Wow. I grew up in Houston, and I assumed that the smell from these plants was pretty-much unavoidable. It's shocking (and I guess not all that surprising) that this is a choice that manufacturers make.
I guess it really does depend on the economic power of the surrounding communities.
When? I don't know Houston, but I recall in MN a refinery that made the whole area stink for 10 miles around. 15 years latter I went by and the air was great even when driving buy the main gate. Soon after my brother in law got a job at that refinery and he told me that for a years they decided the EPA fines for releases were a cost of going business, but when management decided to clean up they were quickly able to root cause and fix all the issues that caused "releases." Houston can clean up as well, but since I've never been to that city I can't say if things have changed.
It's not like there is one chemical plant. The plants start on the east side of town, and they pretty much go all the way to Beaumont. The night-time view Eastward from the top of the ship channel bridge is best described as "Hell at Christmas time". Lights and flares stretching to the horizon.
There are a few times I've been in Pasadena (the town East of Houston), and I've just started retching from the smell. I don't understand how anyone can live there (and my father did for many years.)
When it's lit at night you can see it from up to twenty miles away. Closer in you can hear it. Things have gone back and forwards on mitigations, fines, industrial disputes, and in the end the plant is closing.
You might have smelled Baton Rouge before the Clean Air Act of 1990 kicked in.
And that was long after the emission cutbacks of the 1970's had taken place, back when it was really rank. But the EPA had not been around very long at that early point.
Driving across the state of Louisiana you could feel better stopping to nap in the car for a few hours in a far-away mosquito-infested rest stop next to a low-lying bayou during a flash-flood warning, rather than get a hotel room in the state capital, it smelled so toxic.
When we lived in Edinburgh our flat had a fantastic view north - which included the spire of Fettes College and occasionally the flare from Mossmorran - which together look quite like Barad-dûr and Mount Doom...
Likewise, a lot of the complaints people have about data centers are engineering choices. If companies can get away with it, they'll do it the cheap way.
What could be needed is internalization of external costs. If you release chemicals that cause problems, charge the polluter, and send the charges to those affected.
On a global scale this breaks down, because governments value the lives of non-citizens orders of magnitude below the lives of their own citizens. The US will spend millions to save one expected life at home; it will avoid spending thousands to save one expected life in a third world country.
Polluter pays models are becoming more common. Idk exactly how they function but in Ontario Canada they just switched from a municipal tax funded WM model to a private consortium funded model.
Often the pushback on these "polluter taxes" is that they increase the costs of downstream goods and therefore the consumer pays it anyway, but I think when the link of how the consumer is "already paying" is made clear (as was easy in the case of municipal WM taxes) it's also easier to see how the costs would actually reduce in the long term (bc for "management" this is another line item they can optimize via reduced pollution rather than some vague cost to society via property taxes)
The problem with "costs" is that when companies are finally faced with steep fines or lose a lawsuit, they would often declare bankruptcy or a spin-off a division and dump all the obligations to the spun-off company which would go bankrupt. The only thing that works, I believe, is the threat of criminal penalties with actual jail time.
That's a good point, so laws requiring bonds or insurance would also be needed. This could be an incentive towards at least limiting the worst case outcomes; if those are too large insurance may not be available.
I guess it really does depend on the economic power of the surrounding communities.