Infrastructure Bill Funds Pollution Bomb for Black Neighborhoods 

By Willy Blackmore Originally appeared in Word in Black In 2021, President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law made a whopping $1.2 trillion in federal funds available to states to upgrade everything from roads and bridges (which are often crumbling) to subways and other mass-transit systems. The idea, in part, was that making such a huge pile of money available to local governments would encourage a leap forward in climate-friendly infrastructure. But while there have been green success stories, like the expansion of electric school bus fleets, according to a new review of infrastructure bill spending, such spending has been the exception to the rule. Instead, states have plowed money into the same thing they always do: more roads and highways, or more lanes on existing highways. The policy group Transportation for America calls the future emissions that will come from the spending a “climate time bomb.” It will also create an explosion in pollution for the predominantly Black and brown communities that tend to live alongside the country’s freeways. The analysis looked at some 57,000 projects and found that $33 billion of funds from the bill are going “toward projects that expand road capacity, doubling down on a strategy that has...