible and put out clean air.”
Compare Bennett’s approach to that of refinery workers. Where they dismissed her and others, she appealed to them, offering “life”—long, healthy lives—as something they should all be able to agree on. She tried to call them in to moral community, where they had been trying to drum her out. Yet even as she advanced a better moral standard, Bennett felt the need to affirm prevailing standards. Her community did not want undeserved money, she assured their critics, and they did value workers and their jobs. They were faithful upholders of shared standards, in other words, and were thus entitled to participate in thinking through those standards and how they should be applied to PES and its future in Philadelphia.
The asymmetry here is telling. Gray’s Ferry residents had to defend themselves in ways that refinery workers didn’t. They had to accede to the norms of people who were actively attacking them. The “jobs” camp has the moral high ground. The economic well-being of companies and workers is a norm that is taboo to question. Workers can assert their moral authority—including the authority to judge the integrity of others—without even having to say, “Of course we care about the health of the community. It’s a sad day when people in their 40s and 50s are dying of cancer.”
Prevailing norms around health help job defenders keep the high ground. Although health is valued in contemporary American culture, it’s considered the responsibility of the individual to stay healthy. When people like Sylvia Bennett or Sonya Sanders say that their loved ones are sick, it becomes an occasion for people to ask not “How can we help?” but “What did they do wrong?” The slight acknowledgments that refinery workers did offer to Philly Thrive members’ concerns about health were tinged with this kind of judgment. John Wharton, a white refinery worker who “lived in the community for years,” said, “I understand about the cancer. My mother died of cancer at 47, but she smoked three packs a day. It’s not all the refinery.”
Here is a place where science could seemingly help. Scientists could investigate the links between refinery emissions and various health effects, like asthma and cancer. They could demonstrate that oil companies and regulators understate the harms that pollution causes. Solid evidence of those harms could cause us all to rethink our moral calculus where it comes to tradeoffs between economic activity and people’s lives. We could adjust our shared standards to make unacceptable the kind of pollution that people living near oil refineries have long been forced to tolerate.
The thing is, scientists are already doing those studies. They have been for decades. Although it is notoriously difficult to prove that exposure to pollution caused an illness, we do have evidence that curbing refinery pollution would improve health in nearby communities. Yet the debate over PES that occurred in 2019 didn’t look very different from controversies over petrochemical facilities in the 1990s. Our regulatory regimes still operate on the same logic, allowing as much pollution as the environment can absorb. “Jobs” still have pride of place in the public discourse. People are still blamed for their own ill health. Somehow, all of the research that has been done hasn’t been very effective in shifting the standards to which we hold industrial facilities. If we look at how scientific evidence is used to back up communities like Gray’s Ferry, where people face assaults on their health and their integrity, we start to see why.
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Non-exonerating evidence
A week after the Story Station, Dr. Marilyn Howarth, a physician and researcher at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Excellence in Environmental Toxicology (CEET), took the microphone in the same high school auditorium at the Refinery Advisory Group’s fourth public meeting. A white woman with decades of experience in her field, Howarth started by introducing her organization and its mission: “The environmental health researchers, physicians, and public health professionals of the CEET work every day on environmental health issues that affect our region and recognize the value of scientific evidence to establish and maintain public policy protective of human health.”
From this you might glean that Howarth and CEET were on the side of community members like Sylvia Bennett and Sonya Sanders, who believed that illnesses in the Gray’s Ferry neighborhood were connected to pollution from the refinery. Indeed, Howarth had for many years been sounding the alarm about the negative effects refinery emissions could have on human health. She was among the critics of a 2014 proposal by business leaders to make Philadelphia an “energy hub” with new pipelines and petrochemical facilities. The refinery, she told the Philadelphia Daily News in 2015, was releasing “very strong pollutants” that “contribute to asthma and would irritate the airways for people with chronic pulmonary disease.”
Howarth’s testimony to the Refinery Advisory Group likewise connected ill health in the city to refinery pollution. She began by offering “background on the health outcomes that are relevant to [PES’s] emissions and releases.” Rates of several kinds of cancer were higher in Philadelphia than in Pennsylvania or the United States as a whole, she explained, and “several of these cancers are caused by environmental exposures,” including exposure to benzene, a chemical released by refineries. Howarth then turned her attention to asthma, heart attacks, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, each of which, she said, was significantly more common in Philadelphia than in other parts of the state. “Certainly there are many contributors to each of these health outcomes,” she conceded, but went on to suggest that the refinery’s contributions were significant. The refinery was the city’s largest source of volatile organic compounds. A number of these hazardous chemicals caused cancer, and all of them contributed to the formation of ozone, which worsens asthma and makes heart attacks more likely. Howarth also noted that, for the past three years, the refinery had been spewing more pollution than its permits allowed.
To stick up for communities like Gray’s Ferry, researchers need to do more than responsibly represent the facts. They need, somehow, to become part of a bulwark against attacks on community activists’ moral standing.
Having mustered all of these facts, Howarth sided firmly with those who felt that PES’s July 2019 closure should be the end of petrochemical operations at the site. “Given the size of the large refinery complex, its significant health-impacting emissions, and the close proximity to millions of Philadelphia residents, we conclude that permits for this type of industry in this location would not be granted in the future.” In other words, even by the existing standards enshrined in environmental law, this amount of this kind of pollution was unacceptable.
If you had been a resident of Gray’s Ferry, convinced that your spouse’s cancer or your child’s asthma was caused by refinery pollution, you might well have felt vindicated by Howarth’s testimony. Cancer and asthma were more common in your community than they should be, according to this respected physician. They were caused by chemicals that PES emitted, and emitted much more of than anyone else in the area. But if you were a refinery worker, you might also have felt that Howarth’s testimony proved your point. She said there were many reasons that people got cancer and asthma. You couldn’t pin all the blame on the refinery, just like John Wharton had said. Nothing in Howarth’s testimony ruled out the possibility that people in Gray’s Ferry had cancer because they smoked.
Here is the problem with the usual way that scientists defend communities exposed to pollution. The facts they have to offer are no defense against the most biting criticisms that residents face. Refinery workers accused Gray’s Ferry residents of wanting a handout. They accused them of making irresponsible choices. They accused them of blaming others for problems they brought on themselves. They accused them of not only failing to stick up for suffering families but also reveling in their misfortunes. These attacks weren’t just petty insults. They were elements of a larger argument, that people who complained about the refinery—allegedly for disingenuous and self-serving reasons—did not deserve to be listened to or defended.
When Marilyn Howarth weighed in on behalf of the community, she did not say, “People with asthma are not asking for money they don’t deserve.” She did not say, “Cancer is not something that people brought on themselves.” She did not even question the premises and say, “You should be able to choose to live in Southwest Philadelphia without choosing a lifetime of illness.” At best, she said that PES’s emissions were at least partially responsible for high cancer and asthma rates—but not that Gray’s Ferry residents were fully justified in blaming PES for what ailed them.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean to suggest that Howarth should have said these things. There was not a scientific basis for saying that Sylvia Bennett’s daughters had cancer because they were exposed to PES’s emissions. It’s likely that no amount of research could produce such a direct, causal claim. Howarth framed available evidence in a way that was accurate and responsible, in keeping with scientists’ standards for making factual claims. My point is that an accurate, responsible reading of the available evidence barely touches the real stakes of the debate. It doesn’t—it can’t—address allegations of greed, irresponsibility, and bad moral character.
To stick up for communities like Gray’s Ferry, researchers need to do more than responsibly represent the facts. They need, somehow, to become part of a bulwark against attacks on community activists’ moral standing. Scientists’ research alone can’t shift our standards for right and wrong to make sure that, ultimately, exposing communities to toxic pollution is met with widespread public disapproval and reparative action. Community activists need to question the moral logics that excuse the harms that scientists demonstrate. When members of groups like Philly Thrive say, “Your jobs do not make up for our lives,” we need to hear them as legitimate contributors to our collective conscience.
In a way, Howarth’s closing remarks did assert the community’s moral standing. She recommended that “public participation by residents in this process be enhanced.” Her recommendation didn’t defend residents’ fitness to be part of public deliberations so much as it took for granted that they deserved to be included. Nonetheless, it countered efforts to drum residents out of the conversation. That was a start. But, as the Refinery Advisory Group process shows, public participation is no panacea, especially when it is structured by entities with limited interest in changing prevailing norms.
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Costs and benefits
Listening to Marilyn Howarth’s August 2019 testimony was a row of individuals, most of them white, representing the City of Philadelphia. It included the city’s managing director, fire commissioner, and director of the Office of Sustainability, as well as professors from local universities and business leaders who had been appointed to the Refinery Advisory Group by the mayor’s office. Their collective charge was to assemble a report on the PES situation—a report that would express the city’s moral standards for industrial development.
No one said so in quite those words, of course. But city officials were emphatic that they could not tell PES what to do with its property. The Refinery Advisory Group process could not result in anything as concrete as a plan for remediation and redevelopment. What it could do was collect the viewpoints of assorted stakeholders and highlight the values that it hoped would guide future uses of the privately owned site. Accordingly, testimony to the Refinery Advisory Group had everything to do with what should be protected and what should be considered out of line. Marilyn Howarth and others who spoke at the Group’s public meetings, including Sylvia Bennett and Jimmy McGee, had a rare chance to articulate the norms for right and wrong that they thought Philadelphians should be sticking up for.
Only two from that row of people, Managing Director Brian Abernathy and Fire Commissioner Adam Thiel, were ultimately listed as authors of the report that was released in November 2019, entitled A Close Call and an Uncertain Future. A disclaimer on page 3 credited the work of other city staff in preparing the report and clarified that it “does not reflect the views of the Advisory Group as a whole or its individual members.” You might infer that consensus about relevant moral standards was not to be found among the diverse Refinery Advisory Group. That didn’t stop the city from putting forth its position about what it would stand up for on behalf of its populace and why.
The report included considerable background on the refinery’s history, the 2019 explosions, and the Refinery Advisory Group process. At the heart of the report, though, were a chapter on “Benefits” and a chapter on “Costs.” Each concluded with quotes from public testimony, under the heading “What we heard.” Sonya Sanders, Sylvia Bennett, Mark Clincy, and other Philly Thrive members were pictured at the end of the costs chapter, alongside their words. So, too, were white representatives from environmental organizations, with assertions about the need to shift away from fossil fuels. Marilyn Howarth, notably, wasn’t among them. Her testimony, along with that of other scientists, was incorporated into the text of the chapter. There authors enrolled her into an analysis that upheld prevailing moral standards, despite her efforts to show that continued refinery operations should be intolerable.
One of the chapter’s main sections was devoted to health impacts and began by noting that health was “a dominant theme” in public comments. The text went on to explain how hard it is to prove that health problems are caused by a specific source, like a refinery. “However,” the authors conceded with a footnote to Howarth, “data strongly suggests that Philadelphians suffer disproportionately adverse health effects, and many of those are correlated to emissions like those generated from the refinery.” The next paragraph consisted of statistics taken directly from Howarth’s written testimony about these elevated rates of cancer and asthma in Philadelphia. The report then invoked another set of public health researchers, in this case from Drexel University, citing their claim that exposures to air pollutants increased respiratory disease among people living near refineries in particular. Nonetheless, the report’s authors concluded the section in a way that suggested health effects weren’t really a cause for public action: “While a reduction in air emissions from the refinery site may help improve Philadelphia’s air quality more generally, it is difficult to tie that reduction in refinery emissions directly to a reduction in the air pollution that impacts any specific community or population because there are other relevant risk factors and pollution sources involved.”
Notice what happened here. The city officials who authored the report respected scientists’ authority. They didn’t question their facts. They just missed their point. Howarth and her colleagues at Drexel were offering evidence to demonstrate that refinery emissions were a source of harm. They were offering evidence to add weight to activists’ claims that the city shouldn’t tolerate this kind of injury to its people. But instead of acknowledging the moral significance of their evidence, the city’s report enlisted it in a project of bean-counting. It said, sure, the evidence demonstrated some costs, but those costs were not so direct, not so certain, and not so large as to overwhelm the economic benefits of the oil refinery.
Let me be clear: When I say the city ignored the moral significance of scientists’ testimony, I don’t mean that they stripped it of its values and dealt with the underlying, unadulterated facts. What I mean to say is that, by weighing the costs and benefits associated with industry, the authors of the city’s report imposed a particular moral framework of their own onto the evidence offered by Howarth and others. Like other policymakers who choose a cost–benefit frame to make sense of environmental controversy, they designated economic activity as the “benefit.” Industry was awarded the moral high ground from the start. Pollution, health impacts, and safety concerns—the “costs”—were a tradeoff, a sacrifice, a price to be paid for this greater good. By grounding the report’s conclusions in a tally of costs and benefits, authors suggested that tax revenues could reasonably be weighed against asthma attacks, that more money flowing in the local economy could somehow be measured on the same scale as fewer years spent with loved ones whose deaths were hastened by exposure to pollution.
Public participation is no panacea, especially when it is structured by entities with limited interest in changing prevailing norms.
People who argue against the continuation of fossil fuels and the petrochemical industry work to destabilize this cost–benefit logic. They have to, if our society is ever to embrace moral standards that ask us to side with the communities on the front lines of pollution. In Refinery Advisory Group public meetings, people like Sylvia Bennett were able to be direct about the fact that jobs were no compensation for lives. Scientists like Howarth had to be more circumspect. Her evidence said only that the presence of the refinery did harm. It did not say—it could not say—that we as a people should not tolerate those harms. Had her arguments been wrapped together with Bennett’s, the implication would have been more obvious. Stripped from its context and reappropriated into the city’s story about benefits and costs, Howarth’s evidence lost its standard-shifting power.
Once again, an accurate, responsible reading of the evidence doesn’t touch the real stakes of the debate. Just as Howarth’s testimony couldn’t rebut attacks on community activists’ moral standing, it couldn’t destabilize the moral logic that shaped the city’s assessment of the PES situation. Arguably, it only legitimized the cost–benefit analysis by helping to generate a credible assessment of costs. If costs are significant, but not that significant, then the game doesn’t look rigged from the start.
A scientist could refuse to be enrolled, of course. She could state outright that communities deserve our protection. She could declare cost–benefit analysis to be a morally bankrupt way of approaching the issues surrounding petrochemical pollution. But if someone like Howarth were to launch an attack on the Refinery Advisory Group’s moral logic, she would find herself on the “What we heard” page of their report, not in the footnotes. Worse, she’d find her own standing in the moral community questioned. Environmentalists who opposed the proposal to make Philadelphia an energy hub back in 2014, Howarth among them, were characterized by its chief proponent as irresponsible, polemical people who don’t work for a living—charges not so different from those leveled at Gray’s Ferry residents by PES refinery workers in 2019.
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Overcoming abandonment
You see now, if you didn’t before, what I mean by dysfunctional moral relations. But keep in mind that the summer of 2019 wasn’t their lowest point. Residents of Gray’s Ferry had lived through “a hundred years of overwhelming pain and agony,” to borrow Ricky’s words from the Story Station, without the moral community rallying around to acknowledge their suffering or to insist that the refinery stop its harmful pollution. It’s the same in Port Arthur, Texas; and New Sarpy, Louisiana; and Benicia, California—places that you may never have heard of, which is part of my point. Dysfunctional moral relations entail widespread abandonment. The people who struggle most because of our collective ways of living fight for accountability, and survival, mostly without backup from the rest of us.
The Refinery Advisory Group process shows how this abandonment is engineered. First, there is the issue of shared standards for right and wrong. Economic activity is awarded the moral high ground by city officials and white, male refinery workers. It is jobs we must protect; workers’ ability to send their kids to college we must stick up for. You or I might not disagree, or not completely. But other things that we might consider wrongs, like Carly’s inability to breathe deeply when the refinery is operating or Sylvia Bennett’s middle-aged daughters being debilitated by cancer, are things that the city and its populace are not as willing to stand up against. Certainly petrochemical pollution is not widely considered a wrong as such. It is a price to be paid and a tradeoff to be made. If that’s all it is—an inconvenience and not an injustice—then it comes with no obligation to go to bat for the people who suffer it routinely.
Then there is the issue of who deserves to be defended. When residents of Gray’s Ferry called on the City of Philadelphia to defend their health, refinery workers accused them of being irresponsible and greedy. These are charges routinely leveled at refinery neighbors who call on the rest of us to rein in industry on their behalf. They are told to mind their own health and make better life choices. If, in fact, we believe they are responsible for their own fates, the rest of us need not feel guilty for failing to show up. If, in fact, we understand them as grifters milking minor insults, we are justified in leaving them to their own devices.
Even if it is not environmental justice that you care most about, these patterns will be familiar to you. Women pressured for sexual favors by their bosses are still too often told it’s no big deal. They’re not really being harmed. Those with the audacity to try to hold them accountable in the court system, or the court of public opinion, are accused of wanting money or pursuing personal vendettas. They are made out to be people who don’t deserve our sympathy or our solidarity. People who seek to fight racism, to undo discrimination against people with disabilities, and otherwise to make oppression unacceptable all confront not only abandonment. They also confront the denial that they have been wronged and the denial that they have the moral standing to expect solidarity.
If you are a researcher committed to justice in any arena, this is the thing you need to understand: Just showing up as an ally is not enough to overcome the abandonment faced by marginalized groups. It is the right start, to be sure. But if you show up armed with facts alone, you risk having them used to deny that the harms people experience are really wrongs that anyone needs to feel obligated to fix, as Marilyn Howarth’s facts were in the City of Philadelphia’s report on PES. If you show up armed with facts alone, you’ll find they don’t offer much of a rebuttal to those who argue that the people you’ve come to defend aren’t worthy of protection.
If science is going to contribute to the repair of moral relations, it has somehow to help resist efforts to push people out of the moral community. It has somehow to shore up people’s moral authority when they fight for improved standards of right and wrong. Research can work to these ends—if scientists focus on the power of processes of inquiry, rather than facts themselves, to improve moral relations.
Excerpted from The Science of Repair by Gwen Ottinger. Copyright © 2026 by Gwen Ottinger and published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
