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Abstract In Commerce City, Colorado, residents contend with multiple environmental hazards and live in the most polluted zip code in the US. Perhaps no source of environmental harm is more visible than the imposing, aging Suncor Oil Refinery. The refinery dominates entire city blocks and residents' daily lives. Since 2005, the refinery has been cited for over nearly 60 environmental and safety violations. Despite this, it continues operating with minor penalties, exemplifying how the state's neoliberalized regulatory approaches prioritize corporate profit over social–environmental protections. We examine how the Suncor Oil Refinery creates harmful environmental injustices, representing a significant instance of state‐facilitated corporate crime, as the state leaves the industry to self‐regulate and violate (or operate without) permits. Bridging green criminology and environmental justice literatures, our findings emphasize the importance of recognizing state‐facilitated corporate crime as a key driver of environmental injustice. Drawing on interviews with 53 community members, educators, and elected officials, this study provides firsthand accounts of the detrimental effects of the refinery's operations on nearby residents and documents their lived experiences of environmental injustice. Our findings illustrate harmful impacts of state‐facilitated corporate crime and contribute to scant research examining people's experiences of harm from living or working near oil refineries. 

Despite knowing about climate risks for decades, oil and gas companies continually increase production. Infants, children, and adolescents are most vulnerable to intensifying air pollution and other upheavals of climate emergency. Here, we illustrate localized impacts of global processes by focusing on the Suncor Oil Refinery in Commerce City, Colorado, the state's only oil refinery and a major polluter. The Suncor facility illustrates broader structural and environmental health vulnerabilities of living and/or attending school near fossil fuel infrastructure. Drawing on community‐based, in‐depth interview data from 53 participants, we show how children have been affected by the facility's pollution. In 93% of interviews, worries over children's health problems—including respiratory problems, chronic illnesses such as asthma and cancer, developmental disorders, nosebleeds, and dizziness—emerged as primary concerns and consistent and harmful sources of stress and ongoing trauma. Rather than being adequately protected by regulations, children instead face excessive asthma rates, other health issues, and contested illness responses from medical providers. Their parents, teachers, and other caretakers face exceptional structural limitations to protecting them. We establish key localized harms of oil refining and answer the call for more rigorous examinations of how fossil fuel‐based systems impact children's quality of life. 

Iowa's farmlands, celebrated for their remarkable agricultural productivity, are facing pressing environmental challenges, including soil erosion, waterway nitrogen pollution, and vulnerability to extreme weather events. These issues imperil the state's agricultural sector's long-term sustainability and economic stability. Despite substantial investments from governmental and non-governmental entities to encourage conservation practice use, adoption rates remain persistently low. In this report, we use quantitative, qualitative, and social network analysis on a sample of 38 farmers to understand how social networks shape their adoption of conservation practices. We analyze data through a systems framework and compare counties with high- and low-adoption of conservation practices to assess influences from the individual farmer level to the broader societal context. We conclude with a discussion of strategic implications to promote conservation adoption.