Earth Day in East Oakland write up, read more here!

San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution District issued a sham permit.

EPA Cites Bakersfield Oil Train Terminal for Clean Air Act Violations

CBE advocates for emergency action on extreme oil infrastructure threat. Read our letter to Governor Jerry Brown, HERE and the follow-up information requested by the Office of the Governor, HERE.

CBE works closely with CEJA to release the following statement on Governor Brown’s Executive Order that establishes a greenhouse gas reduction target of 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030:California Environmental Justice Alliance | CEJA Applauds Governor Brown’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Executive Order; Calls for Increased Commitment to Environmental Justice

CBE Statement on Mayor Garcetti’s sustainability pLAn

CBE calls on local, regional, and state officials in California to implement a Moratorium that halts new permits and construction of extreme oil* infrastructure.

California faces a crude source switch. The new oil the industry wants to refine here is fundamentally different, and its extraction, transport, and processing results in the most extreme pollution, safety hazard, and climate impacts of any petroleum known. A switch to this ‘extreme oil’ could result in severe and irreversible harm. Better alternatives are available—if we stop extreme oil before it becomes entrenched. Stopping extreme oil would allow alternatives that could reduce already-serious impacts of our energy system, create more and safer jobs, and meet our state’s climate targets, to be ramped up instead. For these reasons, an Extreme Oil Infrastructure Moratorium is necessary, feasible, beneficial, appropriate, and prudent policy for Californians.

*Terms used: In this policy statement extreme oil includes ‘heavy oil’ and ‘natural bitumen’ as those oils are defined by the USGS[i] (tar sands oil), oil produced using hydraulic fracturing (fracking) or strip mining, and oil transported by extremely hazardous methods (i.e., via rail). Extreme oil infrastructure includes oil processing (refining), extraction (production), storage, and transport (port, pipeline, and rail facilities) equipment that enables the use of extreme oil.

Harm caused by extreme oil includes but is not limited to pollution, deaths, injuries, climate disruption and economic damage resulting from:

• Increased frequency and magnitude of toxic spill, fire, explosion, and flare emission incidents impacting workers and residents in and near refineries, ports and rail lines;
• Increased daily emissions of toxic and smog-forming air pollutants from refineries that switch to extreme oil as a greater portion of oil feedstock processed;
• Severe and disparate impacts on low income communities of color and oil workers;
• Increased greenhouse gas emissions from the extraction, upgrading and refining of bitumen and heavy oil and from fracking operations;
• Contamination and destruction of aquatic habitat near rail lines when trains derail and release tar sands bitumen that sinks in the water and cannot be cleaned up; and
• Undermining the achievement of climate protection targets and slowing the growth of sustainable energy in California through an unfair subsidy of extreme oil created by allowing its associated environmental, health, safety, and economic impacts.

Irreversible harm is imminent. The new and modified refining, fracking, port and rail spur equipment that could enable extreme oil in California is a huge capital commitment that would become entrenched for the equipment’s operational duration (≈ 30–50 years). This commitment is imminent; refinery, port, and rail infrastructure that could enable extreme oil is proposed in dozens of places throughout the state now.[ii] If it is built now this infrastructure could be used for decades, even if we keep using less and less gasoline in California, since the industry in California is rapidly switching to export its refined products overseas.[iii]^{, [iv]} Extreme oil threatens to cause imminent and irreversible harm.

Extreme oil is not needed. An extreme oil moratorium would allow refiners to use conventional crude oil while California continues its technically and economically feasible switch to power our cars with already-proven, currently available technologies[v] such as electricity generated from renewable sources of energy. Moreover, a global scientific consensus holds that we can only burn less than half of currently proven fossil reserves and still have a good chance of avoiding climate change so extreme it could be ‘incompatible’ with human societies and economies as we know them.[vi] Thus, we have both the means, and the societal-and-economic imperative, to leave more than half of the remaining oil resource in the ground. What we do not have is any overriding need to use the part of this resource that is extreme oil.

Extreme oil threatens California’s jobs recovery. Allowing extreme oil impacts here would make using more oil artificially cheap. The unfair subsidy would undermine less polluting energy and transportation alternatives that create more jobs, and slow efforts to make our economy less dependent on oil and less vulnerable to oil price shocks. This jobs threat is important: Government data show that oil refining creates fewer jobs per dollar revenue than any other sector in California’s economy,^{2, [vii]} and ten of the last 11 U.S. recessions followed on sharply rising oil prices.^{2, [viii]} The Moratorium would protect our jobs from this threat while allowing money that could otherwise go to extreme oil infrastructure to instead support cleaner, safer jobs in the badly needed upgrading of existing refineries’ dangerously old and polluting equipment.

California is crucial. The oil industry’s footprint in California accounts for 91% of crude production and 76% of refining capacity in the western continental U.S. (Arizona, California, Nevada, Oregon and Washington).³ Extreme oil could cause more harm here than in neighboring states, and action here is crucial to prevent its climate impacts.

Emergency action is needed. This imminent threat of severe and irreversible harm warrants emergency orders directing state, regional, and local agencies to halt and suspend actions in furtherance of extreme oil infrastructure permits and construction.

Notes

[i] Meyer et al., 2007. Heavy oil and natural bitumen resources in geological basins of the world; US Geological Survey. Open-File Report 2007-1084; http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2007/1084.

[ii] See CBE fact sheets; www.cbecal.org/resources/our-research.

[iii] See U.S. Energy Information Administration data; www.eia.gov/petroleum/data.cfm.

[iv] See San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont and Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana metropolitan areas data in Brookings Inst., 2013; www.brookings.edu/research/interactives/export-nation.

[v] See Williams et al., 2011. Science. ScienceExpress; DOI: 10.1123/science.1208365.

[vi] Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2014. Fifth Assessment Report.

[vii] U.S. Bureau of the Census, various dates. See Economic Census data for ‘paid employees’ versus for ‘sales, shipments, receipts, revenue or other business done.’

[viii] See National Committee on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill & Offshore Oil Drilling, 2011. Deep Water: the Gulf Oil Disaster and the Future of Offshore Oil Drilling; Report to the President.

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To download a PDF of CBE Calls for Extreme Oil Moratorium in California, click HERE.

TODAY: Long-Overdue Forced Shut-Down of Exide Technologies’ Vernon Facility Announced! Read our Media Advisory & Press Release.

This morning CBE sued Phillips 66 and Contra Costa County based on the County’s omission of critical crude quality information and its failure to mitigate the significant environmental, public health and safety impacts from Phillips 66’s Propane Fuel Recovery Project before approving the project and issuing permits.

Read more in CBE’s press release [here] ; and see today’s filings [here].

Support Community and Workers health and safety.

Tactic to run plant with replacement workers threatens to worsen spill, fire, explosion and flaring hazards

What: Richmond City Council vote on resolution calling for full compliance
with safety rules and ‘safe and orderly shutdown’ during strike

Where: Community Services Building, Richmond City Hall, 440 Civic Center
Drive, Richmond CA 94804

When: Tuesday, February 17, 2015; the Council Meeting begins at 6:30 PM.
Background: Oil refineries are complex and custom-built. Knowing how to operate one oil refinery’s equipment does not mean one knows how to operate the equipment at another refinery safely, especially when something goes wrong.

When refinery workers walk off the job during a strike the safe thing for the company to do is cooperate with them in a safe and orderly shutdown of the refinery. That is what happened at the Tesoro Golden Eagle refinery near Martinez during the ongoing strike. But if the company keeps running the refinery using replacement workers who have not previously operated it, the likelihood of a serious chemical spill, fire, explosion or flare emission incident can increase greatly. Chevron’s statements and strike preparations suggest that it plans to keep running the Richmond refinery in this more dangerous way.
The dangerous tactic, by threatening to undermine worker rights, also threatens to undermine the ‘just transition’ to sustainable energy that is needed to meet California’s greenhouse gas targets.

Exactly when a stop-work action might occur at the Richmond refinery is unknown at this time but it is reasonably likely to occur soon.
Communities for a Better Environment (CBE) supports the refinery workers strike. Please visit our web site at www.cbecal.org for more information about CBE’s position on this nationwide strike over worker rights, health and safety.