...Under Newsom’s plan [which takes effect 2024], the air resources agency will evaluate the economic, environmental and health benefits and effects of eliminating oil extraction, and his administration will also determine how to address the loss of jobs and the effects on local economies due to the policy.
Leaders from state trade unions, whose membership includes pipe fitters and electrical workers at California’s refineries and in other sectors of the petroleum industry, issued a scathing response to the action, saying it would cost thousands of well-paying union jobs and devastate the economies in towns in the heart of California oil country, including in Kern County...
— LAT - Newsom bans new California
fracking permits starting in 2024
See also DK ... Governor Newsom Takes Action to Phase Out Oil Extraction in California by Dan Bacher.
We do need to speed up the cadence for the broad public health impact, especially for members of communities of color and of poverty. From financial viewpoint, we might argue to conservatives that this element of advance would be valuable to all Californians, and in communities of color it would confer improved personal health that allows greater participation in and contribution to California economy, including paying more taxes, with decreased need of benefits from the economy.
This isn’t original with me, of course: it’s been pointed out frequently for years, possibly decades. To readers who think it’s cold, consider that if we can’t talk the concepts conservatives understand and prioritize, we not only can’t enlist them (which might be unduly idealistic anyway) but can’t even decrease their resistance.
Everything comes down to economics in real world terms (e.g., how do local, state and federal governments pay for the services and benefits they supply to the public?) and there ARE idealists who study economics and work in those fields, including in government jobs, in order to devise wherewithal that works.
Absent effective mechanisms of wherewithal, there is no persuading conservative voters —including those in minority communities trying to haul their families’ upward mobility … well, up— that ending harmful industries, and the jobs and taxes and fees that come with them, will not land financially on their backs and cripple their own hopes for themselves, their kids, and their communities.
There’s no point in railing about how selfish, stupid, or immoral conservatives are. Nor in fantasizing that there are none in low-income populations, none in communities of color, none among immigrants: if there’s one thing all these communities have in common with everyone else is a driving and more critical need for a better financial footing. Immigrants have always come to this country for precisely that opportunity, and still do; Americans of every community have always migrated from country to city and back again in search of it, and found it verrry tough going. Middle class folks might literally be able to afford additional taxes on their incomes to pay for government programs (although it’s more common here to demand that the rich be taxed more, not us, regardless of our stated Democratic convictions).
To coin an existing phrase, “how stupid you are depends on where you are a the time.”
<big><big> Among mechanisms proposed by the environmentalist sector is to engage “state trade unions, whose membership includes pipe fitters and electrical workers at ... refineries and [other plants in] the petroleum industry” in partnering with industrial technology education departments in California’s substantial community college network, to create job training in fossilfuel field rehabilitation and clean-up and in the necessary auxiliary industries, with a hiring priority on former oilfield workers.</big></big>
In theory (as can be read at various of Dan Bacher’s diaries, among others), oil field operators in California )and around the country) are under various legal regs for shutting down and even rehabilitating fields, wells and pipelines at the end of the operational life of those facilities, so residual methane and other pollutants don’t leak damagingly into the environment for dozens upon dozens of years afterward. The how-to and means involved are not fledgling scitech at all.
But commonly go begging, because of no simplistic wherewithals at hand, as Meteor Blades posted last September:
...There are more than 3.2 million deserted oil and gas wells in the United States. More are being added all the time. In the past five years, 207 oil and gas companies have gone belly-up. By the end of 2022, that number is predicted to be twice as high with lower prices from the glut of oil and especially natural gas making many wells uneconomic. But before abandoning them, many companies [just cap their wells, in case prices go up again]. Capping is only good for 20 or so years, and over time thousands of low-producing wells are orphaned, meaning “there is no associated person or company with any financial connection to and responsibility for the well,” according to California’s Geologic Energy Management Division. And that means the fiscal burden for plugging these wells falls on the states. Until then, surveys of hundreds of these deserted wells show, most are leaking methane. Over 20 years, methane is 86 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. Very bad news for the environment.
Quoting Mya Frazier at Bloomberg, he continued:
“...these artifacts of the fossil fuel age are ubiquitous, obscured in backyards and beneath office buildings, under parking lots and shopping malls, even near day-care centers and schools in populous cities such as Los Angeles, where at least 1,000 deserted wells lie unplugged.” ... The cost of plugging a single well varies widely. But just plugging California’s estimated 5,500 deserted wells could cost $550 million, according to a report released earlier this year. But that’s nothing to what the cost will be if the oil and gas industry collapses and gives up operations altogether. Plugging and decommissioning 107,000 active and idled wells could go as high as $9 billion...
Again, in theory, fees, fines, and penalties might supply a good portion of revenue stream to fund job retraining and the creation of an environmental tech rehabitation industry on large scale. But getting that particular revenue stream going requires that local and state governments enforce the regulations. And eventually, over time, wholly abandoned fields are likely to increase, with no one left legally responsible to pay the fees, fines and penalties … unless California state government and county governments create title-search offices that track ownership to hunt down field operators who can afford to pay, and enforce their doing it. But this too is both expensive and difficulty — for example, foreclosed fields may be purchased by shoe-string operators who were never in much better financial condition than members of the communities who most need clean-up and rehabilitation of gas and oil wells abandoned in their communities.
And as always, the fact-based arguments about jobs (would there be enough?) in clean[er] energy technology.<small>Battery production isn’t clean, for example, but it may sum out to cleaner than oil; biogas/trash-gas isn’t all that clean either, but it’s generated in landfill no matter what we do, and possibly there’s scrubber tech that can make use of it as fuel sum out to cleaner than “natural gas”.</small>
Arguers who can give realism to [a] the wide financial advantages of environmentally clean and clean-up industries, and [b] the financial opportunities that materialize whenever any new industry gets rolling, have more persuasion- power to decrease opposition to environmentalism, than arguers who cannot make solid financial points. Arguers who get themselves in-depth informed can interest ordinary-income-level and low-income conservatives in supporting environmentalism in their own families’ best interests, in ways that people who behave hatefully toward them utterly can’t.
Are there more personal and community economic arguments we could state and research further? Please comment on ideas and link resources. Thanks for reading.