California Communities Celebrate ‘Massive’ Victory as Oil Industry Drops

Environmental justice communities across California rejoiced last week when the oil industry, at the eleventh hour, withdrew its controversial effort to overturn a historic law aimed at curbing the deadly effects of neighborhood oil drilling.

Now, nearly two years after community activists and their allies watched Gov. Gavin Newsom sign the bill they’d worked for years to get through the Legislature, they can finally breathe freely.

Senate Bill 1137 prohibits new permits for oil and gas wells within 3,200 feet of homes, schools, clinics and other so-called sensitive sites, and tightens oversight of existing wells within the buffer zones.

Newsom signed the bill in a high-spirited ceremony in September 2022 as part of a sweeping package of climate measures to accelerate the state’s transition to clean energy.

But the ink had barely dried on the landmark public health measure when the oil industry filed a referendum to kill it. Oil industry trade groups and neighborhood drillers quickly poured more than $20 million into a deceptive campaign, dispatching petition circulators who lied to voters, saying the referendum would lower gas prices or—shockingly, as happened to this reporter—that it would protect neighborhoods from oil drilling, when in fact it would do the opposite.

Such tactics helped the referendum qualify for the ballot last February. At the time, grassroots activists and the bill’s coauthors, state senators Lena Gonzalez (D-Long Beach) and Monique Limón (D-Santa Barbara), vowed to keep fighting to protect the millions of Californians who live near oil wells from their noxious emissions.

Gonzalez heard rumors swirling around the Capitol that the oil industry might pull the referendum. But she told colleagues, “I won’t believe it until I see it.”

The senator had watched the industry deceive voters, mischaracterize her health protection law as an “energy shutdown” and ultimately spend more than $37 million, according to state campaign finance records, seeking to overturn science-based provisions to safeguard California’s most vulnerable residents from fossil fuel extraction’s litany of harmful effects. 

The small producer Signal Hill Petroleum—which operates marginal wells in dense urban neighborhoods at the southern end of Gonzalez’s district—spent more than $3.2 million in just over a month to get the referendum on the ballot, which automatically froze implementation of the law.

Since the law passed, the industry and its allies spent more than $60 million on lobbying and advertising to overturn it, according to the Campaign for a Safe and Healthy California, a broad coalition of groups working to defend S.B. 1137.

Grassroots organizers who grew up experiencing the deadly effects of neighborhood oil drilling