For environmental justice communities and their allies, it’s yet another sign that California is failing to live up to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s claims of being a global climate leader.
Over the past three months, California has averaged more than 70 oil spills per month, with petroleum polluting ports, harbors, streams and oil field soils, state data shows. In the past month alone, oil has poured out of malfunctioning pipes and tanks into ditches and dirt roads in Kern County, onto the shoulder of a highway in Tulare County, into a seasonally dry creek bed that feeds Los Angeles County’s Santa Clara River and into another creek that ultimately flows into the Santa Clara, known as the only wild river in Southern California.
The day before a pipe failed at the San Ardo oil field last week—the 95th spill in that oil field over the past 20 years, according to state data—a drilling rig off the coast of Santa Barbara County dumped crude oil into the Pacific Ocean…