A Texas mayor is defending his city’s reputation after CNN’s chief climate correspondent said a resident expressed concern to him about dying from starvation.
Port Arthur Mayor Thurman Bartie’s city of about 55,000 people is probably best known as the home of the Saudi Arabia-owed Motiva oil refinery, North America’s largest facility. In 2017, the low socio-economic community was also devastated by Hurricane Harvey. The tropical cyclone tore through about 80% of the housing available in the Southeast Texas city, where almost a third of the population lives below the poverty line and roughly 5,000 households are dependent on food stamps, according to recent government statistics. Two years on, the clean-up after the storm continues.
Acknowledging Port Arthur’s challenges, particularly homelessness, Bartie didn’t want to “downplay” the worries of the resident who spoke to CNN’s Bill Weir. But while their complaint deserved “its hearing,” he emphasized it was only one opinion.
“They have the right to feel that way. Now you could go ask another person and they would not feel that way. Those were the sentiments articulated by one particular individual. That was not skewed in an equitable manner,” he said.
Still, Bartie welcomed the attention, especially if it could lead to more federal investment in recovery efforts or his residents being thought of for good paying jobs, even with the refinery.
“It caused persons all around the United States to want to think about, to consider Port Arthur,” he said. “It’s causing a dialogue to be entered into by individuals concerning the topic. I consider it to be a positive. It allows us to go through great change and something that may even help the air quality… If it puts us in a better state of mind to continue to grow out our city, it would be all worth it.”
Weir raised eyebrows Wednesday night when he asked Elizabeth Warren during his network’s seven-hour, climate-focused town hall series how she would sell her clean energy plan in places like Port Arthur, which is tied to the fossil fuel industry.
“I met a family in a $60,000 house that can’t afford to fix the mold from Harvey,” Weir told the Massachusetts senator. “Even though they understand the problems, they would tell you, please don’t shut them down because I will die of starvation before I die of pollution. They’re worried about jobs. And so what do you tell the pipefitters and cafeteria workers in Port Arthur what will happen to them if these places go dark?”
Warren replied that infrastructure jobs could replace employment linked to the refinery over the next two decades.
“I’ve seen Port Arthur. Port Arthur is going to need a lot of infrastructure, re-building, and strengthening. It’s going to need a lot of help right on the water. Those are good jobs. Those are union jobs, those are skilled jobs. We have a lot of work to do and I hope the workers in Port Arthur will be a big part of that,” she said.
Southeast Texas Food Bank president and CEO Dan Maher estimated more than one in four people in Port Arthur would currently be deemed “food insecure,” meaning they lack access to enough food for “an active, healthy life,” according to a U.S. Department of Agriculture definition. That’s a higher incidence compared to the 11% rate applicable to the rest of the nation in 2018, but Maher said perspective was necessary when talking about “starvation.”
“When we deal with domestic hunger it’s very different from international hunger, and so the images we have of starvation that are shown to us from around the world are probably not matched in our Port Arthur community,” Maher told the Washington Examiner.
Starvation, however, does occur in the U.S., with isolated seniors among those at risk. In 2017, the latest available data, 2,813,503 people died of starvation, according to a query of mortality data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That number has steadily risen since 1999.
