Tag Archives: Chevron Richmond Refinery

Big Oil, Climate Change, Coal industry, Fossil fuels, Green Industrial Revolution, Oil Industry

Grant Cooke: Big Oil’s endgame has begun

Repost from The Benicia Herald
[Editor: Benicia’s own Grant Cooke has written a highly significant three-part series for The Benicia Herald, outlining the impending fall of the fossil fuel industry and concluding with good advice for the City of Benicia and other cities dependent on refineries for a major portion of their local revenue stream.  This is the first of three parts.  Read part part two by CLICKING HERE and part three by CLICKING HERE and .  – RS]

Grant Cooke: Big Oil’s endgame has begun

September 28, 2014 by Grant Cooke

Editor’s note: First of three parts to run on consecutive Sundays.

P1010301“THE STONE AGE CAME TO AN END, not because we had a lack of stones, and the oil age will come to an end not because we have a lack of oil,” said Sheikh Ahmed-Zaki Yamani. The former Saudi oil minister is arguably the world’s foremost expert on the oil industry. In 2000, he introduced this extraordinary observation with an even more prescient one — to wit, “Thirty years from now there will be a huge amount of oil — and no buyers. Oil will be left in the ground,” he told the UK’s Telegraph.

A decade and half later, we are coming to the end of Big Oil, and the domination of the world’s geopolitics and economy by the fossil-fuel interests for the past century. Correspondingly, the carbon- and nuclear-powered centralized utility industry that was started by Thomas Edison in 1882 when he flipped the switch at the Pearl Street substation in Manhattan has begun its decline.

Over the years, Big Oil and its related industries and supporters have disrupted the way humans manage their affairs, and wreaked havoc on our environmentally fragile planet. Today, the loss of a major section of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet from global warming caused by excessive carbon-generated heat appears unstoppable.

That hasn’t stopped the dead-enders from fighting on. In February, North Carolina’s Republican governor turned his administration into a joke with a clumsy attempt to help Duke Energy, the nation’s largest utility, avoid cleaning up 39,000 tons of coal ash that was spilled into the Dan River. The Duke ash coal spill came a month after 10,000 gallons of 4-methylcyclohexane methanols, or MCHM, spilled into West Virginia’s Elk River, ruining the water supply of Charleston, the state’s capital. A second chemical, a mix of polyglycol ethers known as PPH, was part of the leak, the company involved, Freedom Industries, told federal regulators. The company uses the chemicals to wash coal prior to shipping for coal-powered utilities. More than 300,000 West Virginians were impacted and several hundred residents were hospitalized with various symptoms.

Closer to home in Northern California, we had the massive 2012 Chevron fire that sent toxic chemicals billowing into the air and caused respiratory problems for 15,000 Richmond residents. Chevron admitted to negligence as the cause of the fire. In 2010, PG&E’s neglect led to the horrific San Bruno gas pipeline explosion that killed eight, injured 66 and destroyed 38 homes. The California Public Utilities Commission fined PG&E $2.5 billion, the largest fine in U.S. utility history. PG&E now faces federal charges that it violated the U.S. Pipeline Safety Act.

For several years, U.S. oil oligarchs Charles and David Koch have made a mockery of American democracy by pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into smear campaigns against scientists, environmentalists and liberal politicians. More than any others in recent memory, the Koch brothers have manage to replace consensus and compromise with vitriol and dysfunction in U.S. politics.

Oil madness is not a strictly U.S. disease. Vladimir Putin, channeling the ghost of Joseph Stalin, recently swept up a huge chunk of Ukraine and threatened an astonished Europe that if it opposed him, the result would be a shutdown of the Russian natural gas that many see as vital to the EU’s economic recovery. And the world seems to have grown accustomed to Mideast mayhem, where the biggest transfer of wealth in world history — from the oil users to the oil suppliers — has led to social and political chaos, repression, suffering and death.

* * *

EVEN AFTER A CENTURY OF SUPPORT, the U.S. federal government grants the oil industry, the world’s richest, with about $4 billion a year in tax subsidies, and Exxon Mobil Corporation (the largest grossing company in the world) minimizes the taxes it pays by using 20 wholly owned subsidiaries in the Bahamas, Bermuda and the Cayman Islands to legally shelter cash from its operations in Angola, Azerbaijan and Abu Dhabi.

The coal industry is also favored with tax breaks, public land loopholes and subsidized railroads. A 2013 Harvard University study concluded that the total real economic costs from U.S. coal amounted to $345.3 billion, adding close to 17.8 cents per kilowatt hour to the cost of electricity generated from coal. Called “external costs, or externalities,” these costs are borne by the U.S. public.

Now the carbon-based industries, which include coal, oil, natural gas and related industries like centralized utilities and transmission line companies, are coming to the end of their socially useful cycle. Their resources are aging beyond economic justification and their business models are too inflexible to adapt to a new industrial era with a different energy model.

This new era of energy generation, storage and sharing is upon us. We call it the Green Industrial Revolution, and it is emerging as the next significant political, social and economic era in world history. As it takes hold, it will result in a complete restructuring of the way energy is generated, supplied and used. It will be a revolutionary time of extraordinary potential and opportunity, with remarkable innovations in science and energy that will lead to new ones in sustainable, smart and carbon-less economies powered by nonpolluting technologies like wind, geothermal, wave, river and solar, with their advanced technologies like flywheels, regenerative and maglev systems, and hydrogen fuel cells.

Community-based and on-site renewable energy generation will replace massive fossil fuel and nuclear-powered central plant utilities. New advances in efficient recyclable batteries and fuel cells will store energy for when it is needed. Smart green grids will share electricity effortlessly. Additive manufacturing will minimize wasted resources, and new sciences like nanotechnology will have a profound impact on business, careers, human health and the global economy.

This new era encompasses changes in technology, economics, business, manufacturing, jobs and consumer lifestyles. The transition will be as complete as when the steam-driven First Industrial Revolution gave way to the fossil fuel-driven Second Industrial Revolution. It is a monumental shift that is already under way and spreading rapidly around the world.

Industrial revolutions occur when a new energy source intersects with a new form of communication. In the First Industrial Revolution, steam was the energy source and the printing press provided the means to disseminate new ideas that accelerated scientific breakthroughs and the adoption of inventions. In the Second Industrial Revolution, the fossil fuel-driven internal combustion engine was the power source and analog communication provided the channel for new ideas and technologies.

Today, the digital age, with Internet access to almost all scientific knowledge and Facebook and Twitter-led social media, has intersected with renewable energy generation, hydrogen storage and smart grids. While vast fortunes were made in the fossil-fuel era by extracting natural resources and despoiling the environment, wealth in this new green era will come from digital and IT breakthroughs, intelligent machines and a host of environmentally sensitive inventions.

Many factors are coming together to hasten the Green Industrial Revolution. Putin’s march on Ukraine shocked Europe and stirred the region’s efforts to generate more renewable energy and cut ties to fossil fuel. Forty percent of Scotland’s domestic electricity generation comes from renewable sources, mostly tidal and wind. Denmark and other Nordic nations intend to generate 100 percent of their energy by mid-century. Germany’s Energiewende (Energy Transformation), which aims to power the country almost entirely on renewables by 2050, is accelerating.

Almost daily, scientists in university and national research laboratories are making breakthroughs in developing non-carbon energy sources. The chemistry department of the University of California-Davis recently figured out how to make carbon-less gasoline from straw. Advancements in nanotechnology are making electricity usage much more efficient.

China is considering a ban on new cars that run on fossil fuels, and major cities across the globe have limited the use of autos in downtown areas. Several nations — and California, too — are creating hydrogen highways. Norway, Sweden and Germany have them; California will open its hydrogen highway in 2016. Daimler, Honda, Chevrolet and most other major automobile manufacturers have hydrogen-powered fuel cell cars ready to go.

Grant Cooke is a long-time Benicia resident and CEO of Sustainable Energy Associates. He is co-author, with Nobel Peace Prize winner Woodrow Clark, of “The Green Industrial Revolution: Energy, Engineering and Economics,” to be released in October by Elsevier, of which this column is excerpted.

Bakken Crude, Bay Area Refineries, Crude By Rail, Oil Industry, Tar sands crude

East Bay projects are redefining refineries

Repost from The Contra Costa Times
[Editor: a shorter version of this article appeared in The Vallejo Times-Herald with byline Robert Rogers.  This seems to be a re-write by Tom Lochner and Rogers.  Interesting to see analysis of all five refineries in the Bay Area, labeled the “Contra Costa-Solano refinery belt, California’s largest.”  Good quotes from our colleagues Tom Griffith and Antonia Juhasz.   – RS]

East Bay’s oil refineries look to the future

Upgrades: Projects to allow flexibility to respond to changing energymarkets, but environmentalists raise concerns
By Tom Lochner and Robert Rogers, September 24, 2014

chevronThe East Bay’s first oil refinery opened in 1896 near the site of Porkopolis-of-the West, a defunct stockyard and slaughterhouse in the town of Rodeo. In the ensuing decades, four more East Bay refineries joined it, defining the region and powering its growth like no other industry.

A century later, the Contra Costa-Solano refinery belt, California’s largest, continues to cast an enormous shadow over surrounding cities, influencing their politics, their economies, even their aesthetics. And at a time when fossil fuel seems like yesterday’s energy source, the Bay Area’s five refineries have all embarked on ambitious projects to transform the way they do business — and ensure their economic viability in a rapidly changing global energy market for decades to come.

These projects, if seen to completion, will diversify the refineries’ operations by allowing them to process both dirtier, heavier oil and cleaner, lighter crude. Two refineries are looking to build their future, at least in part, on crude-by-rail operations, expanding available sources of petroleum while intensifying a controversy over whether that transportation method endangers East Bay communities.

All told, the upgrades will generate a collective investment in the East Bay of more than $2 billion, while adding hundreds of construction jobs. And once they are completed, proponents say, the projects should result in a substantial combined cut to greenhouse gas emissions, even though many environmentalists remain unsatisfied.

“While some of these local refinery projects promise to reduce greenhouse gasses, or pollution in general, that’s not nearly enough,” Tom Griffith, co-founder of Martinez Environmental Group, said in a recent email. “And it’s arguable given the cumulative costs.”

Catherine Reheis-Boyd, president of the Western States Petroleum Association, said oil companies are looking to increase efficiency through these refinery projects while meeting the state’s stricter environmental requirements — not an easy balancing act.

“They want to continue to supply California. And they want to contribute to the economy of the state,” she said. “What’s different right now is, a lot of the policies being contemplated in California, either at the state level or locally, are making it more difficult to achieve that. The biggest thing is, how do you balance our energy policy with our climate change policies?”

Even without the new projects, the five East Bay refineries are a critical part of the local economy.

In 2012, Chevron, Tesoro, Shell, Phillips 66 and Valero processed a total of about 800,000 barrels a day of crude oil, providing more than 7,500 direct jobs, according to industry sources. The oil and gas industry as a whole in the Bay Area generated $4.3 billion that year in state and local taxes, plus another $3.8 billion in federal taxes, according to an April 2014 Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation study commissioned by the Western States Petroleum Association.

The biggest project underway is at Chevron, a $1 billion investment to upgrade parts of its century-old 2,900-acre Richmond refinery allowing it to refine dirtier blends of crude with no increase in greenhouse gas emissions, according to the project application.

Tesoro’s Golden Eagle refinery, near Martinez, has spent nearly as much on upgrades since 2008, and other projects are underway at Shell in Martinez, Phillips 66 in Rodeo and Valero in Benicia.

ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERNS

While these sweeping investments offer the promise of new jobs and cleaner, more efficient operations, many environmentalists complain that they don’t go far enough to curb emissions of greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming by trapping heat in the lower atmosphere, and sulfur dioxide and other pollutants that can cause serious health problems in people in surrounding communities.

And others warn that the improvements will smooth the path for highly flammable crude oil from North America’s Bakken shale region to the East Bay on railroad lines, raising the specter of spectacular explosions from train derailments, as happened last summer in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, where 47 people died. Those fears have dominated debate over a proposed rail terminal at Benicia’s Valero refinery.

A growing number of detractors clamor for America to cast off the yoke of fossil-fuel dependency altogether and concentrate on efforts to develop cleaner, renewable energy.

“The missed opportunity here is for the oil companies to refocus their sights on the future of renewable energy,” Griffith said.

That aim, albeit more gradual, is the policy of the state under Assembly Bill 32, the California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006. The legislation calls not only for reducing greenhouse gas emissions but also for reducing the state’s dependency on petroleum.

The refineries take that as a challenge but not a death warrant.

“The industry clearly thinks these refineries are here to stay and wants them to adjust to the changes of the makeup of the world’s oil supply, which is dirtier, more dangerous oil,” said Antonia Juhasz, an oil and energy analyst and author of the book “The Tyranny of Oil.”

Juhasz cited Canadian tar sands oil as the prime example of dirtier crude, and pointed to oil from the Bakken shale formation, mostly in North Dakota, as the prime example of the more dangerous variety.

Scott Anderson, a San Francisco-based senior vice president and chief economist for Bank of the West, agrees that the increases in renewable energy sources pose no threat to the future of oil refineries locally. In fact, he says, increasing global demand for refined oil products makes refineries like those in Contra Costa and Solano counties an “emerging growth industry for the U.S.”

“Demand is going to continue to increase, and there haven’t been any new refineries built in the U.S. in decades. So what we’re left with is these projects in existing refineries designed to improve efficiency and flexibility,” he said.

Here is a look at the major projects underway:

• At Tesoro’s Golden Eagle refinery, one of the biggest shifts has been bringing in up to 10,000 barrels per day of Bakken crude, which company officials say is critical to replace other sources of petroleum.

“Our challenge going forward is, as California and Alaskan crudes decline, to find replacements that keep the refinery a viable business,” General Manager Stephen Hansen said.

“One of those crudes is in the midcontinent, and the only way to get it here is by rail,” he added, noting that the refinery receives crude from ship, pipeline and truck after offloading it from rail cars in Richmond.

The refinery’s nearly $1 billion in capital upgrades since 2008 have focused not on increasing capacity but on using a wider variety of crude blends and processing them more efficiently, cleanly and safely. A $600 million replacement of the refinery’s coker, for example, has reduced annual carbon dioxide emissions by at least 400,000 tons, according to refinery officials.

• Shell’s Martinez refinery is seeking to shift some of its refining capacity toward lighter crudes, which it says will allow it to trim greenhouse gas emissions. In phases over several years starting in 2015, the refinery would build processing equipment and permanently shut down one of two coker units, resulting in a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 700,000 tons per year.

Shell spokesman Steve Lesher said the project involves replacing equipment, not expanding the facility beyond its 160,000 barrels per day. He also said the refinery currently processes heavier oil from the San Joaquin Valley but will be bringing in oil from other, as-yet-unidentified sources.

• Phillips 66 in Rodeo, the region’s oldest refinery, hopes to start recovering and selling the propane and butane that are a byproduct of its refining process, rather than burning them off in a highly polluting process called flaring or using them as fuel in refinery boilers.

The project would add new infrastructure, including a large steam boiler, propane and butane recovery equipment, six propane storage vessels and treatment facilities and two new rail spurs.

Phillips 66 has said the project, which was approved by the county Planning Commission in November, would reduce emissions of sulfur dioxide by removing sulfur compounds from refinery fuel gas, and reduce other pollutants and greenhouses gases, but those assertions have been questioned by environmentalists and the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, which wants further evaluation before signing off.

Two groups have filed an appeal to overturn the Planning Commission’s approval, and in what might be a first for the region, the air district is requiring that the project’s emissions and possible health effects must be considered cumulatively with other refinery-related projects in the Bay Area.

• Chevron’s plan, which received City Council approval in July after months of intense public debate, is touted as an important upgrade in an increasingly competitive global petrofuels market. While other refineries are gearing up to exploit the North American oil boom, Chevron will continue to get the bulk of its oil from the Persian Gulf and Alaska.

But the new modernization plan approved in July would allow the refinery to process crude oil blends and gas oils with higher sulfur content, which refinery officials say is critical to producing competitive-priced transportation fuels and lubricating oils in the coming decades.

In addition, it would replace the refinery’s existing hydrogen-production facilities, built in the 1960s, with a modern plant that is more energy-efficient and yields higher-purity hydrogen, and has the capacity to produce more of it.

• Valero Refining wants to build a $55 million crude-by-rail unloading facility at its Benicia refinery that could handle daily shipments of up to 70,000 barrels of oil transported in two 50-car trains daily from sources throughout North America. That plan has drawn sharp criticism from locals and leaders in Sacramento concerned about the hazards of increased rail shipments.

The project would not increase capacity at the refinery but replace crudes that are currently delivered by ship. Nor would it increase emissions from refinery operations, according to a project description on the city of Benicia’s website. The document also cites an air quality analysis indicating that rail cars generate fewer emissions locally than marine vessels.

The latest projects, while still drawing criticism, have turned some critics into allies. Henry Clark of the West County Toxics Coalition, who played a leading role in getting millions of dollars in settlements for North Richmond residents stemming from a chemical spill linked to the Chevron refinery in the early 1990s, has come out in support of the Chevron modernization.

“After all the negotiation and community input, we have a better project than we ever expected,” Clark said. “Fenceline communities like North Richmond are going to be next to a safer, cleaner facility and get to share in millions in community benefits.”

Local Regulation, Oil Industry, Richmond CA

Chevron: deep pockets, heavy influence on electoral politics in Richmond, CA

Repost from Counterpunch

Chevron Sounds Alarm Against East Bay “Anarchism”

Via Mass Mailings & Push Polling
by Steve Early, September 16, 2014

One of the great things about living near Chevron’s big East Bay refinery—yes, the one that caught fire and exploded two years ago—is its system of early warnings about new disasters about to befall Richmond, CA.

In our post-Citizens United era, the nation’s second largest oil producer is now free to spend $1.6 million (or more, if necessary) on direct mail and phone alerts, designed to keep 30,000 likely voters fully informed about threats to their city.

During the last week, glossy mailers from a Chevron-funded group called “Moving Forward” have been flowing our way, at the rate of one or two per day—almost seven weeks before Election Day.

And, then, just to make sure that Chevron’s urgent message is getting through, we’ve also been called by pollsters. They claim to be surveying  opinion about Richmond politics, but actually just recite the contents of these same Moving Forward mailers over the phone.

My favorite manifestation of this negative campaigning involves a Latino candidate for Richmond City council. His name is Eduardo Martinez and remembering the Eduardo part is important. By some strange coincidence, Moving Forward—the Chevron-backed “Coalition of Labor Unions, Small Businesses, Public Safety and Firefighters Associations”—is backing another Martinez for city council whose first name is Al and who is apparently not a public safety threat.

One Martinez Too Many

Eduardo, the dangerous Martinez, is a retired public school teacher and registered Democrat. He’s silver-haired, soft spoken, neatly dressed, and rather distinguished looking. For years, he has devoted himself to good causes in Richmond, including serving on the city planning commission. On that body, he has been an influential voice for Richmond’s Environmental Justice Coalition.

Earlier this summer, for example, he voted to impose additional air quality and safety requirements on Chevron, in return for city approval of its long-delayed $1 billion refinery modernization plan. This project was finally OKed by the city council majority in July after some improvements were obtained, plus $90 million in Chevron-funded “community benefits.”

Chevron did not forget that Martinez—Eduardo, not Al—helped to challenge and change its original blueprint for “modernization,” a project that will employ 1,000 building trades workers. And that’s why Richmond voters have just discovered, via expensive mass mailers and phone calls, that Eduardo Martinez is really a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

This alarming news first arrived in the form of a lurid four-color mailer, with a cover picture of “Black Bloc” demonstrators wearing face-masks and brandishing shields on behalf of the “99%” three years ago.  Inside, 65-year old Martinez is fingered as a fellow “Occupy Oakland member, who believes that anarchy is the highest form of government.” In a second “hit piece” a few days later, Chevron—through its “Moving Forward” front group–claimed that, after enlisting in Occupy, Martinez urged others “to join the group, which has been blamed for violent protests that cost Oakland more than $5 million, hurt local businesses, and drove away new business.”

Abolish The City Council?

This mailer again displayed a glowering, angry-looking headshot of Martinez—one of three appearing in the first piece (which made him look a little bit like the late Leon Trotsky, who was no anarchist). The second brochure noted that “Richmond needs new businesses and jobs” but, with a card-carrying “anarchist” on its council, the city won’t be able to attract either. The bottom line: “Eduardo Martinez is too radical for Richmond.” For more details, readers are directed to a Moving Forward website – www.NoEduardo.com – where we learn that Martinez is “so radical that he does not think the city council should exist”—a truly unusual stance for any city council candidate anywhere.

Just as these dire warnings landed in the mailbox, my home phone started ringing. It was Research America, a Sacramento-based pollster, calling to discuss local politics. Who was paying for this opinion survey, I asked. Oh we can’t disclose that, my would-be interviewer said, but you can talk to my supervisor. Her supervisor didn’t know or wouldn’t say who was behind the call either, disclosing only that Research America had been retained by EMC Research, a firm based in Oakland, who was acting on behalf of some third party whose identity could not be revealed in order to “maintain as much impartiality as possible” in the polling.

I objected to this policy of client anonymity but asked the supervisor to put her subordinate back on the line.  OK, I said, what do you want to know? Actually, she had some things that Research America/EMC wanted me to know like, for example, that Martinez and his “Team Richmond” running-mate, Gayle McLaughlin, were part of “an extreme left wing group called the Richmond Progressive Alliance. It’s a group of radicals out of touch with Richmond voters.”

Stop right there, I said. How could that be? McLaughlin has twice been elected mayor of Richmond, and once before that to the city council.  Martinez only narrowly lost his previous council race two years ago. How “out of touch” could they be with a won/loss record of 3 to 1 between them? Besides, I said, “I belong to the RPA and I’m a Richmond voter. Does that mean I’m ‘out of touch’ with myself?

Push Polling Paymasters

My good-natured interlocutor at Research America plodded through the rest of her dreary task—which consisted of reading and asking my reaction to a long series of questions or statements, almost all of which deliberately misrepresented the political views, personal behavior, or public record of Martinez, Mayor McLaughlin, and Richmond Vice-Mayor Jovanka Beckles, a third RPA-backed council candidate.

The Occupy-related scuffles in downtown Oakland in 2011, which Martinez had no connection with, were duly revisited.  Anyone who didn’t know the RPA candidates personally—or hadn’t bothered to follow Richmond issues very closely—would have been left with a distinctly unfavorable impression of Martinez, McLaughlin, and Beckles.

Eager to confirm the identify of those displaying such “impartiality” while conducting a public opinion survey, I called and/or emailed Research America in Sacramento, EMC Research in Oakland, Chevron in Richmond, Moving Forward in San Rafael, and the firm of Whitehurst/Mosher, a key Chevron advisor, in San Francisco. Whitehurst/Mosher is listed as a paid “campaign consultant” on the California Fair Political Practices Commission Form 460, filed on July 30, which shows Chevron ponying up $1.6 million, all by itself, for the Moving Forward “coalition.” Neither Research America or EMC are listed yet as “payees” for any services rendered.

None of the above, except EMC responded, in any form, by Beyond Chron’s deadline. Reached by phone, EMC president and founder Alex Evans told me he has been a pollster since 1984 but would “neither confirm or deny” that Chevron/Moving Forward was currently his client. A Richmond city councilor in the late 1990s, Evans also wouldn’t acknowledge any past work for the oil company, before, during, or after his council service. “We have no disclosure obligations, no professional obligation to disclose unless directed by our client,” he said. (According to longtime Richmond council member and current mayoral candidate, Tom Butt, Evans is a Chevron pollster.)

These calls were necessary because, as Evans correctly noted, there is no mandated disclosure of who is financing phone polling, no matter how propagandistic.  Corporations or unions bankrolling “independent expenditure” committees–like Chevron’s Moving Forward—have to put their names on the direct mail brochures they send out to sway the electorate (and, in California, report their funding sources to the FPPC.)  But their hired “public opinion” surveyors are free to engage in “push polling,” with complete funder anonymity, until the next round of FPPC form-filing months later.

Aren’t You That Anarchist?

Two years ago, Eduardo Martinez was first runner up in a large field of Richmond council candidates, falling about 500 votes short. When one of the three winners died shortly after that election, Martinez should have been named to fill the vacancy– based on the 11,000 votes he received and the fact that the city’s Latino population, its largest ethnic minority, has no council representation. (Martinez chairs the Richmond chapter of MAPA–the Mexican-American Political Association.)

Instead, a non-Latino who received half the votes that Martinez got—but who doesn’t belong to the RPA —was appointed to the council for the next two years. This led Eduardo to run for city council again this year, as part of the three-person slate which includes RPA leader Gayle McLaughlin, a registered California Green, who is termed out, as mayor, after eight years in that office.

When Martinez was out campaigning last weekend, he made stops at a neighborhood block party, a local Democratic Party club, and a Pt. Richmond fundraiser for his campaign. At the block party, after he mingled and chatted affably with potential voters, one confessed to him: “You know, talking to you is not the same as reading about you.”

At the meeting of West County Democrats, Martinez tried to convince his fellow party members that his personal refusal to accept corporate donations made him a good candidate for local Democrats to endorse. Both he and Beckles, who was also seeking the club’s backing, pointed out that Chevron’s massive display of unfettered (and, in some forms, hidden) political spending illustrated the post-Citizens United threat to reform candidates throughout the country, regardless of party label. Their plea fell on partially deaf ears. Neither RPA candidate got the 2/3 vote necessary for the group’s endorsement.

On Sunday, Martinez was raising funds the old-fashioned way, one-on-one, at a house party attended by Richmond residents. The donations were modest, but there was a silent auction to boost the take. In his 2012 race, Martinez raised about $35,000–$20,000 coming from individual donors and $15,000 in local public matching funds. He expects to raise and spend a similar amount in the course of this year’s run for office.

It’s easy to do the electoral math. Eduardo’s total spending will be in the range of $1 per voter, if turnout is similar to last time. Meanwhile, Moving Forward will be spending more than $50 per voter, for its four preferred Richmond candidates, and possibly much more. Already, Chevron’s “independent expenditures” on behalf of the other Martinez have given him instant visibility via billboards, direct mail, other advertising, and, soon, paid canvassing as well. None of this activity has, of course, been “authorized” by or coordinated with any of its lucky beneficiaries—and certainly not the “push polling” that depicts a local progressive Democrat as an “anarchist,” of the violent and irresponsible sort.

But it sure makes running for municipal office a lot easier if your name is Al rather than Eduardo Martinez. If the latter suffers a second defeat on Nov. 4, he won’t be the only loser in Richmond.

Steve Early lives in Richmond and belongs to its ten-year-old Progressive Alliance. He is the author of Save Our Unions (Monthly Review Press, 2013) and is now researching a book about recent political changes and environmental conflicts in Richmond.

Air Quality, Bay Area Air Quality Management District, Take Action

Bay Area Air Quality: Isn’t your family’s health more important than Big Oil profits?

From an email by Sierra Club San Francisco Bay Chapter
[Editor: For details about participating in the upcoming meeting of the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, see below.  – RS

Isn’t your family’s health more important than Big Oil profits?

Jess Dervin-Ackerman, August 27, 2014

For too long, the Bay Area’s five oil refineries have been polluting our air and water and pouring money into local politics to ensure they can continue their dirty, harmful practices. In the Bay Area alone, air pollution kills nearly 2,000 people each year.

We need the Bay Area Air Quality Management District (the body tasked with regulating the refineries) to take strong and bold action to protect our communities from the toxic air pollution spewing from these facilities. Send a message to the Air District Board supporting a proactive approach to regulating refinery emissions now!

The Chevron refinery in Richmond is one of the worst offenders; two years ago this month, a huge fire at the facility sent upwards of 15,000 Richmond residents to the hospital with respiratory problems. Right now, the Chevron refinery is emitting fine particulate matter that causes heart and lung disease—and the rules allow them to do it. We need stronger regulations that prevent toxic polluters from poisoning Bay Area families, as well as specific action to cap fine particulate emissions from the Chevron refinery.

Add your voice to the growing movement in the Bay Area calling for strong and bold action to reduce dangerous emissions and carbon pollution from the refineries along the Bay.

Thank you for taking action to protect the health and safety of our community and the planet.

Jess Dervin-Ackerman
Conservation Organizer
Sierra Club San Francisco Bay Chapter

P.S. — Forward this message to a friend!

Please attend the September 3rd Air District Board meeting to support cleanup and emissions restrictions.

Support  –  including emission limits in BAAQMD’s proposed Bay Area refineries rule.
Oppose – Big Oil’s proposal of a ‘monitoring only’ rule that threatens to study us to death.

What: Meeting of the Bay Area Air Quality Management District Board of Directors—write “For Cleanup” on your speaker card

When: Wednesday, September 3 (all morning—suggest arrival by 9 AM)

Where: BAAQMD offices, 939 Ellis Street, San Francisco, CA 94109 (Ellis near Van Ness Ave., about eight blocks from Civic Center BART Station)