The Mobilization for Climate Justice West is targeting Chevron, one of the largest polluters in the Bay Area and a major player in national and international corporate climate lobbying.

Chevron is the largest corporation in California and the fifth largest corporation in the world. Its Richmond refinery, one of the oldest in the country, is the largest industrial polluter in the San Francisco Bay Area, releasing nearly 100,000 pounds of toxic waste a year, including known human carcinogens and asthma-causing pollutants. The refinery is now, and has been, listed as in “high priority violation” of air compliance standards, among other violations, by the EPA every year since at least 2006. In Richmond, 17,000 people live within three miles of the refinery, and Richmond’s childhood asthma rates are higher state and national averages.

Chevron is trying to expand this refinery to process heavier crude oil. Refining heavier and dirtier crude will result in more air pollution and disease in the local community. Heavy crude production also contributes 2 to 3 times more climate pollution than conventional oil.
The Mobilization for Climate Justice West is demanding:
Oil Reduction, Not Refinery Expansion! Cap the Crude!
Corporations out of Copenhagen – Our Climate Is Not Your Business!
Oil Reduction, Not Refinery Expansion! Cap the Crude!

Instead of reducing oil production and shifting to sustainable industries, Chevron and other Big Oil corporations are expanding their refineries, pipelines and extraction projects to process dirtier, heavier crude oil from places like the Alberta Tar Sands. This massive expansion is destroying communities and ecosystems across North America, and if allowed to continue would derail any efforts to adequately reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Communities for a Better Environment recently released a study that found that, “a switch to heavy oil…. could double or triple greenhouse gas emissions from U.S. oil refineries”.
Richmond and Bay Area environmental and climate justice groups are leading a precedent-setting fight against this expansion. A fierce, local grassroots campaign has been fighting Chevron’s pushing, lying and bribing strategies to expand their Richmond refinery. After Chevron pushed their expansion plans through the (formerly pro-Chevron) Richmond City council, environmental justice groups sued the city to stop the expansion and are demanding a “Crude Cap” that would monitor and prevent the refining of heavier, dirtier crude. Like the No Coal campaign, it’s time for the climate justice movement to step up and take on big oil and their deadly expansion plans.
It’s also time for the Chevron, and our society more generally, to move beyond fossil fuels – and to move beyond corporate-driven solutions to corporate-caused problems (such as nuclear power, biofuels, waste incineration and “clean coal”). We demand a rapid transition towards an economy based on environmental sustainability and social and environmental justice.

Corporations out of Copenhagen – Our Climate Is Not Your Business!

We demand that Chevron and other corporate polluters stay out of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change – that corporate lobbyists be barred from participation, and thus prevented from further interfering in the development of climate stabilization strategies. To date, the UNFCCC meetings have had corporate lobbyists vastly outnumber representatives of governments and civil society groups – sometime as high as 4:1. Meanwhile, Indigenous Nations, frontline communities and the most impacted people from around the world are not allowed meaningful representation at the table. We demand that such corrupt international processes be stopped, and that sovereign Indigenous Nations and frontline communities be allowed leadership roles in developing a global climate strategy in the interest of people and planet.