California’s Oil Withdrawal Syndrome
The most progressive state in America has an oil dependency problem
As the most populous, economically developed, and culturally diverse state in the United States, California has been the backbone of the Democratic Party since the 1990s, and has become the policy testing ground for many Americans with progressive ideas. As one of the highest priorities for progressive politics, California’s approach to global warming has generated much attention and discussion. In August, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) held a historic vote to end the continued sale of fuel-powered vehicles by 2035. Many politicians, including California Governor Gavin Newsom, expressed strong support for this decision and called on other states to make similar efforts to change the status quo of global warming.
It is clear that California is trying to make up for its negative impact on climate change as one of the nation’s longtime top producers of fossil energy through legislative measures. While many people remember California’s founding from the gold rush, the pursuit of oil, or “black gold”, has been no less important than real gold from the beginning. As early as the 1860s, the first settlers to move to California found oil so abundant that it leaked to the surface. In addition to this, there are many oil deposits located in asphalt seeps and residues throughout the state. After an 1864 study assessed and proved the potential of the oil reserves, oilmen began a massive drilling program in 1870, which quickly made California one of the most popular destinations for settlers in the world. Compared to gold, oil seemed to be readily available and inexhaustible. It was also the income and immigration from oil that enabled Los Angeles and San Francisco to quickly become the metropolitan cities they are known today.
To this day, many years after California has practiced environmental protection as a political principle, it is still the seventh largest producer of oil in the United States. Each year, up to 140 million barrels of oil are extracted from California.
The environmental consequences of oil dependency
However, such exhaustive and reckless oil digging has had a predictably devastating impact on climate and the environment. A 2018 paper published in a journal owned by the American Geophysical Union suggests that the unprecedented high level of oil drilling that kicked off for war preparations was likely the direct cause of six separate earthquakes that struck Los Angeles between 1935 and 1944. The researchers note that although California sits on a huge seismic belt, this is still an extremely unusual frequency in terms of geology and seismic activity, and that these earthquakes also produced severe economic damage and psychological trauma to Los Angeles and the surrounding cities.
The environmental disasters caused by oil extraction are many and varied, and one of the most haunting manifestations is the oil spill. In 1969, a blowout from a drilling rig at an offshore oil field southeast of the famed tourist destination of Santa Barbara spilled some three million gallons of crude oil into the ocean, creating hundreds of square miles of oiled pools, killing thousands of seabirds and marine animals, devastating the local economy, and prompting vociferous state and congressional reactions. The accident fundamentally changed the attitudes of Californians toward oil, and they began to realize the inevitability that economic efficiency and ecological stability could not be reconciled on the issue of oil.
In the wake of the accident, Congress passed the National Environmental Policy Act that same year, and it was signed into law by President Nixon in the New Year of 1970. This law established the Council on Environmental Quality, which oversees federal environmental policy, for the White House and became the first law to incorporate environmental protection into national policy, prompting other countries to establish similar rules. In California, a popular referendum established the California Coastal Commission, which oversees all activities in the state’s coastal areas, and banned all new offshore mining activities within its jurisdiction, but did not ban the continuation of platforms that were already being mined.
Unfortunately, despite the government’s best efforts to regulate and monitor, oil spills continue to occur along California’s coastline due to a lack of commitment to completely stop drilling. Whether it’s due to a tanker collision, a burst pipeline, or a blowout, hundreds of thousands of gallons of crude oil spilled and millions of dollars in remediation bills continue to happen. As recently as 2021, an underwater pipeline near Huntington Beach, Orange County burst, and the company responsible for managing the pipeline initially thought it was a false alarm and failed to address it, resulting in the death of hundreds of animals and the forced long-term closure of the beach, and the company operating the pipeline was required to pay the government $956,000 in economic damages.
Oil is polluting the air
The Huntington Beach oil spill was likely the direct cause of Los Angeles’ determination to ban new oil and gas drilling the following year and to decommission all existing platforms within five years. The common existence of oil in California means that rigs are not just found along the coastline and in the middle of nowhere, as portrayed in many literary and film productions, but all over residential areas in the city. In Los Angeles County, there are 5,000 rigs working around the clock every day. And throughout California, about 2.1 million people live within a half mile of an oil or gas well.
For a long time, Los Angeles did not have laws requiring rigs to be spaced from residential areas. Approximately 75 percent of active oil and gas wells are located within 500 meters of “sensitive lands” such as homes, schools, childcare facilities, parks, or homes for the elderly. Studies show that these rigs and refineries are disproportionately concentrated in disadvantaged, Black or Latino communities, posing serious health hazards to them.
In Wilmington, a Latino immigrant-majority community with an average income well below the Los Angeles average, a study has shown that the daily release of benzene, hydrogen sulfide, particulate matter, and formaldehyde as byproducts of oil production has led to the highest cancer and asthma rates in the county here. Another study noted that babies born near oil wells were at risk of low birth weight and preterm birth from the start; babies born to mothers who lived for long periods of time in high oil production areas weighed a full 11 grams less on average than babies born to a reference group. Children born at low birth weight and prematurely, may face lifelong health problems, including impaired lung, heart, and nerve function, as well as memory and attention problems.
Oil in the San Joaquin Valley was discovered between the 19th and 20th centuries; soon the region accounted for 70% of the state’s oil production and made California the largest oil-producing region in the United States. In San Joaquin Valley, far from the hustle and bustle of the big city and with a far more conservative political population than Los Angeles, the health and social problems caused by continuous oil extraction projects are even more evident. The valley’s Kern County is home to California’s richest oil producer and current House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy, but it also has a large, impoverished Latino immigrant community, and Arvin, where oil wells are ubiquitous, is one of them.
Here, residents routinely face autoimmune diseases caused by oil extraction, including irritation in the nose, eyes, and throat, headaches, fatigue, and anemia. In addition, the routine use of shale hydraulic fracking to extract oil has led to massive amounts of arsenic-laden produced water seeping into the city’s groundwater, irreversibly damaging the city’s water system.
Although Newsom announced in 2021 that he would ban new wells within a kilometer of sensitive areas and plan to retire all wells by 2045, and plan to create a “buffer zone” around existing wells, enforcement of this rule has not been satisfactory. Kern County has a long history of Republican control of the local government, and they are the direct beneficiaries of a well-developed oil industry that is obviously unwilling to comply with and enforce Newsom’s, or any environmentalist’s, demands. Because the oil wells around Arvin are not highly productive, the problem does not get enough attention; however, because of this, the fact that Alvin’s air quality continues to be among the lowest in the country has long been ignored.
Air samples taken around Arvin’s wells by the Central California Environmental Justice Network, contained high levels of volatile organic compounds like benzene, xylene, methane, and formaldehyde, which can cause not only a host of autoimmune diseases, but also skyrocketing cancer rates.
When researchers approached the California Air Resources Board, they said that if the companies were not producing enough, they could be exempted from reporting leaks to local governments and would only need to submit overhaul reports to the board itself. In addition, the board has delegated to local departments the authority to enforce methane emission regulations set by Republican local governments, leaving its own regulatory authority in limbo. At the same time, the region receives more than 3,000 complaints about leaks and emissions each year.
In Arvin, 94 percent of residents are Latino, and unemployment and poverty rates are nearly twice the state average. This means that not only are they more likely to be negatively impacted by environmental pollution, but they also have a more difficult time obtaining adequate health care coverage.
It’s hard to get rid of oil
Across the United States, there are many communities that rely on oil, a non-renewable resource with devastating climate impacts and well-documented health hazards, to keep their economic systems functioning. The tax revenues generated from oil and natural gas continue to outweigh all the emerging renewable energy sources being used in terms of short-term gains. And for regions like Kern County, which was born because of oil, getting rid of it could mean giving up everything. In 2020, oil and gas generate 25 percent of the county’s property tax revenue, nearly $200 million. In an area where poverty and crime rates are already on the rise, local officials fiercely denounced California’s regulations in interviews because they believe the restrictions could make the situation worse.
Places facing similar resource woes are not limited to California. Reliance on traditional energy resources as a source of job security and stable tax revenue is one of the most important reasons people vote for Republicans in energy-rich areas, because the Republicans consistently oppose renewable energy developments and economic transformations that could replace oil and gas. There are regions that will make great efforts for energy and economic transformation, such as New York State, which has funded local facilities to redevelop entire industries in some areas through subsidies handed out by the state legislature.
This cannot be accomplished on the same scale and at the same pace that California wants to phase out fossil fuels unless Congress and the White House consistently fund these activities. Kern County, for example, is actually the largest producer of solar and wind energy as well, but the lack of tax revenue and subsidies continues to make people hesitant to make the transition.
What is the next step?
There is no one-size-fits-all solution to this pathological dependence on harmful non-renewable energy sources. The political power of the fossil fuel industry remains incredibly strong, not just in California, but throughout the United States.
Their lobbying was the driving force behind the Supreme Court’s West Virginia v. EPA decision in July, which severely limited the scope and power of the EPA to regulate pollution. The six conservative justices who supported the decision gave reasons behind the ruling that were largely based on hypothetical situations of excessive enforcement rather than objectively existing facts. Before Newsom signed the law limiting the distance from oil wells to homes, interests representing the oil industry spent millions of dollars lobbying state Senate politicians to defeat the proposal.
For Arvin’s residents, their seemingly small voice is making a difference little by little. Year after year, residents of this poor little town protested their plight with the assistance of legal aid and environmental agencies. When Kern County allowed more drilling based on a false report, lobbied by oil companies, a local committee in Arvin sued the county, arguing that the report ignored water supply pollution, air pollution, farmland degradation and noise problems, and the court eventually ruled in its favor. Arvin’s local government later enacted an ordinance that expanded the distance between the wells and sensitive lands. In 2022, the California Bureau of Land Management announced a temporary moratorium on new oil and gas leases on public lands in central California until the federal government completes an environmental and public health assessment of the area.
Efforts from communities remain the most effective form of resistance to force political forces to cave on these issues. For their policies to truly help the people of the state and serve as a model for other states to follow, California’s state legislature must listen to the voices of ordinary people, such as those who live in Arvin, rather than the easily accessible oil industry lobbyists who, of course, will do everything they can to call for opposition to the current trend. California’s government should remain sober as opposed to being complacent and boasting about itself. What local lawmakers should do now, is to think about how to mitigate the serious environmental damage and community health crisis the dependence on oil had already inflicted.
