**Table of Contents Contents 1ac – Mass Transit
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HealthEnvironmental Racism cause health issues, specifically the use of freeways and transportation causes people in poor communities to more likely be affected by asthma Sanchez at al 03 (Thomas W. Sanchez, Rich Stolz, and Jacinta S. Ma, homas W. Sanchez is an associate professor of Urban Affairs and Planning and research fellow in the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech in Alexandria, Virginia. Rich Stolz is Senior Policy Analyst at Center for Community Change. Jacinta S. Ma is a Legal and Policy Advocacy Associate at The Civil Rights Project at Harvard, “Moving to Equity: Addressing Inequitable Effects of Transportation Policies on Minorities”). Like Detroit, many urban areas have significant pollution, much of which can be traced to transportation policies that favor highway development and automobile travel over public transportation. In addition, these transportation policies combined with land use or zoning policies lead to more toxic usage of land in poor and minority neighborhoods than in affluent areas and areas with fewer minorities.147 Higher percentages of African Americans (65%) and Latinos (80%) compared with whites (57%) live in areas with substandard air quality.148 Research suggests that these polluted environments in turn result in higher rates of respiratory diseases, such as asthma.149 It is known that the occurrence of asthma and asthma-related deaths is higher in African Americans and Latinos than in whites.150 Asthma is almost twice as common among African Americans as it is among whites. Even more disturbing are the disparities in asthma deaths among African Americans and whites: Though African Americans make up approximately 12 percent of the U.S. population, they account for about 24 percent of all asthma deaths.151 A report by the Environmental Protection Agency found that non-Hispanic African-American children who live in families with incomes below the poverty level have the highest rate (8.3%) of asthma of all racial groups.152 While it is not known to what extent these disparities are due to outdoor pollution, research studies have found a strong and significant correlation between residing near heavy automobile or truck traffic and increased difficulties with respiratory function and higher incidence of disease, such as asthma, in children.153 Specifically, studies have found that high concentrations of air pollutants from vehicles are linked to asthma.154 A study of Atlanta during the 1996 Summer Olympics when alternative transportation strategies were implemented155 found that hospitals and doctors saw significantly fewer children for serious asthma problems.156 A study examining the effect of daily air pollution levels on asthmatic children living in the Bronx and East Harlem, New York; Baltimore; Washington, DC; Detroit; Cleveland; Chicago; and St. Louis found that increased exposure to certain air pollution was associated with asthma.157 The neighborhoods of Harlem and South Bronx in New York City have received attention due to the high rates of asthma among their residents. Central Harlem’s population is approximately 88 percent African Americans and 10 percent white.158 South Bronx has a population of approximately 79 percent Latino and 19 percent African American.159 Neither of these communities has been meeting air quality standards.160 Most of the area’s bus depots were sited in Harlem161 and like the South Bronx, it contains or is surrounded by heavily traveled commuter highways.162 One study of these communities found the rates of developmental and respiratory diseases (such as asthma) are disproportionately high Impact Framing: ProbabilityThe “any risk” logic would make all decisionmaking impossible—evaluate probability over magnitude MESKILL 2009 (David, professor at Colorado School of Mines and PhD from Harvard, “The "One Percent Doctrine" and Environmental Faith,” Dec 9, http://davidmeskill.blogspot.com/2009/12/one-percent-doctrine-and-environmental.html) Tom Friedman's piece today in the Times on the environment (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/09/opinion/09friedman.html?_r=1) is one of the flimsiest pieces by a major columnist that I can remember ever reading. He applies Cheney's "one percent doctrine" (which is similar to the environmentalists' "precautionary principle") to the risk of environmental armageddon. But this doctrine is both intellectually incoherent and practically irrelevant. It is intellectually incoherent because it cannot be applied consistently in a world with many potential disaster scenarios. In addition to the global-warming risk, there's also the asteroid-hitting-the-earth risk, the terrorists-with-nuclear-weapons risk (Cheney's original scenario), the super-duper-pandemic risk, etc. Since each of these risks, on the "one percent doctrine," would deserve all of our attention, we cannot address all of them simultaneously. That is, even within the one-percent mentality, we'd have to begin prioritizing, making choices and trade-offs. But why then should we only make these trade-offs between responses to disaster scenarios? Why not also choose between them and other, much more cotidien, things we value? Why treat the unlikely but cataclysmic event as somehow fundamentally different, something that cannot be integrated into all the other calculations we make? And in fact, this is how we behave all the time. We get into our cars in order to buy a cup of coffee, even though there's some chance we will be killed on the way to the coffee shop. We are constantly risking death, if slightly, in order to pursue the things we value. Any creature that adopted the "precautionary principle" would sit at home - no, not even there, since there is some chance the building might collapse. That creature would neither be able to act, nor not act, since it would nowhere discover perfect safety. Friedman's approach reminds me somehow of Pascal's wager - quasi-religious faith masquerading as rational deliberation (as Hans Albert has pointed out, Pascal's wager itself doesn't add up: there may be a God, in fact, but it may turn out that He dislikes, and even damns, people who believe in him because they've calculated it's in their best interest to do so). As my friend James points out, it's striking how descriptions of the environmental risk always describe the situation as if it were five to midnight. It must be near midnight, since otherwise there would be no need to act. But it can never be five *past* midnight, since then acting would be pointless and we might as well party like it was 2099. Many religious movements - for example the early Jesus movement - have exhibited precisely this combination of traits: the looming apocalypse, with the time (just barely) to take action. Traditional risk analysis underestimates common hazards – prefer the impacts of the plan Kasperson et al. 1988 - , Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts (January 8, Roger E., Ortwin Renn,' Paul Slovic,2 Halina S. Brown,' Jacque Emel,' Robert Goble,' Jeanne X. Kasperson,'~~ and Samuel Ratick', “ The Social Amplification of Risk A Conceptual Framework ” Risk Analysis, Vol. 8, No. 2, http://elib.uni-stuttgart.de/opus/volltexte/2010/5307/pdf/ren27.pdf ) The point is that traditional cost-benefit and risk analyses neglect these higher-order impacts and thus greatly underestimate the variety of adverse effects attendant on certain risk events (and thereby underestimate the overall risk from the event). In this sense, social amplification provides a corrective mechanism by which society acts to bring the techni- cal assessment of risk more in line with a fuller determination of risk. At the other end of the spec- trum, the relatively low levels of interest by the public in the risks presented by such well-docu- mented and significant hazards as indoor radon, smoking, driving without seat belts, or hghly carcinogenic aflatoxins in peanut butter serve as ex- amples of the social attenuation of risk. Whereas attenuation of risk is indispensible in that i t allows individuals to cope with the multitude of risks and risk events encountered daily, it also may lead to potentially serious adverse consequences from under- estimation and underresponse. Thus both social amplification and attenuation, through serious dis- junctures between expert and public assessments of risk and varying responses among different publics, confound conventional risk analysis. 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