Visitor Commentary written by
Dolores Huerta
Dolores Huerta is president of the Dolores Huerta Basis and co-founded the United Farm Staff union with César Chávez. She is a longtime civil rights activist and group organizer.
Nayamin Martinez
Nayamin Martinez is the chief director of the Central California Environmental Justice Community.
Maybe no different state within the nation has finished extra to struggle local weather change than California.
We stood as much as the highly effective auto business and handed the primary U.S. ban on new gasoline-powered automotive gross sales. The state is suing the world’s largest oil producers for many years of local weather deception. Quickly we’ll be stopping all new fracking as a part of an historic plan to finish oil extraction throughout the Golden State.
Even companies, municipalities and advocates are uniting round an bold purpose of reaching 100% clear energy by 2045 by investing billions in renewable power and eliminating the foundation reason for local weather change — burning fossil fuels.
Now we seem poised to undermine this progress by opening California’s doorways to the fossil gas business’s newest greenwashing scheme: carbon seize and storage. Let’s hope our flesh pressers and environmental regulators, together with the Environmental Safety Company and the Division of Power, rethink.
The fossil gas business is spending hundreds of thousands to persuade the general public that carbon seize is a viable answer to the local weather disaster, however in actuality, it’s a failed expertise. And a rising variety of local weather scientists and power consultants, together with the Worldwide Power Companyagree.
Usually carbon seize and storage refers to expertise that captures carbon dioxide from industrial or energy plant emissions and places it underground, the place it isn’t anticipated to contribute to international warming.
However the issues with carbon seize and storage are huge. For starters, based on Jonathan Foley, former head of the California Academy of the Sciences, even after a long time of funding in analysis and growth and hundreds of thousands in subsidies, carbon seize expertise has solely captured just a few seconds’ value of our yearly greenhouse fuel emissions.
That’s hardly a dent.
Moreover, carbon seize extends the operations of the polluting infrastructure and will increase our reliance on fossil fuels. Each greenback spent on carbon seize and storage takes treasured assets away from actual local weather options, thereby delaying the transition to a clear power future.
Most troubling, although, are the dangers that carbon seize and storage infrastructure pose to California communities already overburdened by fossil gas air pollution.
This expertise does nothing to deal with the lung-damaging pollution brought on by extracting oil and fuel, and it dramatically will increase the chance of a harmful — and even deadly — fuel leak. There have been at the very least 25 carbon dioxide pipeline leaks within the U.S. from 2002 to 2021, together with one which brought about 200 individuals to be evacuated and 45 to be hospitalized in Satartia, Mississippi for years in the past.
So what’s the business’s motive for selling a flawed, harmful and basically defunct expertise? Straightforward: to delay the phaseout of fossil fuels whereas seizing billions in state and federal {dollars}. Including carbon seize to a challenge, and snapping up the federal incentives that include it, would enable oil and fuel producers to proceed producing income by protecting polluting infrastructure going for many years.
For example, California’s largest oil producer is California Sources Corp., in Lengthy Seashore, which merged with Aera Power in Bakersfield, following California Useful resource’s $6 billion chapter. The merged firm has proposed changing two outdated, unproductive oil fields in Kern County into California’s first carbon seize and storage websites.
The state might have required $1 billion in orphaned wells bondshowever as a substitute it let California Sources off the hook. Now the conversion of each websites makes the corporate eligible for greater than $15 billion in tax credit for simply one of many carbon seize initiatives, based on MIT analysis.
Each initiatives’ impression on air high quality could be important, based on their draft environmental impression reviews. Regardless of this, at a current public listening to, Kern County officers voted to approve California Sources’ carbon seize challenge, and so they could vote on the pending Aera challenge quickly. Last approval of the initiatives could be horrible information for all Californians, however particularly for the households who dwell in close by Buttonwillow, Taft, Tupman, Bakersfield and Misplaced Hills, who’ve borne the brunt of the fossil gas business’s air pollution for many years.
Our regulators and politicians ought to honor California’s dedication to struggle local weather change and get off fossil fuels, and they need to block any business makes an attempt to deliver carbon seize and storage to our door.
Approving California Sources’ permits would open the floodgates to comparable initiatives throughout Higher Los Angeles, the Bay Space, and Sutter Countyand it might topic much more communities to yet one more fossil gas scheme.
California has banned among the fossil gas business’s most dangerous practices, and we’re seizing the promise of renewable power at each flip. Now we’ve got the chance to stop oil and fuel firms from squandering billions in public funds, to guard Kern County households and to steer the nation and world in denouncing the carbon seize farce.
Let’s acknowledge this chance and cease any carbon seize permits earlier than it’s too late.
