As our "green jobs czar" rides off into the west, never to be heard from again (we hope), he leaves a legacy of charges against white people who he has claimed many times, deliberately fouled the environment of the inner cities and poisoned people of color.

Ever wonder where people like Van Jones find information on which to base those charges? Apparently, Mr. Jones simply pulled it out of thin air.

This piece by Stephen Hayward of the Weekly Standard, exposes Jones as either an ignoramus who doesn't have a clue of anything he speaks, or a racialist liar, laying the guilt trip hot and heavy on liberals to extort cash:

Indeed, there is scant evidence of "disparate" environmental harm to minorities and the poor. Data on environmental health is only broken out by race in one government data series, the Centers for Disease Control's National Report on Human Exposure to Environmental Chemicals. The CDC tracks levels of over 125 chemicals and heavy metals in human blood and urine. In some cases, such as blood lead and phthalates, blacks and Hispanics have higher levels than whites; in other cases, such as cadmium and some polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), blacks and Hispanics have lower levels than whites. (In a few cases, such as cesium, the level detected in whites is twice as high as in blacks or Hispanics.) In still other cases, such as mercury, there is little difference between races.

In sum, at the general level there is no evidence in the CDC data that racial minorities experience higher exposure to environmental chemicals than whites on a national scale. And there is considerable uncertainty about the source of chemical exposure where differences do exist. The CDC notes: "It is unknown whether differences between ages or races/ethnicities represent differences in exposure, body-size relationships, or metabolism."

The CDC does make special note of a study that found higher levels of some environmental chemicals correlated with low incomes. But a correlation with income is a very different matter than race. Low income correlates with poor health outcomes on a broad range of risk measures beyond environmental exposures.