Please note that the transcript provided below is AI-generated and intended for reference. It may contain missing words, misspellings, or other small errors. To request a correction or clarification, please contact info@theclimatecenter.org.
Woody Hastings, The Climate Center (00:17:36):
I am Woody Hastings, Phase Out Polluting Fuels Program Director with The Climate Center. Thank you all so much for joining us today for this breakout session on the Phillips 66 refinery closure. We’re going to drill down folks heard a little bit about it this morning in one of the morning plenaries, and I’m going to be able to have a much deeper level discussion. I’m just going to race through a few quick slides and then hand things over to our moderator, Veronica Wilson. Just a few slides here about our sponsors. So thank you to Sunrun, one of our key sponsors, Peninsula Clean Energy, Heirloom, Bay Area Air District, GM, and thank you to the gold level sponsors, Clean Power Alliance, LADWP, San Jose Clean Energy, and Sacramento Municipal Utility District. Welcome folks.
(00:18:30):
Thanks for joining us. And also to Ava Community Energy, one of the community choice agencies that launched in 2016 and the Energy Coalition. Marin Clean Energy, the very first community choice agency in the State of California launched in 2010 Citizens Climate Lobby DC Bell Renew Home Policy Pulse, Silicon Valley Clean Energy and thank you to all the individual donors who helped make this event possible. And thank you to our promotional partners. 350 Bay Area, 350 Sacramento, Act Now Bay Area, California Environmental Voters, Center for Biological Diversity, Climate Action ,California Climate Resolve, Coalition for Clean Air, and Sierra Club California.
(00:19:19):
Then please if you haven’t already dialed into it, everything about the summit is in a platform called Event Leaf and there’s a QR code. If you’re quick, you can grab that QR code. I see somebody doing that right now, so I won’t go to the next slide. Anybody else out there doing the QR thing? No. Good. So next slide And just this is the hashtag to use for any post hashtag CA Climate summit. And those are all the socials you can find us on. I do want to say this is the first breakout in the afternoon track on phasing out polluting fuels. So after this one at 2:40, we’ll be all about the Polluters Pay Climate Superfund legislation that is in play right now in the state legislature. That’ll start at 2:40 and then at 4:00 PM there will be a session all around the transportation fuels transition plan that is in the works at the California Energy Commission and at the Air Resources Board. So I hope you can join us for this entire track. I think that’s everything I was going to mention before I hand it off to Veronica. So I will do that now. Thanks so much Veronica Wilson for stepping up to be our moderator for this session.
Veronica Wilson, Labor Network for Sustainability (00:20:41):
And thank you Woody. So much of your work is just foundational to everything that’s been going on today and especially this topic. So big round of applause for you. Whatcha thinking? Thank you. Thank you, thank you. My name is Veronica Wilson. I use she her pronouns and I am, as Woody mentioned, going to moderate today. As soon as I open up my little guide tools here, hold on a second, if I can get in. Hey, thank you all for being here. It is very much a pleasure to be here. Thank you to The Climate Center and all of the logos that you just listed. Thank you to all the sponsors. I’m going to quickly, it’s really about who we have as experts here today. So you may have been in the morning session and heard some from our esteemed panelists, but if you just walked in, and I think most of us have been in here for a couple of seconds, but we are in the Phillips 66 Los Angeles Refinery closure, a test case for justice in transition. And in this panel we have most of our panelists, we are missing our representative assembly member. But if they come at some point, yes, URI, you have a thing.
Woody Hastings, The Climate Center (00:22:11):
The staff member for Assemblymember Muratsuchi is here and he let me know that the assemblymember is in a caucus right now, but he’s going to be heading over. And the other thing I want to say is just that we are going to be having the air conditioning turned up a little bit. It’s a little warm in here, so that should be coming on soon.
Veronica Wilson, Labor Network for Sustainability (00:22:33):
Fantastic. Thank you. Okay, well we’ll welcome anyone who comes in whenever they get here. The organization I work for is Labor Network for Sustainability. I am based in the Los Angeles area. And we say in a really quick tagline, just to give you an idea of what I work on, is we just say, we are trying to make a living on a living planet. So working at the intersection of labor and climate. And I’m really here to just kind of hand off with a few questions to our panel and we will start. I’m just going to give a brief, I don’t know if we did this this morning. I think so, but just in case you weren’t here. Alicia Rivera is here organizer at Communities for Better Environment in Wilmington, California. And she’s been a lead organizer in the oil refinery for oil refineries in California for over 20 years.
(00:23:34):
I’m going to say that differently. I’m going to say she has been a lead oil refinery organizer in California for over 20 years. Julia May, senior scientist of communities for a better environment provides engineering analysis and regulatory policy development on oil refineries and other industrial pollution sources. And Gary Holloway, a 35 year member of United Steel Workers Local 6 7 5, began his career in the oil industry in 1990. And we hope to have a representative from marucci’s office if they are able to make it. What I wanted to do, in case we haven’t read too much of the news, but we’re essentially in this, our goal here is to hear from the experts from Fenceline communities. We have labor leaders, hopefully state rep and refinery experts because we need to know how to safely wind down and equitably wind down refinery operations safely and equ.
(00:24:49):
I think what we’ll do is just a really brief overview. So in October, Phillip 66 announced their closure and roughly 600 employees and a few hundred more contractors were working at two facilities linked by pipeline located five miles apart in Carson and Wilmington, California built more than a hundred years ago, the refinery distills crude oil, producing about 8% of the state’s gasoline emits 372.9 ketons of greenhouse gases and is located in a densely populated area with more than 6,000 people per square mile. And if those stats are a little off, please correct me if I’m wrong. And a big reason why we’re here is because the unpredictable timing of plant closures has an emotional and financial toll on workers and local economies and can be devastating for whole communities. That’s why we need some insight. I’m going to pass it to Alicia and Julia to start a presentation that they have prepared for us and I see a couple more people in the room. Thanks for coming. Welcome. Come on in And Julia, I’m going to pass it on.
(00:24:49):
Julia May, Communities for a Better Environment (00:26:27):
Okay. Julia May, senior scientist, CBE, Alicia Rivera, community organizer. Alicia is in the trenches and knows a lot about oil refineries. I just wanted to say the context. We’re talking about a lot about closure, but don’t forget, most of the refining capacity in the state is open. So it’s not like it’s going down and going away. We’re talking about how to deal with it with some of the closures that are happening, but most of the capacity remains open. So it’s a big deal to deal with. We could go to the next slide.
Alicia Rivera, Communities for a Better Environmen (00:27:07):
So a little bit about where fire refineries a located in Wilmington, which is a very small community. This area produces about a third of the state refining capacity and it’s all half a mile away from where people live and some on the other side of the fence. So here are the names of some of the refineries. We have marathon, we have Felix 66 in Carson. We have another marathon in Wilmington. And so Felix suddenly last year announced that it would be shattering his LA refinery at the end of this year. And of course the people that are affected with illnesses because of the continuous flaring explosions, black smoke couldn’t take it better. Fortunately the ones that are working at the refinery and who need our help into transitioning are the workers when Phillips 66 announced disclosure and we try to take credit for it as environmentalist, but then Philip said, no, it’s a business decision. It has nothing to do with environmental regulation. We say the workers don’t have to blame us.
(00:28:52):
So there’s a lot of land. And so Philips can catch in on the B, what they can do there. And they will continue to supply gasoline through his terminals and they will continue to operate the 76 gas stations. Of course we’re talking about two refineries, Wilmington and Carson, which are adjacent. And it used to be one whole area until Carson decided to go separate from the city. But it’s a little ways away from where the Wilmington refinery is from where the one in Carson is. But together they’re interconnected and 650 acres would be available for redevelopment.
(00:29:56):
This is the part in Wilmington where people live on the other side of the fence and it is all by the port and all low income housing elementary schools. The kids get to see the black smoke and the flaring from the yards. And so this is where the refineries have operated the same in Carson. There are schools, but there are more neighborhood in Wilmington than in Carson. And this is a great picture that somebody took and that has been in the covers of reports. And actually a reporter, a photographer, took this picture showing the Phillips 66 and Wilmington and the homes right here. And you cannot see the cinder block fence cause see the homes are taller than the fence, but this is the whole divisions, the whole setback, none. So when things are very visible, this is what they look like. And you can see the kids at Hawaiian Elementary looking at the black smoke. They know that day they won’t be able, they’re just about to go home right now, but they were not allowed to come out and play. So this is different events and so this is what’s going to go away with the refinery closing and who wouldn’t be happy about not having to experience and be exposed to these kind of events on a regular basis.
Julia May, Communities for a Better Environment (00:31:50):
So the property development has a lot of possibilities. LA Times reported the developers saying this is a gold mine, 650 acres. It’s a big deal. Communities are asking a lot of question, will housing be built? We know warehouses are a possibility that could bring a lot of diesel trucking in very polluting source unless it’s electrified. Will the site itself be sufficiently cleaned up? We don’t know. We’re working on ensuring a public process. So the community members and workers have some say on this. They’ve been operating for over a hundred years. Next slide. This is a great slide from the energy commission. Will there be enough gasoline in addition to what’s going to happen to the site? Will there be enough gasoline? And in fact, what we see, if you look at the blue line up here, that’s demand in California. There’s always been enough capacity even with the two refineries that closed marathon and Phillips from the pandemics, there was still enough capacity.
(00:33:04):
There’s even slack even after Phillips LA closes, there will still be enough capacity. There’s some problem when refineries blow up from lack of maintenance, it can constrain supplies and California also exports significant amounts of finished fuels including gasoline. But if you look at in-state demand and instate supply, even with the refinery set of clothes, there’s still a lot of refining capacity that’s important to realize. Next slide, but what about Valero? Last week we just heard Valero Benicia is going to close. This throws a monkey wrench in what we’ve been trying to propose for a long time, a smooth planned reduction in refinery production over time to match a smooth lowering demand so that we can avoid workers being dumped, communities being dumped on. We’re grappling with what that’s going to mean ourselves. We’re looking at things like what if refineries didn’t export as much and a lot of other options to ensure that we have a gradually lowering supply. Next, we’re in an interesting position of wanting a gradual closure of refineries because of Superfund sites, because of workers, because of communities and their tax base, because it could cause gasoline price spikes. We’re not big on importing gasoline. And so that’s why we’re trying to get the state to plan a gradual reduction. Next side,
Alicia Rivera, Communities for a Better Environmen (00:34:50):
When we showed this one this morning, we don’t need to, I thinking used to the recording. Hello. Okay, so the images show what we are going through with food, the use of fossil fuels, everything on fire, smoke in the atmosphere, and so the questions are in climate and smoke. Disaster and emergency are in thousands of people dying every year from air pollution in our state are in frontline communities hit the hardest. And of course the oil industry seems to be taking advantage of communities and workers holding them hostage for duty energy during this low transition to clean energy. And all the answers yes, of course, yes.
Julia May, Communities for a Better Environment (00:35:50):
Next slide. So we also want to battle the myths that California was better off decades ago when there were 40 refineries. Don’t believe that most of those were small rickety. Most of them couldn’t make gasoline very dangerous. A couple of them were so dangerous during a couple different air pollution episodes, children were carted out on stretchers, vomiting, and gagging from the extreme air pollution, the clicker. In fact, most of the refinery capacity got bigger even as those old small refineries disappeared. So don’t just worry about the numbers of refineries, worry about the total capacity. Capacity got bigger. It wasn’t until the pandemic capacity went down because we needed less. Next slide. So we do have some statewide tools to deal with planning clean air and smog plants. South Coast Air District found they will never meet smog standards without zero emission energy, including both, not just transportation but also stationary sources.
(00:36:54):
That means a phase out of refineries if we’re going to meet Clearex MOG standards, SBX one and two and ABX two one, they deal with gasoline price gouging. They also deal with planning a transition. Energy commission came up with a lot of good options, but we don’t yet have a transportation transition plan. Carb is working on it. They don’t really want to phase out refineries. They just want to wait and see what the refineries decide on their own. But that’s very disruptive. We need refinery safety policies as they phase down. Refineries can become much more dangerous. We’re really worried about the worker long hours and staffing cuts at Phillips 66 in la. That’s when it gets even more dangerous. We need state funding for worker and community transitions. We need a planned phase down and we have a lot of written comments about this if you’d like more detail from us. Last slide.
Alicia Rivera, Communities for a Better Environmen (00:37:54):
So the local ordinance also need, the local ordinance also need to be much stronger. We had in Los Angeles had phase out oil drilling and we need that reducted. We need land and water cleanup after this refinery is phase out. We need models such as the Chevron, Richmond Polluted Pays fund and we need the city and the counties to pass ordinance and policies for the transition on the closures to support workers and community. Because what people want is clean energy, good jobs. They want affordable housing and they want adequate housing. They want inclusion in what’s going to happen in the land that is closing, right? They want no more polluting project in that land. They also want restaurant. They want grocery storage that sometimes areas don’t have. Very many are. So yeah. And so that concludes our presentation and we’ll have questions after we all have.
Veronica Wilson, Labor Network for Sustainability (00:39:30):
Thank you so much Julia and Alicia. That was an incredibly thorough presentation. Definitely hearing that the sudden refinery closures can lead to problems and yet action to address public health concerns and the climate crisis are of utmost urgency. You noted a need to have strong statewide policies of course and local ordinances to best support communities and for workers. And so I’m going to turn it to Gary.
(00:40:07):
Oh yeah. Assemblymember Muratsuchi here. We can very much want to welcome you. Do you want to slide in? Right on. I’m so excited to have you. The applause here. We’re honored to have assembly member where Athi of the 66th district and we’ll just hand it over as you arrange your, yeah, really interested in your worker pro climate policies and all of the work that you do to champion education and public health.
Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi, California State Ass (00:40:43):
Thank you very much. Thank you. And thank you Gary for letting me jump ahead of line here. Yeah, my name is Al Marissa. Gee, you could just call me Al. Very happy to join all of you today. I was supposed to be in a committee hearing and so that’s why I’m late and that’s why unfortunately I’m going to have to cut out early. But thank you to all of you for fighting climate change. The greatest crisis facing our times when I authored the California Climate Crisis Act in I think it was 2022 to establish, to codify our statewide goals to not only reach carbon neutrality buyer before 2045, but perhaps more significantly to set the next commitment beyond 2030 to increase greenhouse gas emissions by 85% by before 2045.
(00:41:49):
Of course, a big part of that commitment is phasing down our reliance on fossil fuels. That’s driving all of our wildfires and all of our sea level rise, extreme weather conditions that we’re suffering from. But just following on Julia’s presentation, this is so timing because I just came from another discussion and a briefing from the Energy Commission where we were talking about the announcement last week about the Valero Refinery potential shutdown. I don’t think they finalized it yet, but I believe they have announced a potential shutdown. And this is following what I know Gary is going to be talking about is the previous announcement a month, two months ago. Yeah. Of Phillips 66, the refinery in my district in the Los Angeles South Bay area in this case in Wilmington where I mean I have the fortune or the misfortune of having three refineries in my assembly district.
(00:43:05):
I think I have the most refineries in my assembly district, the Chevron refinery in El Segundo, the PBF refinery in Torrance and Phillips 66 and Wilmington. And as soon as Phillips 66 announced that they were going to be closing down the refinery, I had a Zoom meeting with their representatives the next day and they told me about how their plan was to start importing refined gas. I forget the countries that they mentioned, but they did not sound like countries that have anywhere close to the same environmental protections that we have here in the state of California. And so that is, I totally agree what Julia was talking about and how that’s really throwing a monkey wrench into our efforts to try to have a smooth transition so that we could not only try to avoid these gas price spikes that I know that we saw when PBF refinery and Torrance, when they had their major explosion in 2015.
(00:44:22):
I lived just a couple miles from the refinery when that explosion happened. We saw gas prices spike in Southern California after that shutdown. And so the goal is how do we manage a smooth transition like Julia was saying, to phase out our reliance on fossil fuels and to make that transition to clean renewable energy. Of course, ideally with good union labor working not only in that transition but on building and maintaining that clean energy infrastructure. That is the big challenge that we’re facing now. And again, as Julie just showed in her slide presentation, we are, we’re going through those conversations in real time as to how do we manage that transition as these refineries are proposing to shut down. As part of that presentation that we suffer from the Energy Commission, they showed the dramatic decline in stock prices for PBF Energy, which operates the Torrance Refinery.
(00:45:36):
And I know that the Western State Petroleum Association Building and Construction Trades, I mean they’re saying that they’re blaming it all on us on the legislature for passing all these climate and environmental bills and regulations that they’re saying is affecting their business climate, their ability to operate in California. But of course, we’re seeing refineries in other parts of the state like including Texas closing down. So the bottom line I think is that we’re facing a complicated, complicated global picture here of the global oil industry as we try to address this global crisis that is the climate crisis. So I’m sorry. I just wanted to give you an update from my perspective in terms of the discussions that are taking place in real time in the California legislature as we feel the urgency of addressing, of doing our part to fight climate change and to address the climate crisis.
(00:47:01):
At the same time, we know that the number one issue for Californians, as we saw in this last November election is the cost of living. And of course a big part of that is the cost of gas. How do we manage that transition so that we take care of all Californians, all residents, and all of our workers that work in the oil industry. So thank you very much for letting me share just some few thoughts and I’m going to have to head back to my work and the capitol, but appreciate all of you for being here.
Veronica Wilson, Labor Network for Sustainability (00:47:36):
Well, thanks so much. We’re very honored to have you. We appreciating your time and thanks for all of your work. We are just so happy that you had a chance to dip in on your busy schedule. And now I’m going to pass it to Gary. I don’t know why this is echoing, but might be because we have a little bit of feedback with the mics on over there. But I’m just curious. We’ve heard a little bit this morning from you, Gary and refinery operators are at the facility day and night, rain or shine to make sure fuel is processed safely. Maintenance has to be consistent, especially in aging facilities. What are you hearing from people working at the plant or at the facilities at the refinery? A year’s notice is an improvement on a month or two and what we want to know, is it enough time to plan for transition or for what’s next? And is there support for people who are trying to find jobs or retrain? You don’t have to answer all of those at once, but
Gary Holloway, USW Local 675 (00:48:46):
Darn. I thought I could do it all in one sentence. It’s an easy sentence, right? So the reality is when you give somebody a year’s notice or a little over a year’s notice that the thing they feared most losing their job was definitely happening. It doesn’t make people feel better if they feel dread. Now, in addition to the fear, they don’t know what comes after. There isn’t a plan B that’s anywhere at least that they can see easily. That’s anywhere like the jobs they’ve been doing. So one of the things I had toyed with not bringing this up, but since it’s come up, the issue of importing, exporting fuel into the state and the issue of the various refineries.
(00:49:44):
This is not an exhaustive list, but in the last few years, refineries have closed in El Paso, in Houston, in New Mexico, and the city is escaping me right now. We probably possibly will see the Valero Venetia plant close. We’re soon to see P 66 plants close. Martinez changed from a marathon. Martinez changed from a regular refinery into renewable fuels, which meant a significant cut in staffing. We’ve seen the same with P 60 six’s work, the additional closing of the Santa Maria refinery. And there’s been at least one other refinery closure in Louisiana. Just off the top of my head, because I pay attention to this stuff, the market is obviously contracting at some level, whether it’s whatever the numbers are is harder to say because everybody looks at different numbers and blames different things. But the demand is down for some reasons. Some of it’s maybe regulation, but I doubt that maybe the market recovery from Covid isn’t high enough.
(00:51:07):
That seems plausible from our lives, and it may be electric cars that’s plausible as at least some part of the demand. But the reality is P 66, as Julia was saying, isn’t closing that refinery because of laws. They’re not even closing it because of market, because they’re leaving the marine terminal attached to that refinery. Open fuels will be coming in, be imported. They won’t be made there anymore. So they’ll cut staffing from around 600 to about 30 and there won’t be the robust of those hundred people doing maintenance and the contractors coming in, doing turnarounds, terminals operate on a very different economics. They’re basically, you have a wharf and a couple of tanks.
(00:52:02):
And P 66 additionally is getting out of certain, Julia was talking about the sources, other sources for the fuels. They’re also getting out of European pipeline company. They sold just a few days before announcing the closure of Swiss, a Swiss pipeline company. So my point is the industry’s making doing what the industry often does, which is buy and sell pieces of itself. The Valero Venetia plant was ExxonMobil, the Torrance Refinery when the explosion happened in 2015 wasn’t PBF. It was ExxonMobil. It’s like one of the jokes that people have working there is that we all work. You might as well just put our company name on Velcro because it changes so commonly, but now basically onto the steelworkers, but before it, the oil chemical on atomic workers, as I discussed a little this morning, we knew this is coming, Tony Zaki brilliantly coined a phrase, just transition and brilliantly claimed, coined the phrase a super fund for workers, treating workers not as an afterthought, but as part and parcel of what it means to environmentally clean up things, what it means for a future. And it hasn’t gone anywhere quite yet, but it is aspirational for us to continue that demand and try.
(00:53:39):
But I think what’s important here as we talk about this, when we talk about the new jobs, everybody’s excited. There are new green jobs. Some people in this room may have heard of the Proterra bus company, which was a high road training partnership plant, got high road training partnership grants. The membership of the workers at that plant were organizing the same local as refinery workers. And Proterra like a good little company, took the money and built a new factory in Georgia, excuse me, South Carolina, I’m sorry. I don’t mean to insult South Carolina, but they built a new, yeah, sure. But they built a new plant and then they went bankrupt and sold bits and pieces of it to Volvo and everybody else. I will tell you from experience of having been the rep and having negotiated that contract, this was not a high road job. This was a job that with a lot of work would’ve become something good, but it was going to take 20, 30 years to get there. These are not those kind of jobs that was a manufacturing job and just simple put things together that came from all over the place as opposed to actually making something.
(00:55:02):
One of the more immediate things that we got in the P 66 closure agreement that we did was access to training records. Now, it may surprise you a job like my job, when I went to work at the refinery, it took me four years to be fully qualified. Most people would call that an apprenticeship and a journey card comes at the end of it, but not in this industry. They will not bargain it because they view every piece of their training as proprietary. Every piece. I think it’s even how to write your name. But having said that, it’s a major weakness. Martinez, when Marathon Martinez closed, those workers couldn’t get their training records, so they couldn’t explain to people who weren’t in the industry what a process operator even is. Why it takes four years to learn to do high temperature, high pressure chemistry at 200,000 barrels a day.
(00:56:04):
What that means is a tremendously dangerous and skilled job, and we’re all firefighters and whatever, bottle washers, everything, and we got a partial agreement to get copies of the file for one year starting in July. It is a gap in state law that doesn’t exist. There is a bill coming up. It’s an effort of California labor for climate justice coming through Senator Razzo to make it so that employers just have to give you your training records. That sounds so simple, so basic and it requires a law. These are going to be fights that take actic number SB five 13. Thank you. The area code in Ohio. I don’t know why I know that, but to get to the point where we have this type of opening, now I’m sticking around here at the legislative type stuff, not my normal habitat. Okay? I can tell you politics are not where I’ve been found for the last 35 years.
(00:57:22):
Much as like Alicia was talking about earlier. I’m a street organizer, I’m a refinery worker, organizer. That’s where I come from. But I do know something when we get done with the fuel, you’re going to have to think about the fact that on your person right now, you probably have anywhere from three ounces to a pounder to a plastic, all made from oil. These are realities. These places will continue as they are with lessen rest regulations because chemical plants have less regulation in a refinery. These are things for us to understand. I’m not going to bemoan that we have ’em in our local union. We will work that, but we are going to have to figure out a future where people have jobs, decent jobs. I’ll only, and I’ll end my comments by saying everybody talks about how great the pay is at an oil refinery.
(00:58:20):
Damn straight. It is. It’s very good. And it’s exactly without concessions in the seventies, eighties, and nineties where the auto workers and the steel workers and aircraft manufacturing workers would’ve been because we made the same as they did then. But no oil company could ever sit there and go, oh, we didn’t make any money. We’re poor. Our market’s shrinking. So that’s why that number’s high and these people to get the job and to work the job, you have to be willing to work inside an explosive, it’s an explosives plant. If I said it to you that way that we made TNT, we made stuff that you would possibly hear about the danger differently. You think of a liquid, a gallon or 17 gallons, you lose that once you’ve been to your first funeral. And you definitely lose any concept of that once you’ve been to dozens.
Veronica Wilson, Labor Network for Sustainability (00:59:16):
Thank you, Gary. Leaving us on a powerful note.
(00:59:20):
It’s very optimistic. So in awe generally of anyone who can face the fears of addressing what might be a potential explosion, if there is a fire happening and making it an effort to consider others before themselves. And I kind of want to use that to give it back to Julia and Alicia to sort of quickly go through a little bit of thinking together. And then we’ll have some time for audience questions after a couple more. What are your thoughts on safely winding down refinery operations? And then I’m just going to combine it here since we’re a little short on time. How do you see this as a test case for an opportunity to increase equity in transition?
Julia May, Communities for a Better Environment (01:00:30):
Hello? Hello. I want to say again. Alicia and CBE and our members have seen explosion after explosion after explosion. I’ve been next to refineries with massive clouds. You could feel the ground shaking from the flaring, just from the amount of gases being routed to the flaring to keep a refinery from turning into a runaway fire. Absolutely frightening. I was amazed that some of the people in the community next to the refinery were sitting on lawn chairs. They were so used to it happening that it didn’t face them anymore despite the danger. But I’d also like Alicia to mention, and I’d like to mention Alicia is there on the line when the union strike, she’s there supporting the workers. Our communities have been in labor to neighbor meetings held by labor, occupational safety people to talk about how can communities and workers support each other? Because some community members don’t think the workers care about them, and some workers don’t think the community cares about their jobs.
(01:01:47):
But when you get ’em in the same room, you find out they do care about each other. They want to support each other. We need more of those people getting together and we need our regulators and legislators to support that. So far, and again, I want to say tremendous, our communities really respect the refinery workers who are the frontline for safety. They have to have, they must have control to shut down the refinery when something is going wrong. And there’s a lot of intimidation by the companies to stop them from doing that. We’ve seen report after report from the US Chemical Safety Board that they’ve skimped on maintenance. They’ve found errors. They found thinning metal before the Chevron explosion year after year, and they didn’t fix it and then it blew up. 19 workers had to crawl out through the exploding gases of one firefighter at the refinery had to jump through flames to get out. We’ve seen refinery explosions where people did not survive. So it’s an inherently polluting industry that does need to be phased out. But we must value the workers that are supporting the community. And we must notice that the community members have terrible health problems that need to be addressed. I want to talk a little bit more about some specific options, but I want Alicia to get a chance to talk about this issue.
Alicia Rivera, Communities for a Better Environment (01:03:27):
Say that it’s a very interesting dynamic working with the community and trying to build breaches with the workers and convince them or try to rationalize that the good paying jobs they have are really hurting the people, the community members. And the community members. You have to rationalize with them as well about their role that the workers have in keeping that monster safe for them and trying to rationalize and make them the case that these monsters are only companies that want to profit, especially on the back of the workers first and becoming rich at the expense of their safety and the loan hours. And then they want to just throw them under the bus by replacing them with non-union new workers and working them on their day off when they’re very tired. And then blaming them when they have some equipment breakdown because this worker is too tired, falling asleep at the job.
(01:05:15):
So this is a dynamic that you have to understand to really and convince the workers that I care about that about you. That this refinery and this company, their employer is really using them and then not caring about, have no whims about getting rid of them in order to pay some other worker less and offer them no benefits. So you have to understand where the companies use us to become richer and they disrespect the workers, they disrespect us, the community, and they have the seat and light about the impact of their products on the climate change, which is now affecting the whole world and making us pay with our health and with our taxes. So
Julia May, Communities for a Better Environment (01:06:27):
Can I add specifics at the state level? So far the state, the CC did a great job of assessing what are some options for phase out, but the scoping plan doesn’t have any real plan for reducing oil refining. It gives, instead it focuses on cap and trade, carbon capture, stuff like that. At the local level, there are specific measures that were identified with workers and community wage insurance for workers, peer support for workers, weathering mental health issues, just transition task force at the city of LA unemployment insurance, make sure we have community members involved in the permitting process for what’s going to happen next. Assurances for site cleanup, we’ve got a lot of detail that we’re thinking about both locally and its state policy. Contact us for more information about that.
Veronica Wilson, Labor Network for Sustainability (01:07:25):
Thank you. Julia and Alicia and Gary, if you would give us just a quick note. Yeah. When you answer questions from the audience, which we’ll turn to right away, we’d like to take a few questions. But what I was thinking you would also address are some of the safety and equity questions that Alicia and Julie just spoke to. Do we have a question ready to go in the audience? Oh, we do. Yes, yes, yes. Awesome. Should we start here on this side? And Eric, do you have a microphone in here? Oh great. Thank you. And if you could tell us who you are and any other details
Speaker 10 (01:08:16):
Mark Ross, Initiated Advisors we’,re what’s called the municipal advisor to California Cities, including the city of Richmond, which means we do bonds and financing for them. I’ll make one short statement then I got a really hot question. The short statement is that the Chevron Richmond settlement looks good, but all it really is going to do in the long run is make up for lost property taxes. Okay? There is no remediation, there’s nothing for workers. All the other issues that this group has very appropriately pointed out are not addressed by that. It is just lost property taxes. That’s the way to think about it. We’re grateful. Yeah, grateful. But everything else, nada. Here’s the question, and I’m talking slightly out of school. We have reason to believe that Chevrons made a decision to abandon that refinery when sea levels rise. Not because they can’t build a diker on the refinery, but because as I think most people in the room know when seals rise, the groundwater comes up and like Wellington, that refinery has been there a hundred years. And what’s sitting in the soil under that refinery, if it starts coming up through artesian springs of toxic, whatever that place is uninhabitable. I mean that place is gone.
(01:09:35):
And again, talking slightly out of school, we think that’s going to be drive Chevron to abandon it. Any other city of Richmond I think would love to ally with other communities facing similar challenges. Any other refineries facing that challenge, any advice, insights you can offer. Much appreciated and thank you.
Julia May, Communities for a Better Environment (01:10:01):
Is Connie here. So Connie worked on the polluters pay tax, CBE and Apen did. And I would say it was a brilliant idea to tax a refinery that could start paying into a fund upfront while it’s operating so that you can figure out how to fund the things you want to fund after it closes as far as whether it’s doing exactly whether they chose the Chevron did a settlement with the city and they killed the initiative and the tax, and they came up with a settlement for a lump sum of a lot of money. That would not have happened without the community initiative to make that happen. It’s a great model that should happen in other places. Existing refineries should pay upfront to help offset the massive amount of money they’ve extracted over decades and decades in polluting these communities. So if you disagree with some of the details, I can understand, but the concept is really important as far as closing, when sea levels rise, I’m a little skeptical of Chevron statements about we’re going to leave the state of California, Chevron Richmond and Marathon LA did massive investments in expanding the refinery in the last decade.
(01:11:38):
And I think that may mean they’re hunkered down to stay and they will benefit from the reducing number of refineries. It’s becoming more monopolistic in the state. There’s fewer entities now that control most of the market and they’ve driven out some of these others. So I’m a little skeptical about Chevron disappearing and I think the Chevron polluters pay taxes is a great thing. Maybe more details, but I’m glad you brought it up. I don’t know if Connie wants to, sorry,
Speaker 11 (01:12:19):
Connie. Sorry I just for everyone’s context, others may know this, but would just like to say that this tax initiative was designed around California’s, it’s going to be really boring for some folks. Taxation limitations and what voter thresholds are required. It’s extremely hard to pass two thirds votes to direct the funds. We also had an extremely dedicated progressive city council that recognized that rightly so, that there were immediate needs that this highly under invested community needed to be able to address. They also needed that flexibility and general funds, but they also had a commitment that which they showed immediately after the tax settlement in a resolution to dedicate funds significantly to just transition. Remediation funds are the top of our priority list, and we’ve been working with progressive city council in order to be able to secure funds for that. But that is, as Julia said, because Chevron’s vertical integration in the global oil market, it is one of the more resilient oil companies that we have to recognize. And so why not use that runway of time to be able to build savings, to be able to build fun and hopefully Richmond will be a pioneer in investment strategies to prepare for transition.
Veronica Wilson, Labor Network for Sustainability (01:13:42):
Fantastic. Thank you. So wonderful. We have experts abound in the room. Yes, Gary, please.
Gary Holloway, USW Local 675 (01:13:49):
First off, I can’t speak to the science of whether this, that or the other will happen. What I can speak to is a reality that every one of the refineries from days when there weren’t quite environmental rules have enormous pools of oil into them. Many of the refineries, at least in the South, are pumping that oil up and seeing what they can re-inject in as sort of previous lost profit. These are, and it’s a lot of oil, how much I do know that if you stop producing oil in Long Beach and in addition to just pulling the oil out, they have to pump seawater back in or the City of Long Beach sinks. Okay. I did admire Chevron’s chutzpah when they said in the middle of all the new regulations, they decided that this is when we’ll announce we’re closing the corporate offices. Over the years, not so much with the refineries. I don’t have much to do with those bargaining units, but I had something to do with the pipeline bargaining units and terminals. They’d moved most of those people out of there. You’d pass 30 empty offices, get to the one and then pass another 30 to get to the other person you need to talk to. So that place has been closed a while.
(01:15:24):
One of the things CBE and Local 6 75, I won’t speak for anybody else in the steelworkers or anybody else in the union movement. We have worked hand in glove for years. Maybe we have arguments, maybe we don’t. Maybe we see everything the same way. Probably we don’t. But the reality is that Dave Campbell, as I mentioned earlier, sat on the board for CBE for years. If you don’t think that had a political cost, you are wrong. Or that it had to have a lot of political and organizational discussion to understand why. To understand why last year we had CBE in the hall talking with us about just transition. These are real things. We do these things because these are the things we have to do because we’re not just workers in an oil refinery waiting around to die. We’re live human beings with kids and families.
(01:16:24):
And we’ve worked hard as a local also to get people from Wilmington hired into the refineries because that Wilmington refinery, which was Unical amazingly, did not hire many people from the Wilmington area, seem to have a lot of white people. Ain’t nothing wrong with being a white person with a job, but somehow when you’re surrounded by Latino, Latinx, and black communities, the fact that there’s a lot of white people and not many Latinx, and now the majority of the workers in these plants are at least more representative, I won’t say completely, but more representative of the communities in which they are. These are changes. It took years to get deal with. And this will take, if you do it just legally or just in a discussion, just having a nice discussion or talking to a politician. We need to figure out ways to pressure these companies. Us assuming that the lurch towards authoritarianism doesn’t get worse.
Veronica Wilson, Labor Network for Sustainability (01:17:33):
We do have a couple more minutes. I think we might be able to take another question, maybe very back and then we’ll, yeah. Okay. I think there’s the very back. And if we can, and definitely stick around if you have more questions when we close.
Speaker 12 (01:17:58):
Hi everyone. My name is Joel Tony. I’m an EJ activist and I also now work for the Bay Area Air District. I was, thank you for that because the just transition team is just starting up for the path to clean air. And so these are great conversations that we’re having. One thing that I’m noticing though, is that we seem to be in this loop of continuing to talk about consumerism as the solution for the just transition where we’re talking about EVs and we’re talking about chargers, and we are talking about getting away from fuel refinery. But without talking about that, these communities that have been impacted also are, well, thank you, Alicia. You mentioned it are also impacted by food deserts are also impacted by transportation deserts. And so I’m wondering, are we talking about having comprehensive fleets that provide public transportation? Are we talking about other holistic solutions that are also heat islands? So what are we talking about as far as collective solutions to the just transition? Thank you.
Veronica Wilson, Labor Network for Sustainability (01:19:02):
I like that. As a closing question.
Julia May, Communities for a Better Environment (01:19:05):
It’s a great question. And in this room right now is our colleague Maya in the blue shirt who works on CB’s Charge Ahead program with others on transportation. And when we talk about transportation electrification, we’re not just talking about EVs, we’re talking about mass transit, we’re talking about walk bikeable communities. Those are inherently part of our work. Sometimes we just use short phrases like transportation, electrification. We do specifically mention EVs because the biggest greenhouse gas sources are cars. So we do have to replace those. So EVs are important, but they cannot be by themselves. And so thank you very much for uplifting that important point that we didn’t get into.
Alicia Rivera, Communities for a Better Environment (01:19:59):
Just to compliment you are right on. Because when I talk to the members about EVs, they think I’m like crazy. How am I going to afford one, even if they are some subsidies for it. And they’re the ones who are going to have their combustion engine cars until something happened to them. Because the other thing is that they don’t trust the batteries to take them forever on what they can do with 10 gallon right now. So it’s definitely some education. And I was just mentioning to somebody, researchers today about we really are in a very up against the wall because EVs are not the answer either. There’s a lot of natural resources that’s needed and people are being exploited in Africa, the children and all that. So we are going to have to go back to basics and not so much on this new stuff going on, even cell phones. We need to really cut down and reuse the ones that we are getting rid of. Definitely it has to be a circular but not circular in what we’re talking about, but circular, like when I grew up to, I had a donkey and not a bicycle. I am not saying to go back to that. You guys never had a donkey, I never had a bicycle. But those kind of things. How do we focus more on public transportation that is reliable, that gets you there instead of waiting forever for a bus instead of individual cars. Definitely.
Veronica Wilson, Labor Network for Sustainability (01:21:47):
Okay. We are at time. I would like to, another round of applause. I thank our panelists and thank you all for coming to this session this afternoon. Please stick around for more questions before the next one starts. Woody, tell us when we get kicked out. Thanks.
Woody Hastings, The Climate Center (01:22:14):
Oh, thank you. I’m going to recite. Thank you Veronica and panelists. Folks, if you’re going to stay in the phase out polluting fuels track, in about 10 minutes, we will be starting on the Polluters Pay Climate Super Fund session here in this room. So stick around for that. Thank you.