By: Arlo Bender-Simon

While Kern County is home to over 75% of California’s fossil fuel production and the Bay area is California’s hub for social justice activism, Los Angeles County is home to millions of people living right next to oil and gas operations.

Part 1: Context

There are more than 84,000 existing oil & gas wells within California; 63,450 of those reside in Kern County, 6,065 in Los Angeles County[1]. We know that the extraction of oil pollutes the Earth; be it during site preparation, drilling, production, transportation, refining, or consumption, our addiction to fossil fuels has very real, toxic impacts at all stages.

For most Californians, pollution from fossil fuels is a distant threat. Sure it is contributing to global warming and maybe we breathe some of it in when moving around our daily lives, but we don’t think about it much and when/if we do, it is at our leisure.

In October 2014, the Natural Resources Defense Council released a report titled Drilling In California: Who’s At Risk? The numbers of oil & gas wells in California, cited earlier, are from this report. This document identifies 5.4 million California residents living within one mile of an oil or gas well. That is roughly 14% of the state’s population; for them, pollution from fossil fuel extraction is a day-to-day reality.

(This does not consider those who live within a mile of storage facilities, processing facilities or refineries.)

Where Does LA Fit In?

Ok. The vast majority of fracking, and fossil fuel extraction in general, is happening in Kern County; it seems like here is where you should focus to bring about a halt to fracking in California.

While Kern County hosts roughly ten times as many wells as Los Angeles, 3.5 million residents of LA county (roughly one in three) live within one mile of an oil or gas well[2]. Engaging even ten percent of them in a dialogue about the future of fracking the golden state would mean that hundreds of thousands of LA residents would be talking about this.

(Efforts in Kern County can only be boosted by an active Los Angeles and the solidarity that results will be beautiful.)

As with the rest of California, drilling for oil and gas got going in Los Angeles towards the end of the 19^th century. Many oil fields are spread across the LA basin, and businessmen, mining engineers, and speculators moved in to exploit the booming resource. As the 20^th century progressed, each of these fields became home to a forest of drilling towers.

Figure 1-Signal Hill, Long Beach, 1937 (Left) and Venice, 1952 (Right) [3]

In 1890, the population of Los Angeles County was a little over 100,000 people, about half of that being LA city. It grew fast, by 1930 the city’s population had jumped to over one million and by 1960 the county’s population had surpassed six million[4]. As more and more people added to the growth of urban Los Angeles, little care was taken to separate residents from drilling, and this is reflected today by wells literally surrounded by residential neighborhoods and parking lots.

Figure 2 – Signal Hill, 2014 (left) This building on Pico Blvd camouflages 50+ wells (right) [5]

Today, Los Angeles is home to roughly four million people. Add six million spread throughout the county and millions more in neighboring Orange County and you get one of the largest urban areas on the planet. As a child who grew up in LA, I know that people talk about the pollution that such an urban mass spews out, but the focus is all on cars and freeways. As if individuals going on with their daily lives are responsible, not the massive fossil fueled network in which they move about.

For too long, the health effects of thousands of oil wells upon the residents of Los Angeles have been neglected. For too long, the people of Los Angeles have been complacent while a few drilling companies suck oil from beneath their feet and dump toxins into their air. For too long, the city of Los Angeles has allowed the fossil fuel industry to proceed with the laxest of oversight.

This can stop.

Figure 3: The bright red signifies areas at risk from multiple sources of environmental pollution, the locations of wells are marked, fracked/acidized/gravel-packed wells are highlighted; pg. 7 Drilling In CA: Who’s At Risk

City Council Votes To Ban Fracking In City Limits

On February 28, 2014 Los Angeles made history by becoming the largest city in the United States to move to prohibit the controversial drilling process. In a 10-0 vote, the LA City Council directed city officials to draft a moratorium on fracking, to remain in effect until the process can be scientifically proven to be safe[6]. Leadership achieved! Sort of…almost a year later we have yet to see draft legislation for the proposed ordinance.

Until that happens, Los Angeles residents will continue to wait for action to be taken on a decision made last winter. At the same time, the rest of the state continues to wait for real leadership on the fracking front, which could be as simple as a moratorium imposed by the governor…Jerry Brown, are you listening?

Come out to the March For Real Climate Leadership in Oakland on February 7^th to demand Jerry Brown to ban fracking and acidizing in the state of California…if New York can do it, so can we!

Part 2 Coming Soon.

Endnotes

[1] Tanja Srebotnjak & Miriam Rotkin-Ellman, Drilling In California: Who’s At Risk, NRDC, http://www.nrdc.org/health/files/california-fracking-risks-report.pdf, accessed 12/2/14, pg. 9

[2] Srebotnjak et Al., pg. 11.

[3] Alan Taylor, Urban Oil Fields Of Los Angeles, The Atlantic, August 24, 2014, http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2014/08/the-urban-oil-fields-of-los-angeles/100799/. (accessed 12/27/14)

[4] Historical Resident Population City & County Of Los Angeles, 1850 to 2010, Los Angeles Almanac, http://www.laalmanac.com/population/po02.htm. (accessed 12/27/14)

[5] Taylor, Urban Oil Fields Of Los Angeles.

[6] City Council Passes LA “Fracking” Ban, CBS Los Angeles, February 28, 2014, http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2014/02/28/city-council-to-vote-on-la-fracking-moratorium/. (accessed 12/27/14)

by The UC Berkeley Environmental Coalition

On Thursday, November 20, 2014, the Regents of the University of California passed a tuition plan that will increase student fees up to five percent for each of the next five years, amounting to a nearly twenty-eight percent increase. This decision was made despite strong opposition from student groups across the state. Students formed The Open UC, a growing statewide movement demanding no tuition hikes and more transparency of the UC budget for students. The Open UC is asking for the state to reinvest in schools and is ultimately standing for an accessible system of public education in the U.S. and worldwide.

ECO, UC Berkeley’s student environmental coalition, stands in solidarity with the Open UC to stop tuition hikes and demand increased transparency. Our work makes us all too familiar with issues of privatization and misplaced investment. Student groups within our coalition are resisting commercial development on the university-owned Gill tract, fighting extreme oil and natural gas extraction, and demanding the university to divest from fossil fuel companies and reinvest in renewable energies. These are just a few of the ways students in our coalition are working to ensure a more just and sustainable future. However, we are frustrated to find that we have less and less influence in the future of our own university whose public character has been jeopardized. The Regents’ proposed hikes have come in the face of reasonable student suggestions to cut costs, many of which would save financial and natural resources. Amid a historic drought, each year the campus uses 49.2 million gallons of potable water to irrigate campus landscapes and wastes a lot of water in order to keep campus lawns green (Berkeley Water Action Plan, 2013). Students have asked the university to design and implement lawn conversion free of charge. Student-faculty lawn conversion would promote hands-on learning and be more cost-effective. However, the university is still reluctant to give students responsibility over our campus landscape, choosing instead to contract out to the campus architect’s own landscaping company. Money and water is wasted.

For us, working in coalition with organizations fighting for affordable education is not only just, it is strategic. Our struggles share common enemies: as students fighting for control of our university we see potential in reclaiming democracy by delegitimizing the Regents and fighting the influence of corporate power in our public institutions.Unless we unite in challenging the systems in place that perpetuate inequality and oppression, a transition to a just, sustainable future will not be successful. Unless we delegitimize the Regents’ source of power and call them out for their lack of integrity, democracy, and transparency, GHG emissions will go up along with tuition.

Many of us within the environmental community at Berkeley have been working to ground our organizing in a framework of climate and environmental justice, reconceptualizing our work as an intersectional struggle for social justice. The students and families most impacted by the rising cost of education are often those most impacted by environmental degradation and silenced within the mainstream environmental movement. Struggles against debt, police violence, and racism are struggles for sustainability, because we cannot build an effective movement for climate justice without also seeking to address the systemic violence affecting the communities who must lead the global struggle against the fossil fuel industry and climate change. Because we see our work as part of a larger project of collective liberation, we want to connect work across movements for justice, and we see the struggles for climate and environmental justice and affordable education as intimately linked.

The word economy means the management of home, whether that is a household, our university, or even our planet as a whole. At Wheeler Commons, Open UC is creating and managing a home, within an increasingly corporate university, for the amplification of student voices and the building of an intersectional movement. The first step is ensuring that our public university remains accessible and affordable to all, and with that ECO stands in solidarity.

Signed,

ECO, Environmental Coalition at UC Berkeley.

ECO serves as the official coalition of UC Berkeley environmental and sustainability student organizations dedicated to advancing sustainability on campus in the short- and long-term.

by: Emily Williams

We’ve probably all heard of the Five Stages of Climate Grief.[1] It has its roots in the Five Stages of Grief, and refers to the emotional processing our society uses to cope with climate change.

First you are in denial. You deny that the earth is warming, you deny the severity of climate change, and you deny that current human activities could cause it.

Next, you become angry that corporations and government have allowed for and financed such reckless exploitation, creating climate chaos; or you are angry that environmentalists are demanding that people change their habits and give up their comforts for the polar bears.

Next, you bargain. We trade scientific fact for political gain, trade carbon credits for a few more years of uncontrolled burning, and trade our logical minds for a monopolized media that will tell us that the science isn’t that serious and we will all be ok.

When one of our cities is devastated by a superstorm or plagued by drought, we enter into depression.

And so, grudgingly, we enter into acceptance. Acceptance is when we acknowledge the science and explore solutions…. But will we really ever accept?

Acceptance assumes that if we understand climate science and are given enough time to move through the five stages, our institutions will ultimately collaborate to implement solutions that will mitigate, and help adapt to, this crisis. However, if acceptance is enough to enact change, a climate denier would not be poised to be head of the Senate Environment and Public works committee, our government would not continue to subsidizing the fossil fuel industry, and fossil fuel industry would invest its money and infrastructure in renewable technology development, accepting that we must leave 80% of reserves in the ground[2]. In the five stages, there is no mention activism. However, the climate crisis need more than acceptance. If we are to see meaningful action on climate change, we cannot wait for these stages to play out; civil society needs to pave the way[3].

Where are we trying to get to?

Let’s talk about 2 degrees Celsius. The Copenhagen Accord glommed onto the target, stating that governments recognize “…that the increase in global temperature should be below 2 degrees Celsius…” But what does 2 degrees entail? Was it in fact science that arrived at the 2 degree target as a safe limit? Ultimately, 2 degrees is a political concept; most climate research shows little confidence in 2 degrees as a safe limit[4]. Already, at 0.8 degrees of warming, we are seeing changes in our climate and adverse impacts on our society occurring at an alarming rate. A 2 degree limit leaves island underwater, or at least inhabitable. Representatives from African nations and Pacific Island nations stated that by signing onto the accord, they would be signing a “suicide pact.[5]” By agreeing to this political limit, our governments have already sold out the Global South, committing one of the worst and largest in scale injustices.

However, to illustrate just how hard it will be to stay within even 2 degrees, we need to understand the carbon gap. The carbon gap is the difference between the rates of emissions we need to stay under to achieve climate stability versus our actual rate of emissions. Closing this gap would mean achieving climate stability. However, our current rate of emissions is not slowing, and the gap widens[6].

Kevin Anderson, Deputy Director of the Tyndall center, outlined the global emissions cuts we need to make if we are to stay below 2 degrees[7]. Anderson’s plan not only closes the gap, but factors in climate justice. Granting non-Annex 1 countries (or developing countries) a carbon budget so that they may continue to develop and phase away from fossil fuels, Anderson details that annex 1 countries need to cut 70% of their emissions in 10 years. To put that figure in perspective, the U.S. would have to cut by 2023 the equivalent of all the emission from the electricity, transportation, and agriculture sectors[8]. Early last week, the United States and China reached a “historic agreement”, committing the nations to certain emissions cuts and peaks in emissions-the United States would decrease its emissions by 26-28% of 2005 levels by 2025; China would peak its emissions in 2030 with 20% of its electricity pledged to come from non-fossil fuel sources[9]. This agreement is historic in that it was not mandatory, and it was made by two of the most powerful countries in the climate negotiations. However, this agreement is non-binding, and translates to a 10% emissions cut from the base year scientists use. So can we succeed in reducing our emissions stay below 2 degrees? It’s not impossible, but ambitious and extremely difficult, especially if there isn’t financial support and regulatory pressure that supports the transition.

Climate activism as a tool to reach our goal

If we are to ensure that our five stages of climate grief result in progress, we have to rethink how we as civil society engage to catalyze ambitious action. Civil society is responsible for the agreement that the US and China reached last week; civil society pushed, and in the wake of the GOP sweeping the elections, the Obama administration chose climate to make his stance. We now know that the administration listens to us; this past week, Obama addressed the Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative and said “the issue of climate change is a perfect example of why young people have to lead.”[10] But if we are to see a more ambitious agreement and achieve significant action on climate change that adheres to the severity of the crisis, and if we are to acheive climate justice, we need to push harder. That means that over the next few years, we need to mobilize even more. So let’s take a look at how one campaign—divestment—manages to do that.

Fossil Fuel Divestment and the Road to 2015

We’ve heard a lot about divestment over the past few years; Bill McKibben became an unlikely rockstar overnight with the Do The Math tour, the campaign spread to new continents making it an international effort, and the Rockefellers—the family that made its fortune from oil—chose to divest. Divestment and gives a face to the crisis, allowing people to rally around a target and feel empowered to take their futures into their own hands, therefore democratizing the issue of climate change. Divestment has the power to change the public perception of the fossil fuel industry. It points to the culprit and organizes the masses to demand that their institutions—their campuses, businesses, churches, or cities—refuse to profit off of that industry. When enough institutions divest, it creates a tipping point where people become passionate about the issue and put enough pressure on their elected officials to start representing their needs instead of the desires of oil barons.

Divestment also frees up finance, forcing institutions and our government to shift finances away from the industry that’s launching us over the edge and toward the low-carbon, just economy we need. This is the reinvestment side of the campaign, and it goes far beyond moving that money into renewable technology development. When we divest, we can reinvest in communities—in their resilience and in community-owned energy generation—and in radical and innovate solutions. The campaign is yin-yang: it identifies that which is harmful, denounces it, and calls upon society to denounce it as well; but it also identifies the real solutions, and financially and ideologically supports those solutions by investing in them.

There are a fair number of critiques of divestment—that it’s too symbolic and draws attention from what really works (on-the-ground resistance); that it is an elitist campaign and excludes those who are the most marginalized by the climate movement and those who are most affected by the industry; and that isn’t radical if folks like Tom Steyer can hop on board and perpetuates the same old capitalist, exploitative, immoral system[11]. A lot of those critiques are founded, and like most campaigns, the divestment campaign has made many mistakes and still has a lot to learn before reaching its effective potential. But it learns from its mistakes, and therefore creates a platform on which many related campaigns can converge into a global movement.

So what is the role of divestment in national and international politics? Divestment is local—it’s implemented at the local level, and has direct local repercussions. Yet its ability to influence the public’s opinion of climate change gives it a global scope. It is a solidarity campaign that allows institutions to make a stand and commit to the transition to a low-carbon and just future, standing on the side of future generations and those most disproportionately impacted by both climate change and the extractive economy. It commits to invest in the solutions that the Global South so desperately need. This shift impacts negotiations. When enough institutions in a country divest, it begins to change the climate and discourse around climate change and the fossil fuel economy. It ultimately shifts the political atmosphere of the country and puts pressure on governments to go into the negotiations with a few more bargaining chips. When 500 campuses, 5 states, and all the foundations divest in the United States, it gives Obama the go-ahead and the political backing to offer more at the UN.

It’s up to us.

Divestment, and every other campaign that focuses on local and grassroots action, shifts systems and create tipping points. Civil rights, women’s rights, and democracy were all won by local, grassroots actions and narratives. They have the power to create a peoples’ movement that creates the political backing (or pressure) that allows for (or forces) governments to enact changes that work for the people over profit. But no one else is going to create this change. If we want to see change, it’s up to us.

Our generation has moved through all five stages of grief, and we’ve been told far too many times that we just need to accept it and let those in power make the changes necessary. But it’s time to start accepting and start acting. If we want to see global change, we need a global movement—and that movement needs to come from the grassroots, be led by those most disproportionately impacted, and create the solutions that our generation needs.

[1] http://www.climatetoday.org/?p=2173

[2] Carbon Tracker Initiative.

[3] http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/09/04/791221/the-six-stages-of-climate-grief/

[4] http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/03/141001-two-degrees-global-warming-climate-science/

[5] http://www.theguardian.com/environment/southern-crossroads/2014/sep/09/new-york-climate-summit-two-degrees-warming-policy-disaster

[6] http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/mind-the-carbon-gap

[7] http://climatenorthernireland.org.uk/cmsfiles/resources/Presentations/What-Next.pdf

[8] http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/sources.html

[9] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jamie-henn/fossil-fuel-divestment_b_6147234.html

[10] http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/11/14/obama-to-youth-on-climate-change-old-people-theyve-created-a-mess/

[11] http://www.energyjustice.net/content/fossil-fuel-divestment-how-evolve-campaign-beyond-its-shortcomings