I guess it really does depend on the economic power of the surrounding communities.
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.
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.
Don't ask me how I know . . .
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.
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)