California has an oil problem.
Despite being known as an energy-progressive state and the vanguard of the green movement, California remains a major epicenter of oil production in the United States. Generally, oil production comes with the predictable environmental issues involved with the endeavor: Polluted air, contaminated water, acid rain, carcinogens, and the occasional landslide, tremor, or refinery explosion. And in California, many of the communities most affected by these environmental issues also happen to be inhabited heavily by Latinos, African Americans, and other people of color.
This correlation is not just happenstance, but an environmental injustice perpetuated and enabled by race. A deeper look shows that California’s oil problem is also a smoldering race problem.
At first glance, the problem seems to spread its tentacles everywhere in the state. Despite a steady drop in crude oil production from 1985 to 2010, oil production in California has been increasing since 2010, peaking at 204 million barrels. California has the third-highest in-state crude oil production of any state behind Texas and North Dakota, and unlike most of the country’s major oil fields, many of California’s are directly underneath densely populated areas. Oil refineries and extraction efforts operate in places as dense as Los Angeles proper, and although state residents faced exorbitant prices at the pump for gasoline, refineries raked in astounding profits in 2015. Business is booming.
But things are not so rosy for the people caught in the shadows of refineries and other industry facilities. The people who are hurt most live alongside the major oil production facilities. Kern County and the San Joaquin Valley, Richmond, and the Los Angeles basin are key places in California’s century-long marriage to Big Oil. Most of the five million residents who live close to oil wells in California reside in Kern County and Los Angeles County, and the residents most disproportionately affected are people of color. And in addition to the high costs at the pump for gasoline, these communities pay the bulk of the environmental costs of California’s oil.
In a state plagued by drought and drinking water contamination, oil wells around California still use hydraulic fracturing—fracking—and other enhanced oil recovery and well-stimulation techniques, including flooding, steam injection, and acidification. Each of these techniques is linked to a number of environmental issues, most of which involve terrible damage to the water supply—including injections of radioactive material and hazardous wastewater directly into drinking water sources—and the air that people breathe. And while California has passed new leading-the-nation rules that monitor and regulate fracking, the Division of Oil, Gas, and Geothermal Resources (DOGGR), in conjunction with city planners, have a history of looking the other way when it comes to existing rules and regulations for oil wells in or near communities made up of racial and ethnic minorities.
This history has led to a concentration of oil wells that have closer proximity to (and less regulation in) communities of color than those near white communities.
Eighty percent of the people in Shafter, California, are Latino. A small town at the periphery of Bakersfield in California’s San Joaquin Valley, Shafter is known mostly for being part of the state agricultural hinterland. However, it sits on top of the Monterey Shale, an oil reserve that essentially requires fracking and other well stimulation processes to be accessible. The use of fracking and the accompanying oil boom pitted oil companies, including California’s Big Oil magnate Chevron, against the agricultural industry in the area. Throughout California’s long drought, the impact of fracking on the Monterey Shale exacerbated the lack of water so much that farms began using wastewater directly from oil wells.
Harmful chemicals such as acetone and methylene chloride have been found in this wastewater, and the exposure was a double whammy for the farmworkers—largely Latino—who had been exposed to the other air and water effects of oil wells near their homes. Citizen groups in Kern County, where Shafter is located, have filed a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) suit in federal court against Gov. Jerry Brown, DOGGR, and several companies including Chevron, alleging that DOGGR’s history of granting favorable permits without proper review to oil companies constitutes an “enterprise” that exists to violate the Safe Drinking Water Act.
In Kern County, oil wells are now ubiquitous. Local resident Rodrigo Romo filed suit against Gov. Jerry Brown and DOGGR just two weeks after California signed a new landmark fracking regulation bill into effect. Romo’s complaint notes that more than 45 wells are located within close proximity to his daughters’ schools, and that his children—who are also plaintiffs—suffer from a myriad of health problems including asthma. The suit claims that the state “fail[s] to protect thousands of students of color, including Latino students, who are exposed to an array of toxins from well stimulation.” The complaint also notes that 92 percent of all people who live near active wells in the state are people of color.
In an op-ed published in The Guardian, Romo expounds upon his reasons for filing suit:
Shortly after fracking began near her school, my youngest daughter began to suffer from unexplainable epileptic attacks. We’ve taken her to numerous doctors and specialists, but no one has been able to tell us the real cause of her illness. As a result of these health complications, her life has been forever changed. My daughter, a girl who loved sports and learning, no longer plays outside. She fears for her health and safety every day because of how close fracking occurs to her school.
This is unacceptable for any Californian, but it is especially disturbing given the fact that fracking overwhelmingly occurs close to schools that serve predominately Latino public school students, the majority of whom live in communities already overburdened by pollution and the resulting negative health impacts. My own town of Shafter is ranked in the top 10% of the most polluted communities in the state - our children can’t afford exposure to these additional toxins.
The children of Shafter are not the only ones who suffer from this injustice. More than 60% of the 61,612 California children who attend school within one mile of a stimulated well are Latino. Statewide, Latino students are over 18% more likely to attend a school within a mile and a half of a stimulated well than non-Latino students.
The children of Shafter are not the only ones who suffer from this injustice. More than 60 percent of the 61,612 California children who attend school within one mile of a stimulated well are Latino. Statewide, Latino students are over 18 percent more likely to attend a school within a mile and a half of a stimulated well than non-Latino students.
But Kern County and Shafter aren’t alone. The environmental injustices of Big Oil run rampant even in the mega-city of Los Angeles. It seems an unlikely place to hide a major oil operation, but there are 3,000 oil wells in Los Angeles County, with several right in the middle of the city proper.
Josh Navarro, a 16-year-old resident near an AllenCo drill site in South L.A., saw the effects of these wells firsthand. In a neighborhood that is predominantly Latino, many of Navarro’s friends live directly in front of the drill site, and the local middle school regularly suffers the stench of fumes from the site and surrounding sites wafting over children while they play.
“I found out that it was not only odors, but health risks,” Navarro says. “A lot of my friends and their brothers or sisters are impacted with nausea, nosebleeds, and asthma.”
Spurred on by these health risks, many of the neighborhood children, including Navarro, joined environmental activist groups like the South Central Youth Leadership Coalition (SCYLC) at early ages. These groups—including the SCYLC and Youth for Environmental Justice—banded together with other environmental groups to follow in Romo’s footsteps, and filed a lawsuit in November 2015 in the California Superior Court against the city of Los Angeles, alleging “that the City has disproportionately exposed the plaintiffs and their communities to health and safety risks” and that “the City’s actions amount to unlawful racial discrimination and a denial of environmental justice” in South Los Angeles and the neighborhood of Wilmington.
The effects of drilling in these black and Latino neighborhoods are hard to ignore—unless you work for the city. Drills are located in startlingly close proximity to where children play or go to school. A neighborhood baseball field features an oil well and a Wilmington Boys & Girls Club is directly next door to a well. The drilling itself is oppressively noisy, and interrupts the sleep patterns of nearby residents with loud noises and flashes of light throughout the night. Constant vibrations in the ground range from nuisances to foundation-cracking disasters for homeowners, and a convoy of trucks rumbles in and out, hauling the dangerous chemicals needed to acidize wells or perform other techniques.
These compounds, like benzene and hydrogen fluoride, are extraordinarily dangerous to people and can cause cancer or lung collapse and are sometimes exposed to the air or water. The stench over playgrounds and ball fields isn’t just a nuisance: It also carries oil particulates. Sometimes, showers of oil rain down upon the residents.
Developing children face the worst of the effects. Other youth plaintiffs report headaches, dizziness, nosebleeds, asthma, stomach aches, and nausea from the noxious odors. One youth plaintiff reported that she suffered temporary body paralysis and required a heart monitor, although the worst of the effects subsided after she moved away.
The youth and environmental groups involved claim that these health effects are the direct result of discrimination by the planning department. California’s environmental statute, the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) requires that every new drilling project undertake an analysis to determine whether there may be significant environmental effects resulting from that project. If adverse effects are suspected, CEQA mandates a full environmental review, followed by mitigation techniques for every proven effect. If the effects cannot be mitigated, then the city or government entity is required to deny the project or approve an alternative.
Gladys Limón of Communities for a Better Environment is also a legal representative on behalf of some of the youth group plaintiffs. She said that the planning department regularly flouts these CEQA regulations by rubber-stamping new oil drilling and well stimulation in minority areas.
“We have oil drill sites and active drilling extraction operations happening throughout L.A. in neighborhoods,” Limón said. “What we are alleging [the L.A. planning department] does is that it has a pattern and practice of routinely invoking exemptions to the state law” in minority neighborhoods. The two parts of the lawsuit—pattern and practice, and civil rights—make the filed suit a behemoth that will likely face a drawn-out proceeding.
California’s history of environmentalism and environmental injustice seem to go hand in hand, especially in the case of Big Oil. Nowhere is this more evident than north of both Los Angeles and Kern County in Richmond. A city in the San Francisco Bay, Richmond is literally the town that oil built, as the original Standard Oil refinery existed even before Richmond was incorporated. In a diversification and modernization that produced more and more kinds of oil byproducts and petrochemicals, Standard Oil and later Chevron polluted the environment with no regulation whatsoever for the greater part of a century, and three refinery explosions in the years since have brought weeks of carcinogenic soot and misery upon the residents of Richmond.
Like California’s other communities that have fallen victim to Big Oil, Richmond has a history as a vibrant place filled with people of color. Black people began to move there during and after World War II, spurred on by the twin prongs of job opportunities in manufacturing and the war machine, as well flight from the virulent racism in the South (see Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns for more). They were joined by a wave of Latinos and today the city is almost three-quarters non-white. Much of the city’s population came to work for the very industries that have become the biggest polluters.
Richmond is not subject to the stresses of fracking in the same way as Kern County and Los Angeles. Rather, it is the last stop for extracted products, which enter the refinery on long trains from wells in other places. But the environmental risks from oil are just as dire. In 2012, a plant explosion sent 15,000 people to the hospital. There is one Superfund site nearby and one former site. People live with the constant risks of disaster, a prospect that not only affects physical health, but emotional and mental health as well.
These dire environmental risks in the face of a refinery overlord animated Richmond’s vibrant, multiracial green movement, which came to a head with the mayoral election of Gayle McLaughlin. Richmond was the largest city in the U.S. with a Green Party mayor during her term, which spanned from 2007 to 2015. With the support of the Richmond Progressive Alliance, which she helped create, McLaughlin and her allies have put together an offensive against Chevron and other polluters that could serve as a blueprint for similar movements around the country.
“I think what we see in Richmond is a situation where our predominant businesses of the 20th century were heavy industry,” McLaughlin says. “They packed up and left us, but they left us with their toxins in our land and groundwater.” However, a long history of grassroots environmental organizers fought back against Chevron, even from the time when enforced government regulations were essentially nonexistent. According to McLaughlin, “in terms of our environmental injustices, they go way back, but we’ve come a long way.”
The Alliance’s work has been the biggest blow against Chevron’s rule. “We’re unique as a model because we support elected officials and we do it without taking any corporate money,” McLaughlin says. “And that’s a very unique thing because Chevron has tried to buy and has had council members in their pockets in the past. But we have made it clear that we support the people. We govern together.”
McLaughlin’s work with other communities facing the same issues has been part of that collaborative governance. She has worked with communities in Ecuador who are also facing Big Oil, and stresses that work between affected communities strengthens the overall movement and the ability to gain traction. This spirit of cooperativeness is vital for organizers across California.
That spirit helped McLaughlin survive an onslaught by Chevron during the most recent election. After reaching the mayoral term limit, she ran for and was elected to the city council, but only after a $3 million injection by the oil giant which aimed to stop her. That re-election indicates the broad trust that the community has in the efforts of McLaughlin and the Richmond Progressive Alliance to effect change. More and more activists are brought into the fold by efforts to translate the often lofty and disconnected elite language of environmentalism to the everyday languages of people living on the edge.
The efforts across all three areas—Richmond, Kern County, and Los Angeles—show both the stakes and the strides involved in the environmental injustices committed by Big Oil. While many may think that people of color don’t care about the environment, the truth is that they care about it as much as anyone. Because many live and die at the whim of disasters, quick and slow, that are mediated by environmental injustice. It looks different than conservation efforts or the vague fears about climate change, but the fact is that areas inhabited by people of color and other people on the margins of society will always be the first and hardest hit by climate and environmental issues. We look down the line and see ice caps melting because of emissions, but children like Josh Navarro are suffering now, in the shadow of the root cause of those emissions. They are already fighting the battles that the forecasters fear.
In California, that battle is often against Big Oil. And while each of the groups in places like Los Angeles, Richmond, and Kern County faces an uphill battle against the vast resources that Big Oil can bring to bear against them, their fights are proof that it’s possible to begin to reverse environmental injustices.
According to Limón, the grand goal of organizers in Los Angeles is that “no child grow up next to these facilities.” And at least in the distant future—through the smog on the horizon—some people are beginning to see that dream take shape.