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 (00:00:05):
Thank you all for being here. My name is Woody Hastings. I am the Phase Out Polluting Fuels Program Director for The Climate Center. I’m just going to say a few opening comments and thank our sponsors and then hand it off to Lisa Tucker to introduce our panelists. Again, thanks for coming to this session and it’s part of the Phase Out Polluting Fuels program track. This morning we heard about a holistic transition. Hope some of you were here. Who was here for this morning’s holistic transition? A few of you. Good. And then just shortly ago, we took a deeper dive into the gasoline scene and so this is our final presentation talking all about the climate super polluter methane, controlling emissions at the wellhead. So you’ll see this slide again in a moment with all our presenters when Lisa introduces them.
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But first, yes, a thank you to our sponsors, Sunrun and Bay Area Air District, two major sponsors. And then there’s a bunch more here. You heard about them this morning. I’m not going to read them all off. So the leader level sponsors. We could not do this summit without them, so we really appreciate their generosity and even more sponsors. So thank you to our sponsors. And also to the individual donors who help make the summit a success. Our fifth annual, by the way, this is our fifth annual policy summit. And to our promotional partners for helping share the word, get the word out, bring people like you here. If anyone’s interested in being a promotional partner or a sponsor, please track one of us down and ask us about that. So by now, you’ve probably, if you wanted to, downloaded the Eventleaf app, there it is one last time.
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If you want to get that QR code, get it on the phone. And if you are a person who’s on the socials and you want to do the social stuff, there’s the hashtag and there’s all those logos there for all the various socials. So please do that kind of thing if you want. So without any further ado, again, I just want to thank you all for being here. And I would like to hand the baton over to Lisa Tucker of Consumer Watchdog. She’s a consumer advocate. Been at it for years doing a lot of great stuff and really appreciate her and all the work they do at Consumer Watchdog. So Liza, without any further ado, please come on up and …
Liza Tucker, Consumer Watchdog (00:02:43):
Okay. Hi. Thank you for having me, Woody. It’s a great honor. So we’ve got a problem with methane emissions from oil wells and other oil infrastructure in the state of California. And we’re going to be talking about the hazards of this from the point of view of health and the point of view of everything, legislation to address it and so on. We have basically got methane leaking from tens of thousands of oil wells in California, and methane is about 80 times more powerful than carbon dioxide over 20 years. The problem is it traps a lot more heat per molecule than CO2 does. And so what it’s doing is it’s driving super rapid, intensive warming. And essentially what comes out is also other dangerous co-pollutants, and we have experts here to tell us what those are, but they’re associated with a host of health problems, everything from asthma to cancer, pulmonary, and heart disease, and so on.
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It’s also methane, a very logical target for regulation. And the reason is that state regulators do have the power to control emissions at the wellhead. And they also have the power to order idle wells shut down that are amenas and have stayed open for way too long. It’s actually pretty low hanging fruit from a regulatory point of view that could yield a big bang for the buck. But there are questions about why state regulators haven’t gone further than they have and why the legislature has not gone further than it has. So we’re going to focus on wellhead emissions and what to do to stop them as fast as possible and what’s hanging some of that up. And I want to leave time for a nice Q&A of about 20 minutes at the end of this discussion. So that’s kind of where we are. We’re starting in order with Miguel.
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And Miguel is the founder and executive director of Unitos Network. He is from Kettleman City and he is very involved in supporting underserved rural and farm worker communities, particularly in the Central Valley. He is a third generation EJ advocate and community organizer, and he has lots of other roles, including this one. Communities and areas like his really need support because it turns out they’re in unincorporated areas and so they don’t really have a lot of legislative champions. It’s a serious problem. And so we’re going to start with Miguel to give us a real on the ground perspective. So many people in and around Kettleman City in general in the Central Valley live in a toxic soup from oil well emissions and he actually grew up with that. So as you give your presentation, Miguel, I just want you to bear in mind a few questions that I have telling us what that was like, what the legacy of oil companies such as standard oil is in the area.
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Do they expect all of us to clean up their mess? And how does this play into the hands of oil companies to operate wells in unincorporated rural parts of the state? And so he’s going to take it away and each person’s going to talk for about 10 minutes. We have a timekeeper. Thank
Miguel Alatorre Jr., UNIDOS Network Inc. (00:05:56):
You so much for the introduction. So I’ll start off with the question that I asked many of the community members that I do work in in the unincorporated areas. Have you guys ever heard of Calamaro screen? Yeah. Raise your hand if you use it in your work. That’s good to see so many hands raised. So unfortunately, the same percentage is not the same when I go do community meetings in the unincorporated areas. And so with Unidos Network, we do focus on those areas and we focus on areas like Kettleman City, Button Willow, Lost Hills, Oildale, and Wilmington, California.
Miguel Alatorre Jr., UNIDOS Network Inc. (00:06:39):
So commonly in these areas, they score among some of the highest on CalEnviroScreen. And that’s not a good thing for those of you that don’t know what CalEnviroScreen is. And so I have the statistics here and you guys are more than welcome to look it up yourself. It’s a great tool that the state through Calowica provides for us. But CalEnviroScreen says that Kettleman City is at 86.3 and 95.43 respectively for its pollution burdens and how vulnerable it is to pollution. And so CalEnviroScreen gives us a sense to how vulnerable a population is to pollution. So where I live in Kettleman City, a population of 990 very hardworking farm worker people, we’re at 95 in our sister community, Button Willow, they’re at 98. Our next community is Lost Hills at 86%.
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The next community is Wilmington at 98% in the percentile. And so there’s a really disturbing trend as we see these numbers over and over repeated. And that disturbing trend is the fact that all of these areas that have been listed are unincorporated. And so there is no governance, there is no civic engagement, and there is no true way for us to protect ourselves from these polluters and the burdens that they have for our community members. And so this means really elevated levels of cancer, asthma has been mentioned. And I have lost many friends and family to these diseases and they’re horrible. And they’re not just statistics that we read on calm virus screen. These are real everyday people that are suffering from these burdens of oil and gas. And specifically in some of these areas like Kettleman City, we had our oil and gas come from the standard oil company in the 1920s when they came and they pushed the Tatchi Yokat Tribe and John Cattleman out of the area and they started their operation.
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They brought this amazing black oil that came out of our hills to the detriment of our community. And when that oil was no longer profitable for them, they left all this infrastructure within the Kettleman Hills. And the Kettleman Hills sit above our drinking water source, right? So our groundwater is contaminated with delicious benzene and arsenic that come from the oil industry. And in Kettleman City, we have a really, really special scientific process, state of the art where some really genius people in the 80s thought it would be a really great idea to vent the benzene from the water into the air. So taking the burden out of our water system and then venting it into the air. And does anyone have a guess as to where they would put such a system to vent benzene into the air? Any guesses from the audience? That’s exactly where they put it, right?
(00:09:25):
The best location to put a benzene stripper is right next to our elementary school. Right next to my fellow coworker, Yovani Solorio, who is the director of community engagement for the Unidos organization, his father passed away from brain cancer and they lived right underneath that benzene stripper. And the people that lived next to the second one, because they didn’t just put one in, right, that wasn’t enough of an insult, right? They had to add the second one. And the second one is at our water services district where every single community member has to go once a month and soak themselves in great benzene, right? And that’s another place where we’ve seen elevated cancer as well, right next to that stripper as well where four community members who live within a 500 foot radius of that stripper have died of different forms of cancer, whether it be brain cancer, lung cancer, blood cancer, bone cancer, cancers that we’ve never even heard of in our population.
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And it’s not just the oil and gas that’s just plaguing Kettleman City, right? This is a pattern that’s repeated in all of the unincorporated areas. So we mentioned Button Willow, right? Button Willow sits adjacent to a massive oil field that’s just as big as the size of their entire community. And they’re also another population of 1,200 residents that don’t have any governance and no protection. And now they stand to be the guinea pig of the CRC Corporation as this is where we’ve decided to put in the greatest of all carbon sequestration. And we’re bringing it to Lost Hills and Butt Willow again. We don’t know if this is by design, but I would think that areas that are left unincorporated that have a very high level of unemployment, a very high level of people who speak Spanish and are monolingual Spanish speakers. We have a repeated pattern of all of these infrastructures and all of these oil and gas companies coming to their areas and taking advantage of that fact that they don’t have a system of protection, that they don’t have a way to protect themselves.
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And we get to live with these consequences and see not a single benefit. Let’s say I was Chevron’s favorite fan and I love bathing myself in oil and gas, which I drive electric, by the way, so I don’t really, but let’s say I was, right? There isn’t even a purported community benefit to be had for the billions of dollars of infrastructure that’s within all of these unincorporated communities and all of them, each single community that I’ve listed has an oil field within their community. Oildale, Wilmington being some of the largest oil fields that we have within the Central Valley. And then of course, Wilmington is in the port of Los Angeles area. And so these are all communities that have to live with these burdens every single day. And in Kettleman, we don’t have sidewalks. We don’t have a high school. We don’t have college success programs.
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We don’t even have a freaking green space. All we have is a very, very tiny park with no shaded trees, no bathrooms for people to use. And so there truly is no real benefit to living next to any of this infrastructure, right? Even if these community members in these areas would like it, which they do not, there is no benefit to living next to this infrastructure. So why is it that they pick on us as unincorporated regions? Why is it that they keep putting these projects in place with no requirements for community benefits, no requirement for workforce development, no requirement for community education so that community members know better in terms of what these projects are doing to their health. And so Unidos Network has dedicated its mission to bringing this information to all the communities that we do work in. Because what’s scary is, again, I asked people to raise their hands if they knew what Calanviro screen is, right?
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And we all know what it is and it’s great that we do, but what about all those community members in Wilmington? What about all the community members in Los Hills and Buttonwell that have no idea that an entire tool has been created for them to advocate against the very poisons, like the oil and gas industry that’s in their communities. They have no idea about these tools, right? And so it’s not just about the oil and gas industry. It’s also about the patterns that they use and how they keep picking on Latino populations that are, again, impoverished, that don’t have the education to fight these things, and it’s a real damn shame. And so not only through Nilos, but also with our work as Fossil Free California, where we push divestment as a tool to get the oil and gas industry’s legs out from underneath them and be able to combat them.
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We need help in these unincorporated areas because we often feel forgotten by our counties, right? Our county of Kings, our county of Kern, they get to keep all the profits of all this waste, but they don’t have to live with the heartache of cancer. They don’t have to live with going to infant funerals. I’ve seen very tiny coffins and it’s not something that’s fun. It’s not something that we like to talk about, but it’s the reality of the situation of living in a community where birth defects are real. Seeing clusters of autism is real and it’s not just the oil and gas, but it’s the cumulative effects of so many, many pollutants that are put into these unincorporated regions. We don’t just have oil and gas. Each one of these communities has landfills. Each one of these communities minus Wilmington has industrial agriculture. Each one of these communities has highways and freeways that are dividing our communities in half.
(00:15:12):
And this is not something that we can call a sustainable practice, right? There has to be equity. There has to be justice and environmental justice for areas like Kettleman City, Button Willow and Lost Hills. And my grandparents were part … Ramon and Mari Lumares, they were part of the first movement of people that helped defeat a billion dollar industry when they stood up with their friends and family members, and they were able to topple the first ever proposed toxic waste incinerator in California. And then they went to Mexico and they beat it in Tijuana too. And so I say this to empower every single one of you guys that we can do it if we put our minds to it. And if we truly dedicate ourselves to our communities, there’s nothing that we can’t achieve. And so I’m really thankful to be here and thank you for your time.
Liza Tucker, Consumer Watchdog (00:16:00):
Thank you. Yeah, that was lovely. That was really good, Miguel.
Miguel Alatorre Jr., UNIDOS Network Inc. (00:16:07):
Thank you.
Liza Tucker, Consumer Watchdog (00:16:13):
Okay. So we’re shifting along to Maro Kakoussian. She is with Physicians for Social Responsibility, Los Angeles, and she’s the director of climate and health programs there. Her advocacy and EJ works sit at the intersection really of public health, environmental justice and grassroots organizing, and she focuses on slashing pollution burdens in frontline communities. She also coordinates with Stand LA, a coalition of community groups focusing on ending neighborhood drilling in urban settings and prioritizing public health. Now, she’s an expert on urban oil drilling and we have the largest urban oil field in the United States, Wilmington oil field in LA County. So I wanted to ask Maro, just as a little framing question when she does her presentation. We have pump jacks in rural parts of the state, of course, all over the Central Valley, but we also have them in these urban settings.
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And what I wanted to ask was, is there a difference in exposure in a rural setting versus an urban setting or is it all the same? And if she could tell us a little bit about why proximity to wells matters, what the impacts are and the dangers and how the burdens are not shared equally.
Maro Kakoussian, Physicians for Social Responsibility (00:17:27):
Thank you, Lisa. And thank you, Woody, and The Climate Center for inviting me to be here. Okay. So I’m just going to start off by briefly giving a little bit of background about my organization, Physicians for Social Responsibility Los Angeles. We’re an environmental health and justice nonprofit, addressing the full life cycle of fossil fuels and petrochemicals. We really center public health in any discussion around climate and energy policy, whether that’s at the local level or at the state level. We have various different programs. Our climate program is specifically focused on ending neighborhood oil drilling, whereas we have an air quality program. They’re focused on addressing air emissions and toxic air contaminants at specific industrial sites. We also have a toxics program that focuses on addressing chemicals, whether that’s the chemicals used at extraction sites or used in consumer products, or whether it’s hazardous waste actually being transported to the Central Valley.
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We try to really tackle this issue from a full lifecycle perspective. Our membership is made up of health professionals, so we do a lot of education and training to pair the credible voice of health professionals with frontline communities that are disproportionately impacted by these harms. A lot of our work is done through coalitions. And so one of the coalitions that Lisa mentioned is Stand LA. My work and my orientation to oil drilling has been done through the Stand LA Coalition for the last eight years. It’s an environmental justice and racial justice coalition that is made up of community organizations, including communities for a better environment. I believe you may have heard from Bahram earlier today. All these organizations represent communities that are disproportionately impacted by the issue of neighborhood oil drilling across Los Angeles.
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Really quickly, I also want to mention another coalition, Vizion Voices and Solidarity Against Oil and Neighborhoods. They are our statewide sister frontline Environmental Justice Coalition with frontline organizations from Kern County, including the Central California Environmental Justice Network and the Center for Race, Poverty, and the Environment. A lot of the work we did in the city of LA with the passage of the oil phase out ordinance in 2022 really built the momentum for the executive orders that we got on health harms from oil and gas infrastructure and the historic passage of SB 1137, the 3,200 foot setback spill.
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I will mention a lot of the organizing in LA led to the 2022 passage of the oil phase out ordinance. Unfortunately, that was overturned in 2024. And so we like to tell advocates, activists, and supporters that we are in decade two of the fight to end neighborhood oil drilling. A lot of this work, as I’ve learned, is decades long. And so the work that we’re doing here today, talking about issues around methane leaks, issues around health impacts is really critical as we continue to push for health protections and phasing out fossil fuels across the state. So oil and gas infrastructure, if you can go back to that slide, I want to contextualize this issue within LA. So we have the full life cycle of fossil fuels in LA. We have five major refineries. We have neighborhood oil drilling. That’s what you see here. Neighborhood oil drilling is when oil drilling is happening next to homeschools, hospitals, daycare centers, other sensitive receptors, sometimes within feet of where people live.
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You can open a window and see a pump track right there in your backyard. And this is not a issue that is felt equally among residents, especially in Los Angeles. As was mentioned, we have the largest urban oil field in the country as well, the Inglewood oil field. And full life cycle, we extract, we refine, and we consume the oil because we’re also a very car centric city. We are also highly urbanized and densely populated. So what you see is fossil fuel infrastructure embedded within a dense metropolitan area. You have many, many more people within close proximity to the fossil fuel infrastructure, whether that’s where the oil wells are located, right? They’re concentrated mostly in South LA and in Wilmington. These are communities that are low income and communities of color. And what you see on the west side of town is not similar to what you see in South LA and in Wilmington.
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These communities in South LA and in Wilmington do not have the same protections as oil extraction sites on the west side that are enclosed and that are electrified. When I say the west side of Los Angeles, that’s the Beverly Hills Brentwood area, for those of you that are familiar with the region. Okay. So oil drilling in LA, I’m just going to talk a little bit about drilling in Los Angeles. So it started in the 1890s. So we like to tell people that LA was built on oil. Many of the oil tycoons you might be familiar with like Getty, Dohidi, these are all major oil producers that have a legacy of drilling in Los Angeles. We have 26 oil and gas fields, 5,000 total wells, both active, idle. We also have abandoned wells in the city. There are between 590 to 900 active wells and idle wells.
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And on average, a well produces 2.37 barrels of oil per day, which is very low. And oil wells in the city of LA produced only 1.3% of the oil used in the state of California in 2022.
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Wow. And why does this matter? Why does density proximity to oil extraction matter? The South LA and Wilmington residents do not have the same protections, as I mentioned. We have been fighting in addition to phasing out oil drilling in Los Angeles, we have been fighting for health protections. So we are fighting for enclosure and electrification of infrastructure. And you will see that up here, 74% of residents living within 1,500 feet of an active LA city oil well are people of color. That 74% of people that live within 1,500 feet are communities of color. 42% live 200% below the federal poverty line and 56% are renters. So low income communities are disproportionately impacted. Like I mentioned, they live near greater well density, a greater number of wells and have fewer protections overall. So the right upper hand photo is what an enclosed well looks like, an enclosed derrick versus what you see on the bottom here in South LA.
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It’s a pump jack in the backyard. And then on the left side, you see infrastructure gas tanks, storage tanks in Wilmington, right outside someone’s home. And then in the upper left hand, you see just the concentration again. Wilmington is to the south, and then you’ll see sort of in the middle, the concentration of wells in South LA, including the Englewood oil field. So health impacts of oil drilling, as we heard earlier, proximity matters and protection matters. There’s a significant body of epidemiological research and studies that have been done that demonstrate and show what communities have known for many, many decades that living near oil and gas infrastructure harms people health, people’s health in many different ways. The science also confirms that the closer you live next to an extraction sites, the greater the likelihood of adverse health impacts the community will experience. Oil drilling operations are toxic because they release toxic chemicals like hydrogen sulfide, methane, benzene.
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These chemicals are carcinogens, endocrine disruptors. They’re associated with preterm birth. They’re associated with respiratory illness, asthma, and increased risk of cancers. On the next slide, you’ll see a list of some of the major studies done in California around this issue. If you want to go ahead and look them up later on, these major studies ultimately consistently show that living near oil drilling is associated with serious health impacts, and we’d be happy to share these afterwards. I’m very low on time. So the last thing I want to end with is with a case study because you’re going to hear now from my fellow panelists about methane leaks and just how pervasive this issue is. We were trained a couple of years ago to use FLUR cameras. These are thermal imaging cameras that Kyle will talk more about in a second. And a group of us, organizers, advocates went out.
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We were joined by organizers from CCEJN who had a camera with them and we went out to Wilmington and we were going around the community and we ended up in a soccer field. This is the same sort of area where if folks have been to Wilmington, there are two pump tracks by YMCA. If you just walk around the vicinity, there are storage tanks. And what we found was a methane leak that at that time was 130 parts per million over what it should be. It was first documented on October 28th, 2024 using the camera and the methane monitor. We made a complaint to the South Coast Air Quality Management District. So an inspector came out to investigate what was happening, and they found the methane levels were much higher. They detected 10,000 PPM, which is obviously highly dangerous and toxics when you’re thinking about just families and kids playing soccer there in the evenings or over the weekends.
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The agency required the operator to come out and fix the well, and so they did. They went back to the well and they saw that it was still at a thousand PPM of methane, but the investigator said that he had no regulatory authority to require the operator to take further action. And so he suggested that we reach out to CARB, the California Air Resources Board and Cali PA. So we had to go to the California Air Resources Board and Cali PA file another complaint until action was taken three months later in January 2025. And even till today, when you go to that specific area, you still smell methane. They haven’t fully fixed the issue. And so this is the last sort of example and piece that I will leave you with because Kyle and Jason are sort of going to expand on this issue further.
(00:29:20):
Thank you.
Liza Tucker, Consumer Watchdog (00:29:26):
Thank you very much. Okay. Now we’re going to move on to Kyle Ferrar. I’ll just say a couple words and frame this. Kyle is Western Program Director for Frack Tracker Alliance, and that’s a nonprofit data driven advocacy group, and it focuses on exposing environmental and public health risks from fossil fuel operations. Kyle’s really an ACE researcher. He uses data mapping and public health analysis to highlight the impacts of oil and gas development on frontline communities. He also, full disclosure, works with us at ConsumerWatchdog to try to track oil well drilling permits in California. He gets into the CalGEM database every few months and looks at how many oil permits have been issued. And I write what I hope is a provocative press release around his amazing analytical skills. And then we do these quarterly updates. We have a site called newsomewellwatch.com that we host at consumerwatchdog together and you can see all the wells map there and also some of his work with his infrared camera.
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Look to see what it looks like when you can actually see the methane emissions coming from wellheads and other infrastructure. So Kyle, you are our oil well sleuth and you’ve been going around the state using an infrared camera to show us what the leaking methane from wells that’s not visible to the naked eye actually looks like. And so you’ve been all over California and what I would love to hear from you in your presentation is a little bit about what you found. You look like you’re doing the job state regulators should be doing, and I wonder if that’s a budget problem for them or why you’re doing their work. And if you could talk about the loopholes in the various regulatory programs, especially the California Oil and Gas Methane Emissions rule, which is overseen by the California Air Resources Board. I’d like to just hear about those.
(00:31:20):
I think everybody could benefit from hearing about the loopholes. Thank you.
Woody Hastings, The Climate Center (00:31:25):
Thank you, Liza.
Kyle Ferrar, FracTracker Alliance (00:31:36):
So I’m going to talk a bit about these leaks and the loopholes and also why am I doing this work? It’s interesting, the regulatory bodies, they say they have license to do all these things, but unfortunately they’re very uncreative. They don’t have much of an imagination. So that means that we need legislation to really tell them exactly what to do. They say that they are going to regulate and they’re going to protect, but we really have to sit down and say, “Okay, well this is exactly what you have to do. ” So that’s kind of what I’m going to start with here. Why are we regulating methane? It really started with AB32 in 2006. It’s kind of like California’s endangerment finding. And we had several bills that followed that set climate goals, a couple bills that targeted reductions of leaks and methane reductions overall.
(00:32:32):
And then the Aliso Canyon blowout occurred in 2015, 2016. And that along with the weakening of emissions regulations during Trump number one, led carb to develop their own emission standards. And-
Liza Tucker, Consumer Watchdog (00:32:48):
That’s the California Air Resources Board. CARB.
Kyle Ferrar, FracTracker Alliance (00:32:51):
CARB, yes. Thank you. So next slide please. All right. So this rule, it requires oil and natural gas facilities to control methane emissions. And it includes regulations for leak detection and repair that includes inspections and repair deadlines. Equipment standards such as vapor collection systems. Number three, monitoring and reporting that has specific requirements for underground storage facilities like Eliso Canyon and for record keeping. So immediately the leak detection and repair requirements reduced emissions by about one third in the first year. Wow. Yeah. And those reduction figures have continued to increase each year. The more you look, the more you find.
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Next slide please. But of course there’s always loopholes. So while it’s been a large success, there are many exemptions to the rule when it comes to leak detection and repair. So California is just such a large space with just a massive amount of really old infrastructure. So the rule exempts the least cost effective components from leak detection and repair requirements. And they determine that by production thresholds. Number one, production thresholds, including volume of production and the gravity of oil. We’ll talk a bit about that. Specifically, heavy oil facilities are exempted from many of the leak detection and reporting requirements. We’ll get into that. Number two, equipment specific exemptions such as well casing vents and safety devices. We’ll get into those. And then three, operational exemptions that exempt down hole activity. So anytime that they’re actually working on the well, those activities are exempt and allow them also to extend repair deadlines.
(00:34:31):
So this is a … We can go back to that. One second. This is a white paper by Central California Environmental Justice Network, and it describes how many of these exemptions allow for certain system components to discharge unregulated volumes of hydrocarbon emissions. So great paper. I contributed to it. Please take a look at it. So I’m going to run you through a few of the case studies that kind of get at these three different cases here, separator and tank systems, well casing requirements, and leak detection and repair provisions overall.
(00:35:03):
So case study number one, this is the Morningstar wells. This was just to the southeast of Bakersfield. So it’s the first case, it involved dozens of idle wells discovered to be leaking explosive concentrations of methane within and near Bakersfield. These wells were owned and operated by three different operators. First Sunray Petroleum had 32 improperly abandoned idle wells. That means they were just orphaned wells. They were out of compliance with idle well rules and six were found to be leaking. Then it was Zynergy LLC, had seven improperly abandoned wells, five of them were leaking. And Griffin resources, 25 improperly abandoned idle wells in the Fruitvale field, pretty much right within Bakersfield. And at least five of them were leaking and building high pressure. So when the leaks were first discovered, both the California Air Resources Board and CalGEM, our main regulator of oil and gas in the state, California Department of Geological Energy Management, their immediate response was nothing could be done, kind of similar to Marrow’s experience.
(00:36:08):
This is because these wells were considered to be heavy oil wells. They produce heavy crude. Heavy crude has an API gravity of less than 20 degrees, very tar-like. It’s best suited to make diesel, kerosene and asphalt, not what goes into your unleaded tank. So heavy crew typically has lower pressures of associated gas. It’s tar-like, has less gas associated with it, and therefore these wells are less … They’re cost ineffective to require companies to conduct leak detection and repair on them. So that includes, as you can see in the graph here, about a third of all of the oil and gas infrastructure in the state.
(00:36:54):
Yeah. So of note, when CalGEM finally came to terms with the fact that something had to be done about those wells, many of those wells were fixed. And similarly to what we actually saw, can we go back one slide? You see this? The well on the right here has a bunch of new bolts on it. All the things in blue are all spray painted. They went through and did this to all the wells in the area. A lot of work was done by contractors to fix those leaks. So these leaks can be addressed. And I was in the field a lot in this period. I haven’t been in the field in a few years, but found tens of thousands of wells that I looked at that had a lot of work done following this. So CalGEM can do something when they are motivated. So keep moving.
(00:37:37):
Thank you, Woody.
(00:37:40):
Right. So we learned from the Morningstar leaks and other groupings of wells leaking in and near Bakersfield. So while all the operators have leaking wells, we can look for operators similar to Morningstar’s energy and Griffin. And by that I mean pretty much every well that you go to, you’re going to find some leaks on the well site. If you look hard enough, you’ll find the leaks. So what we’re doing right now is we’re using multiple regulatory data sets, including the orphan well list, idle well management plans. And here we have idle versus active well ratios to show the operators that have higher counts of idle wells. Therefore, they’re likely not taking care of those idle wells. They don’t have the capital to do it. So we typically find leaks at those wells that are ignored. So the data set here shows that there’s about 1,200 operators with a positive ratio of idle to active wells in the state that accounts for about 4,400 wells.
(00:37:40):
Kyle Ferrar, FracTracker Alliance (00:39:09):
Arvin, California is just south of Bakersfield, and hopefully we can see the video, but oil wells in Arvin are particularly gassy. As a result, several have actually been forced to shut down following major pipeline leaks, forcing the evacuation of part of the entire city. This well, as you can’t … We’ll see. It continues to operate even after multiple violations. The video here shows collection tanks that are emitting a hydrocarbon plume that rises into the air, goes across the street, and into the school yard of the Grove Academy that is having recess at the time. There have been violations issued for what’s happening here, but they fixed the issue. This is an issue of an emergency relief hatch that they have on the top of a tank. And as long as it’s functioning properly, meaning that it opens and then recloses when the pressure is relieved, that’s a functioning device.
(00:39:09):
Kyle Ferrar, FracTracker Alliance (00:40:34):
This is something that I just want to make sure we cover real quick. This is the third case study. This is an exemption. This is about exemptions for surface casing vents. So surface casing vents as shown in the figure on the left is a vent that goes into what we call the surface casing and operators or wells are allowed to emit methane out of that vent uncontrolled, as long as that flow is measured twice a year. So I want to talk a bit about them though. These casing vents are necessary due to a failure in the cement or casing of the well. That means that methane from deep underground begins to migrate up the annular space outside of the production casing, which is the straw. This path takes it directly through the groundwater aquifer where it could dissolve into water as what’s happened in Kettlemen City.
(00:41:28):
This vent provides a path of least resistance. Instead of allowing the gas to build up pressure, which could cause it to force out into the aquifer even more or find another uncontrolled path to the surface, the surface casing vent provides a dedicated low resistance route for the gas to escape. This is engineered. The fact that the gas is flowing out of these vents is a measurable, undeniable sign that the well’s primary barriers have failed. The most recent data from 2022 shows that over 1500 active wells report these flow rates. They’re not required to collect that gas, just report the flow rates, and the reported volumes from these wells total about 2.7 million cubic feet. It’s 2,700 MCF. And given that only the oil majors are reporting this data, it’s likely vastly underreported. And in the map on the right, we have some of the wells that have those casing vents, the ones with the stars.
(00:42:21):
The bottom three, bottom four have been plugged. The top three are still active. This is right in the medical area of downtown Bakersfield. All the buildings below that are all pretty much medical buildings.
(00:42:38):
Okay. And last little case study is downhole work. Let’s see if this video will show. So it’s hard to see, but this is the cool optical gas imaging camera that I got to use for a while. And it shows methane as a plume or a cloud. And so this is an example of an operational exemption. So workers are conducting downhole work on the well site. Anytime that the borehole of the wells open, downhole pressure will push the hydrocarbons to the surface and out. So anytime any work is being done, it is releasing big plumes. And what you see here are a bunch of lines holding the workover rig upright in place on top of the well. And then the cloud on the left is a plume of hydrocarbons, VOCs, methane in addition to benzene, BTX chemicals and things like that. And in the video, you see this, you see the plume going, and then I go to a DSLR mode where you can’t see any of it.
(00:43:42):
So we’ll see if we can get some videos here at the end. We’ll play around with it. But anyway, that’s all I got. Thank you so much for having me.
Liza Tucker, Consumer Watchdog (00:43:54):
Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Kyle. Okay. So I’m going to just introduce Jason and ask a framing question or two. So Jason is the California Climate Organizing Director at the Center for Biological Diversity. He works with the organization’s Climate Law Institute to combat pollution from oil and gas extraction and to advance climate policy solutions. I have to say Jason is amazing. He really knows his policy stuff and he consistently works to shepherd through sensible legislation to rain in oil and gas well pollution and also to shepherd through legislation that will make the oil industry put up enough bonding to cover the eventual plugging and cleanup of all of its wells. And we’re short by $21 billion if we had to shut all those wells that we have in the state. We have 90 or 100,000 of them tomorrow. So that’s very important.
(00:44:46):
So I wanted to just kind of frame this and ask Jason, he’s going to give us the topography of all these idle wells and all the wells in the state. But my understanding is that there’s really no mandate here to shut down wells that have been idle after a year or two. A few other states do have that requirement. And the problem with the idle wells is they, two thirds of them are leaking methane. And in addition, even plugged wells, I think a third of them are leaking. So we’ve got a serious problem without a mandate. And I wanted to ask why California’s behind the eight ball in his opinion. Where has idle well legislation and bonding legislation fallen short? What have we been able to accomplish? What still needs doing and what would the best legislative fixes be in Jason’s mind?
Jason Pfeifle, Center for Biological Diversity (00:45:42):
All right. Thank you so much, Lisa. Thank you to the Climate Center for having us. Thank you everyone for attending this panel. Yes, I will be covering most of that. So can you go to the next slide please? Yep. So talk a little bit about oil and gas wells just from zooming out from a statewide perspective, going over some of the numbers, what things currently look like, talk a little bit about methane leaks at the wellhead, and then dive into kind of what the current laws look like and where there are gaps and what the needs are to really get a handle on this problem. Next slide. All right. So there are 87,000 unplugged oil and gas wells in California.
(00:46:31):
More than 2.7 million Californians live within 3,200 feet of an active oil and gas well. Of the 87,000 unplugged oil and gas wells, 30,000 of those are idle wells. That means they have not produced oil for two years. And 4,500 of those idle wells are near schools, hospitals, playgrounds, and other sensitive receptors, which is incredibly concerning given the rate at which these wells are leaking methane and other really, really harmful toxic chemicals, the co-pollutants to methane, stuff like benzene, which are known cancer causing chemicals. A lot of these idle wells are long-term idle wells, which means that they’ve been idle for a long time. When wells are idle for long periods of time, they’re more likely to leak toxic chemicals, which is incredibly concerning. Just to provide a few examples, just from an analysis that our organization did about the proximity of idle wells to sensitive areas.
(00:47:46):
A preschool in LA, for example, is surrounded by 328 idle wells. There are 88 idle wells near a Kern County Elementary School and 88 idle wells in and around a park in Santa Maria. So this is a problem that cuts across geographies in California. There are also the rest of the 87,000 unplugged wells are active wells. Active wells are also rapidly declining in oil production. So at this point, only 8% of active oil wells are producing more than 15 barrels of oil per day. And then as Lisa mentioned, two thirds of idle wells that have been sampled are leaking some amount of methane.
(00:48:33):
Next slide. So we’ve heard from Kyle about some really, really horrible case studies of methane leaks. I think one, to just draw attention to. Well, one, satellite data shows that San Joaquin fields are some of the worst areas in the entire country for methane leaks. The biggest leaks are considered super emitters, which are catastrophic for a climate and major safety and health threats. At least one super emitter was detected by NASA aircraft in Kern County back in September of last year. It was 50 feet away from a residential community, and the well is not near any oil fields or other wells suggesting that this is an idle or orphan well that’s leaking. We heard about a number of other additional examples, and we also heard about all the dangerous co-pollutants that come with these methane leaks. Next slide, Lisa. So zooming out to what are the costs California’s facing for dealing with this problem?
(00:49:52):
The total cost of well cleanup in California is $21.5 billion, and currently oil companies have set aside less than 1% of that cost in bonds, in solid financial assurance, which is hugely, hugely concerning. CalGEM is not using its authority to require higher amounts of bonding. AB 1167, which was passed several years ago, is also known as the Orphan Well Prevention Act, has not been enforced according to its statutory language and author intent. So in some of the biggest recent oil company mergers like CRC and ERA, those bonding requirements were not enforced. And so oil companies were able to merge through stock swaps and then didn’t have to put up full bonding to cover the cost of cleanup for new wells that they recently acquired.
(00:50:54):
Let’s see. Other key things to note here, I’d say in recent years, we’ve seen public money used for oil well cleanups, specifically to clean up orphan wells. In the last five years, $100 million in public money has been spent. 50 million of that came from the general fund, so that’s money that can and should be used for urgent needs in education and healthcare and housing. And if California doesn’t get a handle on this problem, taxpayers are at risk of having to cover those costs, and there’s a very serious risk that more money could be used that should be going to pay for essential public services. Next slide. So California, in terms of legal requirements for oil well cleanup, is lagging behind other states. So California does not have a hard deadline by which oil companies need to plug and remediate their idle wells. So the current law that’s in place is AB 1866, which required that oil companies either pay fees or plug a certain percentage of their wells.
(00:52:19):
When AB 1866 was passed, it was definitely a step forward because it required oil companies to plug a higher percentage of their wells, and it also increased the fees that oil companies would have to pay, but it still did not set that hard deadline. So you see just in this snapshot, other states do have stronger laws on the books. In West Virginia, for example, any well not in use for a period of 12 months shall be promptly plugged. So if an oil well doesn’t produce oil in a year, it’s got to be plugged and cleaned up according to West Virginia law. And then in Colorado, within six months of a well becoming inactive, the operator must plug and abandon that well. So this is one area where California is lagging behind other states. And then as Kyle already pointed out, methane inspections are weak and they’re full of exemptions.
(00:53:18):
There are lots of loopholes and more needs to be done to fix those. Next slide. Okay, great. And so recent legislation related to methane and idle well plugging. So SB 1137, California’s historic health buffer law that was passed does require leak detection within the buffer, but those requirements aren’t going to come online until 2030. CARB is the agency responsible for implementation of those. And then I already mentioned both AB 1167 and AB 1866, both steps forward, but still much work that needs to be done for California to really get a handle on this problem. Next slide.
(00:54:09):
All right. So going further, in order for California to reduce methane leaks at the wellhead, it’s going to require the industry to plug more wells than is currently being done to improve methane leak detection and to submit full bonding for the cost of cleanup. So AB42461 is a build that’s been introduced by Assembly Member Heart in this legislative session, which would strengthen California’s bonding requirements. Specifically, it clarifies AB 1167 to ensure those requirements for full bonding upon transfer of wells from one company to another, that those also need to apply through stock swaps. So for any oil company mergers, those bonding requirements would have to be enforced by the agencies. So that bill, another step forward and is moving through committee this session, but there’s a lot more that needs to be done. So in addition to that, strengthening methane inspection and leak repair, so that’s making those inspections more frequent, ensuring that operators are required to do them on a more frequent basis.
(00:55:35):
Also designating in wells as idle right away. So as soon as they’re not producing, have them designated is idle. Current law has them designated as idle within two years. But one of the problems is an oil company, they’re not producing oil, but maybe they turn it on for a couple weeks within a two-year period to keep that well in an active designation and then it doesn’t get cleaned up. And then also require prompt plugging when wells do go idle, and then finally strengthen the standards for cleanup. So when oil wells are plugged by operators or by Calgem, if it’s orphan wells, that that is done correctly and it’s done in a way that’s going to ensure that any nearby communities are protected. Thank you.
Liza Tucker, Consumer Watchdog (00:56:31):
Okay. I guess we have what? About 10 minutes for Q&A. I think we have somebody helping with the mic. Does anybody have any questions, any follow-up questions?
Speaker 7 (00:56:50):
This may show my lack of knowledge, but why don’t, like Miguel, why don’t they get incorporated, their areas?
Miguel Alatorre Jr., UNIDOS Network Inc. (00:57:02):
That’s a really good question. So in Kettleman City, we have 999 people in our population. You want to guess how many registered voters we have?
Speaker 7 (00:57:11):
It has to be by vote.
Miguel Alatorre Jr., UNIDOS Network Inc. (00:57:13):
Yeah. So you need for the incorporation process anywhere in California, you need at least 500 registered voters to sign a petition that says that they want their community to become incorporated, and that’s when they would go to the county. And the county, based upon the lines drawn around their city, would take account of the economics behind their infrastructure and see if there’s a reliable tax base to use for the procurement of governmental services, such as police, fire, city offices, things of that nature. But in Kettleman, fun fact, we only have 50 registered voters. Wow.
(00:57:55):
In Button Willow, we have 600 and something. In Lost Hills, they have a thousand. In Wilmington, they have a population of 60,000 people. So I’m sure there’s a lot of registered voters, but the other part of the process is going to LAFCO, which is a board that gets to choose what communities are okay for incorporation. And most of LAFCOs that I know are usually industry adjacent, or they have a lot of people that work within the waste management facilities that we have in the valley, or the oil and gas, or the agricultural operations. And it’s within their best interest to keep these communities designated unincorporated for the fact that it’s an easy dumping ground. It’s an easy way to extract money and put all of the worst projects and all the pollution projects in an area that’s not in my backyard and really far away from the local county seats.
(00:58:59):
And that’s usually the reason why these areas are left unincorporated, which is why Unidos was founded to address that lack in civic engagement and get as many people as we can register to vote so that we can begin these incorporation campaigns. And my family’s already been doing this work for three generations, so what’s another three generations?
Liza Tucker, Consumer Watchdog (00:59:22):
What does LAFCO stand for?
Miguel Alatorre Jr., UNIDOS Network Inc. (00:59:25):
Local Assessment Formation- Local Area
Woody Hastings, The Climate Center (00:59:28):
Formation Commission.
Miguel Alatorre Jr., UNIDOS Network Inc. (00:59:29):
Yeah.
Liza Tucker, Consumer Watchdog (00:59:29):
Local Area Formation Commission.
Miguel Alatorre Jr., UNIDOS Network Inc. (00:59:31):
Beat me to it.
Liza Tucker, Consumer Watchdog (00:59:32):
Thank you. Next.
Speaker 8 (00:59:56):
I work for a community-based organization called Sustainable Salon Solano County and there’s a lot of idle wells in Rio Vista or around Rio Vista specifically. I’m curious just whether there are … You have recommendations for data resources. I wrote down two thirds of idle wells sampled or leaking, one third of plugged idle wells are leaking. I’ve just had a hard time finding information and data about these things. So yeah, just curious where that came from and where I can find more. Thanks.
Kyle Ferrar, FracTracker Alliance (01:00:32):
Cool. I’ll start. Cool. Yeah, that figure’s kind of an interesting-
Kyle Ferrar, FracTracker Alliance (01:00:41):
That’s an interesting figure. It comes from a report to the state legislature, Jackson et al. And they sampled a bunch of … They sampled a wide variety of oil and gas wells, including properly abandoned wells, improperly abandoned wells. Level L-E-B-E-L and Jackson are the two authors that are consistently on those papers. They publish about a half dozen papers on those figures. It’s a very small sample size. We really don’t know what the extent is. I keep hearing
Speaker 8 (01:01:19):
You don’t know. We don’t have information about these things. I was just surprised to see that.
Kyle Ferrar, FracTracker Alliance (01:01:25):
Yeah. So that’s a good paper, but anything else?
Jason Pfeifle, Center for Biological Diversity (01:01:29):
I would just also add that we released an analysis of the proximity of idle wells to sensitive receptors. So schools, hospitals, playgrounds. We put out that analysis earlier this year. So I could follow up with that information. It’s titled Ida Wells Active Threat. But on the website that we have for that analysis, there is a map. And so you can zoom into particular geographical areas and see where specific idle wells are located to kind of assess what potential threats could be. Yeah. Okay.
Woody Hastings, The Climate Center (01:02:07):
I’d like to interrupt the Q&A. Thanks, Barbara. Hold on just a minute because I think we might …
Liza Tucker, Consumer Watchdog (01:02:12):
Might have the video?
Woody Hastings, The Climate Center (01:02:13):
Well, I think we might have gotten a video up, so if we could pause the Q&A and see if you can speak to whichever one she pulls up first.
Kyle Ferrar, FracTracker Alliance (01:02:14):
Woody Hastings, The Climate Center (01:02:14):
Kyle Ferrar, FracTracker Alliance (01:02:24):
Yeah. This is the down hole operation that’s happening. And there’s an active crew on the site doing work and you can see
Woody Hastings, The Climate Center (01:02:33):
That’s the plume you see. That’s what the FLIR camera sees. And then in a second, that’s what you see if you’re just looking at it, right?
Liza Tucker, Consumer Watchdog (01:02:42):
You don’t see anything, but- You don’t see anything. But with the infrared camera, which is heat seeking, I think, right, Kyle?
Kyle Ferrar, FracTracker Alliance (01:02:49):
Yeah. Thermal, it’s called optical gas imaging is the technical term. But this is also an issue when you are plugging and abandoning wells, right? We want to plug the wells, but you have to open them up to plug them. There are EPA news source production standards that require green completions for fracking operations means that they don’t actually open the wellbore when they frack a well. In Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Colorado, Texas. Why these NSPS requirements aren’t applied to conventional wells, they were left out of it.
Woody Hastings, The Climate Center (01:03:23):
I think we’ve got the other ones too.
Kyle Ferrar, FracTracker Alliance (01:03:25):
Oh, wonderful. And this is in Arvin. This is always a little rough to watch. And you can see the plume. There’s two-
Liza Tucker, Consumer Watchdog (01:03:41):
Oh, look at that. Unbelievable.
Kyle Ferrar, FracTracker Alliance (01:03:43):
Two different settings with the camera.
Miguel Alatorre Jr., UNIDOS Network Inc. (01:03:52):
Yeah.
Kyle Ferrar, FracTracker Alliance (01:03:56):
So, and in this case, the receptors here are elementary school children. Isn’t that
Liza Tucker, Consumer Watchdog (01:04:05):
Fire risk too? Yes. It’s explosive, right, Kyle?
Kyle Ferrar, FracTracker Alliance (01:04:10):
Yeah. At a certain concentration. About 30,000 parts per million. It is explosive hazard below that. It’s more the risk is exposures.
Speaker 9 (01:04:25):
Are these available on your website?
Kyle Ferrar, FracTracker Alliance (01:04:28):
Yeah. These are all on YouTube. I can share them with you.
Woody Hastings, The Climate Center (01:04:28):
Speaker 10 (01:04:28):
Liza Tucker, Consumer Watchdog (01:04:28):
Speaker 10 (01:04:42):
So especially having seen this, and also just MiDistrict Tguel, your image of tiny coffins. I’m with California nurses for environmental health injustice. And so several years ago, not that long ago, an individual who got cancer finally sued Monsanto for glyphosate exposures, got $80 million. And that was a jury decision, because a jury understood the connection at a level, Michelle, that you could help them understand. And so using epidemiological information, which is not about causation, it’s about association. So I’m wondering, and this is sort of to Jason Law, I think is the only lawyer in the crowd there, whether folks have considered taking a case that is close enough that you’d have visuals like this, that with one of the cancers that we know through epidemiological studies is an increased risk, whether we’ve ever considered asking an individual to take this on, because I think something a big case like that would get a little bit more attention than the slaps on the hands or not even slaps on hands.
(01:06:11):
So it’s just a question.
Miguel Alatorre Jr., UNIDOS Network Inc. (01:06:15):
Half of it, then you can take the technical half. I can speak to that and say that with regards to us asking, we have asked the industry, and this is not the oil and gas industry, but this is the waste industry. In Kettleman City, we’re home to the largest hazardous waste landfill in the West Coast waste management, the Kettleman Hills facility. And we’ve asked them that very question where we had a birth defect cluster. We had 12 infants that were born with really, really specific birth defects, including cleft palate, missing organs, really bad stuff. And the company has always said, “Well, you can’t just blame us.” They’re like, “What about the shipping facilities? What about the ag? What about the oil and gas infrastructure? How would we take the blame for something that comes in a form of cumulative burdens and how would we pinpoint the exact chemical that caused the exact cancer that a person is suffering?” So we have asked that very question.
(01:07:19):
And when we ask for biological sampling, which is something that the community really, really looks forward to, they say we would never ever do that because the results would be biased to you guys looking for us to blame us. But one thing I can say is it all happens before those infants were born. Our hazardous waste facility had an increase of 400% for PCB dumping right before these infants were conceived. So even with causation, as you mentioned, there is still those industry lawyers that will do everything they can to absolve that company from blame. And it’s usually by delegating the blame to all of the pollutants in the area versus just one singular one, which in a sense protects them because it’d be very difficult to pinpoint the exact causation from the exact chemical that could cause a cancer. But that’s just our experience. I don’t know, Jason, if you have a different …
Kyle Ferrar, FracTracker Alliance (01:08:21):
Yeah, there is a class action suit in Colorado that is recruiting specifically children that have had health impacts related to it. It’s interesting because it’s not a nonprofit. It is a for- profit legal firm that is looking exactly what you’re saying, looking for a trial case, jury case. And with that comes a lot of money, if they were to win, I don’t think that NGO space has the capacity to take on such cases, in my opinion. I think that’s why you haven’t seen it yet, although I’m sure we’ve all wanted to, and I’ll let Jason talk a bit about that, but there are cases specifically, they’re looking for children that have been impacted. They’re specifically focused on Colorado right now, but they have interest in expanding to other states as it becomes more public.
Jason Pfeifle, Center for Biological Diversity (01:09:22):
Yeah. I don’t have too much else to add. I mean, it’s not the type of case that our organization has worked on. So yeah, I don’t know. Maybe we’ll go to the next question, but appreciate those answers. Yeah, Mikel.
Liza Tucker, Consumer Watchdog (01:09:35):
I think maybe just one more and we’re going to have to wrap up. Okay. Last one.
Speaker 9 (01:09:42):
Thank you. I wonder if, can you talk a little bit about the role of the counties? I mean, these are unincorporated places, but they have boards of supervisors. Maybe you can tell us a little bit about Kings and Kern Counties and Kern. And what we need to do down there.
Miguel Alatorre Jr., UNIDOS Network Inc. (01:09:58):
I am very embarrassed to say that I’m actually the planning commissioner for District 2 of Kings County. So I am part of the leadership and I don’t expect to make the same decisions as the past planning commissioners have made because they usually just sign off on everything without checking CEQA documents or without checking environmental reviews. And so I guess that’s one of the first changes is that Unidos, we don’t just exist to tackle the issue head on, but we get that we’re climbing up a really steep mountain. And one of the things that we’ve decided as a community is to educate some of our young folks and get them into positions of power where they can potentially become the next board of supervisor, the next member of the LAFCO, the next business that has influence over … Thank you. These decisions, because man, we definitely needed a change.
(01:10:52):
And so I’ll give you an example in Kings County. So in Kings County, our district two supervisor, his name is Richard Valle. But when he polls, his name is Richard Valley, very, very different, right? And he is the only Latino in the entire history of the Kings County Board of Supervisors that has ever served, but he is a huge Republican ex- Marine Corps veteran. So he has a certain flavor to him. But what I can say is that he actually does attempt to care about the unincorporated area of Kettleman City and has hosted multiple community forums. But again, the decisions remain the same because he’s only one man on a board of supervisors and they usually don’t vote for positive things for Kettleman City. It’s usually a vote to put the next pollution burden. So we’re actually facing right now the largest cattle facility in the state of California being installed five miles from kettleman.
(01:11:55):
And Kings County Board of Supervisors approved that one, even though the state legislature told them that this is not a project that they want to see completed within Kings County. So that’s the kind of county that we’re dealing with is one that is very, very business focused and most likely intends to keep a lot of these communities unincorporated through design, but hopefully we can do something about that together.
Liza Tucker, Consumer Watchdog (01:12:19):
Thank you very much. This is going to have to wrap it up because we have some other things to do at five, but thank you so, so much for coming.
Woody Hastings, The Climate Center (01:12:32):
Yes, please join us outside at five o’clock in the mezzanine for the legislative reception. Five o’clock. Thank you all for coming. Thank you again to Liza, our moderator and to our panelists. Really appreciate you. Have a great evening.