Beto O’Rourke says race is the No. 1 indicator for...

The claim: "Climate change has a distressingly disproportionate impact on poor and minority communities across the United States and around the world. Race is the No. 1 indicator for where toxic and polluting facilities are today." — Democrat Beto O’Rourke, in his plan to combat climate change.

PolitiFact ruling: Mostly True. Several studies say that racial and ethnic minorities are more likely to live near hazardous waste facilities and other plants. They’ve also found that race is a stronger indicator than other variables, such as income or property value. There isn’t consensus on O’Rourke’s claim, but much research and feedback supports it.

Discussion: O'Rourke's claim mirrors a statement by an NAACP program that highlights environmental and climate issues affecting communities of color and low-income, and draws from a 2016 editorial in The Nation citing examples of "environmental racism."

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The types of facilities that O’Rourke is talking about include coal-fired power plants, hazardous waste landfills and incinerators, oil refineries, and chemical manufacturers.

"The vast majority of research indicates that in the United States, minorities, particularly blacks and Hispanics, are disproportionately burdened by environmental hazards of pollution as compared to whites," said Jeremy Mennis, a geographer and professor at Temple University.

Blacks and Hispanics in the United States tend to be poorer than whites, so there’s been some debate on whether the geographic disparity of these facilities is due to race or socioeconomic status, Mennis said.

But even when socioeconomic factors are similar across white and non-white communities, minorities are still more likely to be near environmental hazards, said Paul Mohai, an environmental justice expert and professor at the University of Michigan.

Some studies have found that the racial composition of a neighborhood is a stronger predictor than income, property value, and other socioeconomic factors, Mohai said. Those studies used "distance-based" methods and examined racial and socioeconomic disparities at the time of the facilities’ siting.

In a study published in 2015, Mohai and Robin Saha, a collaborator at the University of Montana, explored which came first to a neighborhood, people of color and low-income, or commercial hazardous waste treatment, storage, and disposal facilities. They examined facilities sited from 1966 to 1995 and the demographic composition of host neighborhoods around the time of siting and demographic changes after siting.

"Our findings show that rather than hazardous waste (treatment, storage, and disposal facilities) 'attracting' people of color, neighborhoods with already disproportionate and growing concentrations of people of color appear to 'attract' new facility siting," their study said.

Experts said that factors analyzed regarding the racial disparity in the location of hazardous facilities include:

• intentional discrimination in siting;

• historical zoning and land use patterns related to segregation and redlining;

• minority communities having less political clout to fight back a proposed facility;

• and a "coming to the nuisance" phenomenon in which after a facility decides where to locate, people of color and low-income move in as property values and quality of life decline, and people who can afford to move out do so.

For more on the research and the conclusion, visit Politifact Texas, www.politifact.com/texas/