SouthWest Organizing Project working to empower our communities to realize racial and gender equality and social and economic justice. Current methods of monitoring focus on measuring what is coming out of the smokestacks. After the pollutants leave the stacks, however, there is no tracking to see where they are going.
Current protocol uses statistical models to predict where the pollution is traveling.
But these are only predictions. The only way to know for sure what people are breathing is to put monitors on the ground, where the residents live, where children play. We feel that multinational corporations posting healthy profits and who benefit from public subsidies should make sure that they are not hurting those who live in their shadow. If you emit carcinogens and other toxicants, then you should place monitors in the adjacent neighborhoods to ensure that residents are not breathing poisons that may show up twenty years later as cancer clusters, reproductive problems, or have developmental effects on children. What we are proposing here is not rocket science.