Time for Big Oil to clean our air
I met him just a few months after I started practicing medicine in Richmond: an animated 10yearold, stubborn and funny, who loved baseball and not much else. He came to me wheezing, straight from the place he loved most — the baseball field in Richmond near his school.
“This always happens,” his sister told me.
She was not exaggerating. I prescribed steroids, highdose inhalers, stronger allergy medication. And yet he came back to my office every week or two for the duration of that baseball season, always wheezing. The medication helped, but only briefly. Finally, about six weeks into this pattern, it was obvious: He had to stop playing baseball. The air in his Richmond community was making him too sick.
In 2018, air pollution from fossil fuels was responsible for 1 in 5 premature deaths worldwide. In the Bay Area alone, fine particulate matter (PM2.5), the most deadly form of air pollution, is estimated to kill 3,000 people per year.
Airborne PM2.5 is associated with increased rates of asthma, slower lung development in children, and increased rates of cognitive impairment and dementia — among other health scourges. Worse, the highest concentration of air pollution falls disproportionately on lowincome communities of color.
Families who live in areas with the highest concentration of air pollution suffer, generation after generation. I have lost track of the number of times a family has been in my office, cradling a newborn baby just days old, asking if she or he already has asthma.
Our largest industrial sources of PM2.5 are the fluidized catalytic cracking units (sometimes called “cat crackers”) in the oil refineries that ring the North and East Bay. Since the turn of the 20th century, these refineries have converted crude oil into gasoline and other products.
It’s no accident that communities of color have been subjected to the worst of this pollution.
In Richmond, for example, African American shipyard workers during WWII were housed in segregated federal warhousing projects near the refinery. And after the war, racially restrictive housing covenants, blockbusting, and outright racial violence forced both African American and Latinx residents into neighborhoods closest to, and most impacted by, the refinery. Today, it’s no surprise that among the million Bay Area residents living under the “plume” of the Chevron refiner alone, Black and brown residents remain the most impacted.
Right now, we in the Bay Area have an opportunity to do something about this.
On July 21, the 24 members of the Bay Area Air Quality Management District Board will vote on Rule 65, which would limit the amount of PM2.5 that refineries can emit from their cat crackers. The two refineries that would be cleaned up, Chevron in Richmond and PBF in Martinez, would be forced to reduce their PM2.5 by upward of 75% — saving lives, lessening profound racial inequities, and protecting health.
To comply with this rule, the refineries would likely have to install a commonplace technology called wet gas scrubbing, which is already in use at most U.S. refineries, including Valero in Benicia. These scrubbers remove pollutants by spraying or passing a liquid — typically water — into the gas stream. The gas and liquid are mixed, and pollutants absorb onto the liquid and drop out of the gas stream.
Installing these wet gas scrubbers would protect public health while also supporting the economy. A recent study by the UCLA Luskin Center found that installing wet gas scrubbers in these facilities could create upward of 4,600 jobs.
Predictably, however, Chevron and PBF have tried to distort the facts, making outlandish and dramatic predictions of the costs to install the technology. The reality is that this is a commonsense rule that requires a technology already in use at a majority of refineries nationwide, including refineries in oilfriendly states like Texas.
At the end of the day, after decades of polluting our local communities, these refineries simply want to avoid taking any responsibility to pay for proven technology that would protect public health while also creating jobs.
The Air District’s mission is to create healthy air in the Bay Area while protecting public health and the climate. In June of 2020, the Board passed a resolution in support of racial justice that proclaimed their “commitment to advance the cause of diversity and equity in our policies, programs, and practices.”
Their job does not include protecting the financial interests of the fossil fuel companies that, for decades, have not only poisoned our local air with little accountability, but have actively campaigned to hide the science of climate change and fight responsible climate legislation.
The Bay Area, like the world, stands on a moral and environmental precipice. Will we continue to allow corporations to spew pollution that has disproportionately affected Black and brown communities for decades, or will we force accountability to make the commonsense changes we’ve been talking about for so long?
Board members need to hear the answer to that question from each of us.
That 10yearold boy I cared for is a few years older now. He’s entering the muddy years of adolescence. I’m still his doctor. And he still doesn’t play baseball.
It doesn’t have to be this way. My patients — our kids, your kids — need our help. You can do just that by forcing the air quality district to do its job: by voting for the strongest Rule 65 possible.