The Valero refinery in Benicia. (Craig Miller/KQED)
Valero says it’s facing $342,000 or more in fines from county and regional agencies after a major air pollution incident earlier this year at its Benicia refinery.
In a filing last week with the federal Securities and Exchange Commission, the company says it expects to face $242,840 in proposed penalties from the Solano County Department of Resource Management and at least another $100,000 in fines to settle a dozen notices of violation from the Bay Area Air Quality Management District.
The reported penalty amount is about 1/100th of 1% of the San Antonio, Texas-based company’s reported adjusted net profit for 2018 — $3.2 billion.
“While it is not possible to predict the outcome of the following environmental proceedings, if any one or more of them were decided against us, we believe that there would be no material effect on our financial position, results of operators, or liquidity,” the company said in its filing.
The SEC document also reported a much larger penalty, $1.3 million, that Valero believes it faces in connection with an incident in the Texas city of Corpus Christi, where contaminated backflow from a company asphalt plant contaminated the area’s water supply for several days.
A local environmentalist who has followed the Benicia refinery’s recent problems said the penalties barely amount to a drop in the bucket.
“These fines don’t mean much to a giant oil company worth tens of billions of dollars,” said Hollin Kretzmann, an Oakland-based lawyer for the Center for Biological Diversity.
“It’s likely only a matter of time before we see another incident, so the communities near these dangerous refineries deserve better protection from toxic air pollution,” Kretzmann said.
Lillian Riojas, a Valero spokeswoman, said the company would not comment beyond its public filing.
Ralph Borrmann, a spokesman for the BAAQMD, emphasized that the Valero fines were not settled yet.
The district tends to spend several years negotiating settlements with local refineries, bringing together a handful of violations into a package long after they are the subject of media coverage.
For instance, the district announced in March that Shell had agreed to pay $165,000 to settle violations at its Martinez refinery that took place in 2015 and 2016.
Solano County’s investigation into Valero’s most recent incident is ongoing, according to Terry Schmidtbauer, the county’s assistant director of resource management, who emphasized that the agency has yet to produce or negotiate any final violations in connection with Valero’s March releases.
But Schmidtbauer said it was typical for his department to discuss tentative findings and potential penalties with companies it’s investigating, talks he said would be preliminary.
Two refinery components — a processing unit called a fluid coker, which heats up and “cracks” the thickest and heaviest components of crude oil, and a flue gas scrubber, which is supposed to remove fine particles before they’re released from the facility’s smokestacks — are under scrutiny in Solano County’s probe.
They began malfunctioning on March 11, resulting in the release of sooty smoke from the refinery. The releases intensified two weeks later when the facility belched out a large amount of black soot, leading to elevated levels of particulate matter.
The smoke prompted county officials to issue a health advisory for those with respiratory problems. Refinery managers shut down the facility.
The resumption of operations at the facility coincided with a slow and very small drop in gas prices, after two months of increases. On March 24, the day Valero shutdown, the average cost of a gallon of unleaded gasoline in California was $3.49, according to AAA.
On May 7, as the Benicia refinery gradually got back on-line, the the average price was $4.10. On Tuesday, it had dipped slightly to $4.07
Energy experts have said Valero’s shutdown coupled with other refinery problems in California and the high cost of crude oil globally led to the state’s recent gas price hikes, which are currently the subject of a state Energy Commission investigation.
It’s a foregone conclusion that as long as the world keeps emitting carbon dioxide, we’ll keep setting records for how much ends up in the atmosphere. But that doesn’t make the recent high water mark of carbon dioxide any easier to swallow.
On Saturday, scientists recorded the first ever carbon dioxide reading above 415 parts per million (ppm) at the Mauna Loa Observatory. They’ve been measuring carbon dioxide levels continuously since 1958 at that location, but ice cores and other data show that it’s not just the highest carbon dioxide has been in 61 years of data. It’s the highest its ever been 800,000 years of data, and that should give us pause about the unsettling planetary experiment we’ve initiated.
Plot atmospheric carbon dioxide measurements and you’ll see they follows a sawtooth pattern over the course of a year. Carbon dioxide dips from summer into early fall as northern hemisphere plants suck it out of the atmosphere, and rises from late fall into spring as plants decompose and release carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere. This was all going on largely unchanged from year-to-year until humans started using the atmosphere as a dump for carbon dioxide.
Now, the sawtooth pattern has been set on edge, rising year over year and setting new records each spring. The resulting graph—one of the most iconic data visualizations in science—is known as the Keeling Curve. In February, the world passed the record set last year. And on May 11, carbon dioxide cracked 415 ppm for the first time in human history.
Natural fluctuations like El Niño—marked by a warming of the waters in the eastern tropical Pacific—can speed up the rise but human activities are what have driven carbon dioxide to its new milestone. Sure, it’s just a number. The climate is only slightly more screwed at 415 ppm than it was at 414 ppm. And next year, we’ll rocket past 415 ppm.
But it’s worth taking stock of what it took to get us here and the choices in front of us. The world has known for decades carbon emissions have put it on a path toward dangerous climate change. The greenhouse effect was established long before that. And yet rather than tap the brakes, carbon emissions have sped up. At the start of the Mauna Loa Observatory record, it took 16 years for atmospheric carbon dioxide to rise 15 ppm. It took 6 years to do the same from 2010-2016. It feels like only a few years ago we were worried about crossing the 400 ppm threshold, which wait. We were.
The great carbon acceleration has created an atmosphere unlike one any human has ever seen. And it means the climate is turning into one we’ve never known either, one with super charged heat waves, violent rising seas, and ecosystem failure. But that’s not even the scary part.
These are the changes we’re seeing now with about 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming. Because carbon dioxide sits in the atmosphere for centuries, the climate will warp even further. And with emissions hitting a new peak in 2018, the world isn’t backing away from the brink anytime soon. Instead, we’re racing toward it.
None of which is to say we need to keep running toward catastrophe. The world’s leading scientists have laid out a series of choices we can make to avert it. It’s up to the world and world leaders in particular to look at that map and chart which roads they want to travel.
By Robin Young, May 13, 2019 National Public Radio – Here & Now“The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming,” by David Wallace-Wells. (Robin Lubbock/WBUR)
“It is worse, much worse, than you think.”
That’s how David Wallace-Wells‘ new book “The Uninhabitable Earth” opens. It’s a painstakingly researched look at the catastrophic consequences global warming is already having on the planet — and the even worse ones that are coming unless drastic action is taken over the next three decades.
“Projections estimate that if we don’t change course on global warming, we could have a global GDP that’s 30 percent smaller than it would be without climate change,” Wallace-Wells tells Here & Now‘s Robin Young. “That’s an impact that’s twice as big as the Great Depression, and it would be permanent.”
What can humans do to mitigate that kind of damage? Wallace-Wells says the short answer is “political change producing policy change.”
“We need such dramatic interventions in every sector of our world, from our energy, to our transportation, to our infrastructure, our agriculture,” he says. “Absolutely every aspect of modern life has a carbon footprint, and we need to not just reduce those carbon footprints, we need to eliminate them entirely.”
Scroll down to read an excerpt from “The Uninhabitable Earth”
Interview Highlights
On how he became interested in exploring the impacts of climate change
“I’m a journalist who’s interested in the near future, and I’m also a lifelong New Yorker, which meant that I spent most of my life — I was concerned about climate change. I knew it was an important issue. But I was deluded in the sense that I felt I lived in an urban fortress outside of nature in the modern world, and that while there were people elsewhere on the planet who were going to be really in harm’s way from some of these impacts, that I wasn’t going to be one of them and probably most of the people I loved weren’t going to be among them. And as a result, I thought, ‘This is an important issue, but it’s not an all-encompassing, all-governing issue.’ The deeper I got into the research just as a journalist, the more I realized, it’s everywhere. And every aspect of life — even those that we take so eternally for granted as permanent features of the world — are subject to the forces of nature. So when I walk down the street, on a concrete street, look up at steel buildings, I’m still living in nature. Especially if you’re on the coast, you’re vulnerable from sea level. But really that’s just the start.
“Absolutely everything needs to be transformed and will be transformed either by the force of climate change, or by the force that we put into avoiding climate change.”
David Wallace-Wells
“Projections estimate that if we don’t change course on global warming, we could have a global GDP that’s 30 percent smaller than it would be without climate change. That’s an impact that’s twice as big as the Great Depression, and it would be permanent. We could have twice as much war as we have today because there’s a relationship between temperature and conflict. Our agricultural yields could be only half as bountiful, and we’d be using that half as much food to feed 50 percent more people. There are public health issues, there’s a relationship between temperature and mental illness. There’s an effect on cognitive performance. Really everywhere you look — wildfires, extreme weather, hurricanes, droughts, heatwaves — every aspect of life as we know it on this planet is changing already. The planet is already hotter than it’s ever been in all of human history, and it will surely change more, which means that everything we know about human life and human civilization grew up under conditions that no longer preside, and we’re living in a different enough environment — it may even be better to think already that we’re living on a different planet — and given where we’re headed, things are going to change even faster, even more dramatically in the decades ahead.”
On how rapidly climate change impacts have intensified just in the last 30 years, despite climate change awareness also intensifying
“It’s really amazing to think, I’m 36 years old, which means my life contains this whole story. I have memories that are more than 30 years old. I remember driving and flying more than 30 years ago, and since I formed those memories, we’ve done more damage to the climate than in all of the centuries, all of the millennia before in human history. That’s a really dispiriting fact to know in terms of how powerful knowledge is, because this is the same period of time since the U.N. established its [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] body, and really advertised to all of the leaders of the world that this was a pressing, dramatic problem. But those 30 years have brought us from a stable climate to the brink of catastrophe, which is where we are now. We have about that much time again to avert some of these worst scenarios — 30 years ahead of us — and that means really, again, it’s not just the story of the first half of that story that’s going to take place in my lifetime. It’s the second half, too.
“This is a drama of a scale that really we only used to understand or recognize in mythology or theology. The main driver of the future climate of the planet is what we do, and all of us are protagonists in that story and we’ll determine what kind of future not just our children live in, but our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren. That is how consequential the decades ahead of us will be.”
On what needs to happen in order to avert a worst-case scenario
“Most scientists would say we need to zero out on carbon globally by about 2050 in order to have a chance of stabilizing the planet below this threshold of a catastrophe. I think it’s unlikely that we’d do that. But that’s not a reason for slowing down now.
“I think it’s really important to understand that this is not a binary system, it’s not a matter of whether we pass that threshold or not. It’s not a matter of whether we reach a hellish climate scenario or not. Every tick upward of temperature produces more suffering, more pain, and every tick that we can avoid will make the world a better place in the future. So while I think it’s unrealistic that we entirely zero out on carbon by 2050, I think we should marshal as many resources as we possibly can to achieve that goal. … The story of climate change is so big that we can’t solve it through small actions. We need a big policy response.”
On humanity having to adjust to the new living conditions climate change could create, regardless of what kind of action is taken
“I think that we will be on a different planet no matter what path we choose. Which is to say, even if we take quite dramatic action and really transform our trajectory on climate change — which is possible, everything is within our control, everything is up to us. It’s not outside of our power. But even if we do that, we will be left with a world that is dramatically shaped by climate change, because it will mean huge new plantations of solar panel plants. It will mean plantations of carbon-capture technology which suck carbon out of the atmosphere. It will mean an entirely new infrastructure. It will mean new kinds of airplanes, new kinds of public transportation. It will mean a new approach to diet and agriculture.
“Absolutely everything needs to be transformed and will be transformed either by the force of climate change, or by the force that we put into avoiding climate change. Now thankfully, there’s still time to imagine a world that is made prosperous and fulfilling and just through climate action.”
Book Excerpt: ‘The Uninhabitable Earth’
by David Wallace-Wells
It is worse, much worse, than you think. The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn’t happening at all, and comes to us bundled with several others in an anthology of comforting delusions: that global warming is an Arctic saga, unfolding remotely; that it is strictly a matter of sea level and coastlines, not an enveloping crisis sparing no place and leaving no life un-deformed; that it is a crisis of the “natural” world, not the human one; that those two are distinct, and that we live today somehow outside or beyond or at the very least defended against nature, not circumscribed and literally overwhelmed by it; that wealth can be a shield against the ravages of warming; that the burning of fossil fuels is the price of continued economic growth; that growth, and the technology it produces, will allow us to engineer our way out of environmental disaster; that there is any analogue to the scale or scope of this threat, in the long span of human history, that might give us confidence in staring it down.
None of this is true. But let’s begin with the speed of change. The earth has experienced five mass extinctions before the one we are living through now, each so complete a wiping of the fossil record that it functioned as an evolutionary reset, the planet’s phylogenetic tree first expanding, then collapsing, at intervals, like a lung: 86 percent of all species dead, 450 million years ago; 70 million years later, another 75 percent; 100 million years later, 96 percent; 50 million years later, 80 percent; 150 million years after that, 75 percent again. Unless you are a teenager, you probably read in your high school textbooks that these extinctions were the result of asteroids. In fact, all but the one that killed the dinosaurs involved climate change produced by greenhouse gas. The most notorious was 252 million years ago; it began when carbon warmed the planet by five degrees Celsius, accelerated when that warming triggered the release of methane, another greenhouse gas, and ended with all but a sliver of life on Earth dead. We are currently adding carbon to the atmosphere at a considerably faster rate; by most estimates, at least ten times faster. The rate is one hundred times faster than at any point in human history before the beginning of industrialization. And there is already, right now, fully a third more carbon in the atmosphere than at any point in the last 800,000 years—perhaps in as long as 15 million years. There were no humans then. The oceans were more than a hundred feet higher.
Many perceive global warming as a sort of moral and economic debt, accumulated since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and now come due after several centuries. In fact, more than half of the carbon exhaled into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels has been emitted in just the past three decades. Which means we have done as much damage to the fate of the planet and its ability to sustain human life and civilization since Al Gore published his first book on climate than in all the centuries—all the millennia—that came before. The United Nations established its climate change framework in 1992, building a political consensus out of a scientific consensus and advertising it unmistakably to the world; which means we have now done as much damage to the environment knowingly than we ever managed in ignorance. Global warming may seem like a distended morality tale playing out over several centuries and inflicting a kind of Old Testament retribution on the great-great-grandchildren of those responsible, since it was carbon burning in eighteenth-century England that lit the fuse of everything that has followed. But that is a fable about historical villainy that acquits those of us alive today—and unfairly. The majority of the burning has come since the premiere of Seinfeld. Since the end of World War II, the figure is about 85 percent. The story of the industrial world’s kamikaze mission is the story of a single lifetime—the planet brought from apparent stability to the brink of catastrophe in the years between a baptism or bar mitzvah and a funeral.
We all know those lifetimes. When my father was born in 1938—among his first memories the news of Pearl Harbor and the mythic air force of the industrial propaganda films that followed— the climate system appeared, to most human observers, steady. Scientists had understood the greenhouse effect, had understood the way carbon produced by burned wood and coal and oil could hothouse the planet and disequilibrize everything on it, for three-quarters of a century. But they had not yet seen the effect, not really, not yet, which made it seem less like an observed fact than a dark prophecy, to be fulfilled only in a very distant future—perhaps never. By the time my father died, in 2016, weeks after the desperate signing of the Paris Agreement, the climate system was tipping toward devastation, passing the threshold of carbon concentration—400 parts per million in the earth’s atmosphere, in the eerily banal language of climatology—that had been, for years, the bright red line environmental scientists had drawn in the rampaging face of modern industry, saying, Do not cross. Of course, we kept going: just two years later, we hit a monthly average of 411, and guilt saturates the planet’s air as much as carbon, though we choose to believe we do not breathe it.
The single lifetime is also the lifetime of my mother: born in 1945, to German Jews fleeing the smokestacks through which their relatives were incinerated, and now enjoying her seventy-third year in an American commodity paradise, a paradise supported by the factories of a developing world that has, in the space of a single lifetime, too, manufactured its way into the global middle class, with all the consumer enticements and fossil fuel privileges that come with that ascent: electricity, private cars, air travel, red meat. She has been smoking for fifty-eight of those years, always unfiltered, ordering the cigarettes now by the carton from China.
It is also the lifetime of many of the scientists who first raised public alarm about climate change, some of whom, incredibly, remain working today—that is how rapidly we have arrived at this promontory. Roger Revelle, who first heralded the heating of the planet, died in 1991, but Wallace Smith Broecker, who helped popularize the term “global warming,” still drives to work at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory across the Hudson every day from the Upper West Side, sometimes picking up lunch at an old Jersey filling station recently outfitted as a hipster eatery; in the 1970s, he did his research with funding from Exxon, a company now the target of a raft of lawsuits that aim to adjudicate responsibility for the rolling emissions regime that today, barring a change of course on fossil fuels, threatens to make parts of the planet more or less unlivable for humans by the end of this century. That is the course we are speeding so blithely along—to more than four degrees Celsius of warming by the year 2100. According to some estimates, that would mean that whole regions of Africa and Australia and the United States, parts of South America north of Patagonia, and Asia south of Siberia would be rendered uninhabitable by direct heat, desertification, and flooding. Certainly it would make them inhospitable, and many more regions besides. This is our itinerary, our baseline. Which means that, if the planet was brought to the brink of climate catastrophe within the lifetime of a single generation, the responsibility to avoid it belongs with a single generation, too. We all also know that second lifetime. It is ours.
New oil drilling in the Bay Area? Trump admin opens possibility
By Kurtis Alexander May 9, 2019
The San Ardo, Ca. oil field in Central California which is located between King City and Paso Robles, as seen on Wed. May 6, 2015. Photo: Michael Macor / The Chronicle 2015
The Trump administration brought its pro-drilling agenda to Northern California on Thursday, disclosing a plan to make more land available for oil and gas development, including parts of the Santa Cruz Mountains and East Bay hills.
Documents released by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management show the agency is looking to nearly double the amount of federal property and mineral deposits in its Central Coast region that can be leased by fossil fuel companies compared to what was proposed by the previous administration.
Roughly 725,000 acres across 11 counties will be opened up for new leasing, according to the bureau’s preferred plan, including areas in or around Mount Diablo State Park near Walnut Creek and Butano State Park near Pescadero.
Industry experts say such spots, far beyond the major oil and gas fields in San Benito, Monterey and Fresno counties, are unlikely to attract interest from oil companies because of public outcry or engineering logistics — or because they don’t find petroleum. But environmentalists aren’t so sure.
“Many of these areas have drilling and active gas wells (nearby), so yes, there’s a real risk that these places will be developed,” said Clare Lakewood, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity.
The federal government’s new plan comes as part of an environmental report addressing a court ruling five years ago that essentially halted new drilling leases in California until the impacts of fracking were fully evaluated.
The Center for Biological Diversity and the Sierra Club had brought suit against the Bureau of Land management in 2013, alleging the agency had not sufficiently analyzed fracking’s toll.
Fracking is a method of extracting oil in rock with high-pressure water and chemicals. The practice has become an increasingly popular way to get at previously inaccessible mineral deposits, but it can tear up the landscape, pollute groundwater and trigger earthquakes.
While environmental groups say fracking’s impacts have become increasingly evident since the lawsuit, the Bureau of Land Management report outlines ways in which it says the technology can be safely deployed.
The fossil fuel industry praised the agency Thursday for moving forward with a plan that embraces fracking and advances the extraction of oil and gas.
“We’re pleased that after five years, the process worked and the federal government has reaffirmed that hydraulic fracturing is a safe method of production in California,” said Kara Greene, spokeswoman for the trade group Western States Petroleum Association.
The Bureau of Land Management’s new report comes in contrast to the agency’s initial environmental report, prepared under President Barack Obama and released in early 2017. That document proposed leasing about 400,000 acres in the Central Coast region for oil and gas development.
“For the BLM, the oil and gas program needs to align with new secretarial orders,” said agency spokeswoman Serena Baker, referring to the Trump administration’s aggressive push to expand energy production.
In the bureau’s Central Coast region, drilling operations are currently limited to Fresno, Monterey, San Benito, Alameda, Contra Costa and Santa Clara counties.
Industry experts say that while leases may be offered in additional parts of the region, which include the counties of Merced, San Joaquin, San Mateo, Santa Cruz and Stanislaus, it’s not likely.
“Drilling for oil is so expensive in California, it’s hard for me to believe that anyone is doing it,” said Amy Myers Jaffe, formerly with the UC Davis Institute of Transportation Studies and now a senior fellow at the nonprofit Council on Foreign Relations in New York. “There’s only going to be new drilling if there’s someone who has property nearby and they want to extend what they’re doing on the federal pocket next door.”
The Bureau of Land Management estimates that 37 new oil and gas wells will be drilled as a result of the new plan, a small fraction of the few thousand existing wells in the region.
Most of California’s oil operations are on state and private property, with California regulators dictating if and where new drilling proceeds. Like the Trump administration, officials in Sacramento have been supportive of fossil fuel extraction.
Environmental groups have pressed the state to limit or halt new drilling, citing not only the local problems but the contribution of fossil fuels to global warming.
“There are hundreds of organizations that have been coming together for years” to pressure California officials, said Monica Embrey, a spokeswoman for the Sierra Club. She’s hoping the Newsom administration will finally act.
The Bureau of Land Management’s new report is scheduled to be published Friday in the Federal Register, at which time a 30-day public comment period begins. The governor has 60 days to weigh in. After input is gathered, the agency will review any concerns and decide how to move forward.
