The industry’s ballot push to roll back newly enacted safety zones would delay implementation for nearly two years until voters decide the law’s fate in 2024.
By Liza Gross, Inside Climate News
California Gov. Gavin Newsom last month signed more than three dozen bills to protect the climate and vulnerable communities from oil drilling and fossil fuel emissions.
The historic climate package includes Senate Bill 1137, which bans new oil and gas wells within 3,200 feet of homes, schools, and any other place people could be harmed by drilling operations. Democrats’ previous attempts to create health and safety zones around oil and gas operations failed in 2020 and 2021, blocked by just a few members of their own party.
Critically, the new law includes safeguards for the millions of Californians who live within the roughly half-mile buffer zone of existing drilling operations, tightening restrictions on everything from disruptive noise and light to the release of toxic gases from wells and storage tanks. In addition, operators must provide regulators with analyses of chemicals in any wastewater transported from existing drilling sites and, by January 2027, implement a plan to rapidly detect and fix leaks of noxious gases and the climate super-pollutant methane at these sites.
But the ink had barely dried on this groundbreaking health and safety law when Nielsen Merksamer, a lobbying firm that represents several major oil and gas companies, filed a referendum to reverse it on behalf of Jerome Reedy, a board member for the California Independent Petroleum Association, an industry lobby group.
Now, the industry and its allies have until Dec. 15 to collect enough signatures (623,212, to be exact) to qualify for the next general election. If they do, implementation of the law—which was supposed to go into effect the first day of January 2023—will be delayed until voters have their say in 2024.
“I am optimistic that the referendum will not be successful,” said state Sen. Lena Gonazalez (D-Long Beach), who authored S.B. 1137. “More than ever before, people believe in a carbon- and fossil-free future. And of course, we will not give up without a fight.”
The referendum has become a standard tactic in California for well-endowed special interests to reverse progressive gains, community organizers say
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