July 16, 2014
Earlier this year, I read Elizabeth Kolbert’s “The Sixth Extinction.” Highly recommend it. It’s not as depressing as the title suggests. But it has prompted me to think about dinosaurs more than I might usually.
For instance, I was wondering recently what it would be like to live in a world in which dinosaurs still roam. Then it struck me: I do.
It’s just that today’s dinosaurs aren’t animals wearing scales. They’re companies and technologies struggling to stay relevant beyond their time.
The most obvious of these modern-day dinosaurs is the oil industry. The American oil industry got its big start in the 19th Century, and became a dominant power in the 20th Century, especially as combustion engines became the key to transportation.
Now in the 21st Century, oil is facing some fierce scrutiny and—perhaps most fearful to the products’ marketers—growing competition. Californians, especially, recognize oil’s horrible environmental impacts. These range from simple ground-level air pollution, water pollution, and land degradation, to driving the planet’s climate disruption. As one former CalEPA head was fond of saying, oil is like cigarettes: It’s a product that, if used as instructed, will kill you.
Californians, being people who are not satisfied with a rotten status quo, have been taking action over the last few decades to cut our oil dependence. We have demanded and bought more fuel efficient cars. Hybrid electric vehicles can thank California’s air pollution control regulations for their successful entry into the auto market.
We’ve opened the way for a real market for cars that don’t use oil products as their primary fuel. Electric and plug-in hybrid-electric cars are not just dreams in this state; they are visible and numerous.
Most recently, we’ve put into place incentives and regulations to encourage oil companies to produce cleaner fuels and alternative fuels. One of the newest of these is to go into effect in January.
That regulation would include production of transportation fuels under the cap of the California Air Resources Board’s cap-and-trade program, which would help cut climate disrupting pollution from fuels. Like a mosquito gnawing on a tyrannosaurus rex’s rump, this latest regulation seems to have elicited some new squawks from the oil industry. With its long neck and padded billfold, the oil industry has been reaching out to legislators to help it hang onto its polluting power and market dominance.
This year alone, the industry has helped kill a fracking moratorium bill and slapped down an oil severance tax again. In recent weeks it has turned its attention to killing CARB’s cap-and-trade regulation. The industry’s chief cheerleader in the Capitol on this is Assemblymember Henry Perea (Fresno), who represents one of the most air-polluted districts in the state.
Perea organized a sign-on letter by some state legislators that urged CARB to back off. Then he introduced a bill, AB 69, that would exempt the oil industry’s fuel production from the cap-and-trade program.
Perea has told the press that the bill is an instrument to start the conversation about how CARB’s regulation will affect gas prices.
Conversation is a good thing. So here’s my contribution to that conversation:
Dear Asm. Perea:
The oil industry says that new regulations will raise the price of gas. Hmm. When I consider the profits the industry makes, it’s clear to me that a regulation that simply requires them to cut—not stop, just cut—their pollution won’t be the cause of gas price increases. No, if prices go up, it will be because the oil industry’s core value—making money—has triumphed over any inkling of a desire to help solve one of the most pressing global crises: climate disruption.
And who can blame it? I mean, I look at my retirement savings and I think about how nice it would be to have a job at an oil company for, say, two years. My friends who work there are so handsomely compensated. But they also have to breathe the same air and live in the same world you and I do; in the same world your constituents do. And what we will all discover together—are already discovering together—is that asthma, heart disease, drought, unpredictable and extreme weather, are all very hard things to live with. Indeed, some people can’t live in these conditions and so will pay the ultimate price.
Higher gas prices will happen whether or not there is cap and trade. The oil industry will try to take advantage of its last moments in the epoch to get as much as it can. It is a dinosaur. By encouraging the oil industry to proceed with business as usual, as your bill does, you are encouraging it to continue walking a path that will lead to its demise even as it continues to contribute pollution.
A better conversation topic would be about how to help the oil industry transition to creating cleaner fuels. That’s something the state has been trying to do through other auto and fuel regulations. There, too, the industry has resisted.
Please help the oil industry and your air-breathing constituents, Asm. Perea. Start a conversation that will force the dinosaur to evolve.
Sincerely,
Kathryn Phillips
Director
Sierra Club California is the Sacramento-based legislative and regulatory advocacy arm of the 13 California chapters of the Sierra Club.
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