I’m at a small town’s BIG celebration of oil.
This is oil country.
But I’m not in Texas.
I’m not in North Dakota.
I’m in California.
Oil is our life's blood.
Oil is everything around here.
Oil, it is our roots.
It may come as a surprise
that the Golden State produces oil -
a lot of oil.
And most of it comes from here in Kern County.
Kern County is the Texas of California
because it’s conservative, and we have a lot of oil.
A lot of proponents of oil would look out at this
and see money, jobs, history.
What do you see when you look out there?
Polluting industry that kills people.
The state of California is taking aggressive action
to phase out fossil fuels.
But Kern County politicians are pushing back.
This notion that if we just stop producing oil
in Kern County, we’re gonna fix global warming,
that’s ridiculous.
I want to know what it’s like to live in a place
that’s so attached to oil.
A place that's also home
to a booming solar and wind industry.
Can a place like this ever break up with fossil fuels?
And if a county in California can’t figure out how,
what does that mean for the rest of the country?
Welcome to Oildorado.
Oildorado!
Yeehaw!
This 91-year-old festival in Taft
happens once every five years
and celebrates the area’s heritage
and economic backbone: oil.
I love the parade.
I love everything about it.
It's amazing.
Practically every parade float
is topped with an oil pump or derrick.
There’s a beauty pageant
called the “Maids of Petroleum.”
Never thought I'd see an oil beauty pageant, but...
...there we go!
And oil imagery is everywhere,
even on the local kids’ artwork.
You got to have oil.
It’s a huge part of this town.
Kern County was built on oil.
It was first extracted here in the mid 1800s.
And by the early 1900s, California led the country
in petroleum production.
Today, California is the seventh largest
oil producer in the U.S.
Kern County produces 70% of the state’s oil
and 90% of its natural gas.
And 1 in 7 workers in Kern
has a job tied to oil.
The jobs pay a lot,
and often don’t require more
than a high school diploma.
That’s a big deal in a county
that’s one of California’s poorest.
I've been here all my life, working in oil fields.
I do work in oil.
I'm a well packer.
Grandfather worked in oil,
my dad, my husband.
A lot of my friends still work in the oil industry.
That's what we did.
But just days before this year’s Oildorado,
130,000 gallons of oil
spilled off the coast of California
and washed up on beaches.
I wondered if the festival would
still go on as planned.
It did, and no one seemed fazed.
Do you think at all that it's kind of awkward
to be here celebrating oil when we just had a big oil spill?
No.
Oil's part of this world.
God put it there for a reason.
We're going to go get it.
Do you think that puts a damper on this event at all?
No. [laughs]
There's oil spills all the time, man.
We planned our oil festival
long before that happened.
This is Dave Noerr, the mayor of Taft.
He’s a proud pro-oil politician.
We would all love to be able to say,
"I'm going to invent a car. And it's...
sucking in polluted air and emitting nothing but poetry and petunias."
But that is not a reality.
Unfortunately, some of the policies coming out of Sacramento
are policies driven by emotion,
not driven by facts, not driven by science.
You don't think they're looking at science there?
Not enough.
No, I do not.
The tension between this Republican county
and California's Democratic governor
has ramped up.
In early 2021,
the Kern County Board of Supervisors
unanimously approved a plan that would allow
the drilling of 43,000 more oil and gas wells.
For now, that plan is on hold
as an environmental review is conducted.
Meanwhile, Governor Gavin Newsom
announced a ban on fracking,
and says the state will phase out drilling
completely by 2045.
The Kern County Board of Supervisors responded
by suing the administration.
Governor Newsom’s recent
overzealous, reckless and unconstitutional attack
on Kern County’s oil
is totally unacceptable.
California already imports more than half of its oil.
And oil proponents say that if the state
phases out local extraction,
it'll just have to import more from other countries.
Saudi Arabia, Colombia, Iran.
You're a woman.
You would not want to live in some of those places
because they completely ignore your rights
versus that of a male.
The less that we import
from countries that don't share our values,
the better off we're going to be.
I posed that argument to Juan Flores,
an environmental justice organizer.
When I hear statements like that,
it makes me laugh a little bit because
it's the same oil companies
that are invested in those countries as well.
Let's talk about human rights.
There's children of this community that
sometimes get to spend a whole week
inside of their school, not going out for recess,
because there's a really bad air quality day.
I’ll get to more with Juan later,
and learn about what the state’s plans are for Kern.
But first, I met up with Riddhi Patel,
an environmental activist
who was raised in Bakersfield,
Kern County’s largest city.
Tell me about this place.
It's a public park located next to
thousands of oil and gas wells.
It’s a huge oil field.
It's one of the most carbon intensive
oil fields that exist in the state.
Riddhi actively protests against the oil industry
and opposed the county’s efforts
to fast-track more well drilling.
So there's thousands of oil and gas wells in Kern County.
Over 24,000 wells, to be exact.
Another 16,000 are idle,
meaning they haven’t been used
in at least two years but aren’t plugged.
And the weirdest part is it's really glorified
to the point where it's something to be really proud of.
Oh, see –
Bakersfield High School,
"Home of the Oil Drillers."
Their mascot is literally oil drillers.
Yep. “Driller pride!”
Wow. So you see these things everywhere in the community here, right?
Yep.
The industry’s influence is everywhere.
In 2019, local oil and gas companies
contributed almost $200 million
in property tax revenue.
That money props up the community in significant ways,
funding things like fire departments and schools.
Oil companies also support
STEM programs at local colleges,
and they even fund parks.
This one is sponsored by Aera Energy.
And Oildorado’s main sponsor was Chevron,
which donated $55,000 to the festival.
They know that they have to get community support and good PR,
because they know
if you keep the county reliant on you,
they will have no choice
but to keep using the industry.
Kern survives off of its oil,
but oil is not the only energy source that’s abundant here.
The county also produces about one-fourth
of California’s renewable energy.
In fact, there are more wind turbines here
than in the entire northeast U.S.
But there aren’t nearly the same amount of jobs in renewables.
And because of property tax exemptions,
solar companies provide a fraction in taxes to the community.
Where are we going now?
So now we're going to an
oil pump jack that's located between two homes.
Riddhi says for too long, the county has reaped the benefits
of oil at the expense of its residents.
More than 71,000 people in Kern County
live within half a mile of oil and gas wells.
Close proximity to wells
has been linked to many health problems.
Literally in the middle of homes.
Riddhi grew up less than half a mile away
from an active pump jack,
and would often play around it.
I have asthma.
I deal with a lot of ongoing issues with family members.
They get valley fever because valley fever
is exacerbated by climate change.
And my story is not unique,
which is kind of the worst part.
Kern County has some of the worst
air quality in the nation.
People here have died from respiratory diseases,
like asthma,
at a rate 12 times higher than the rest of the state.
Beyond the long-term health impacts,
there’s also been high-profile disasters here.
Nearly a dozen homes in Arvin
remain under evacuation orders
due to a dangerous gas leak.
A massive oil spill of nearly 800,000 gallons of oil
and water have been dumped into the canyon.
An oil seep has been going on
for more than 15 years
at an oil field
in McKittrick.
A lot of these elected officials
will not address the real issues of the problem.
And it's pretty much, they don't care.
I wanted to hear from local Kern County officials
about their thoughts on the oil industry.
And I actually had an interview confirmed
with Lorelei Oviatt.
She’s the director of planning for the county.
She supported the ordinance
to fast-track more wells,
saying the wells were important
to the economy of Kern.
But she canceled my interview,
right before a judge put a pause on that ordinance,
and just two days after that oil spill off the coast.
But I tried again anyway.
She told us in an email:
We were told that, historically, Kern’s elected officials
and the oil industry have had close ties.
So we ran the numbers.
The current Kern County supervisors
- four Republicans and one Democrat -
have collectively received
tens of thousands of dollars
in political contributions from the oil industry
over the course of their careers.
None of them responded to our requests for comment.
We want them to stick their necks
out of Kern County and to see the rest of the world.
Juan says with many corporations
pledging 100% use of renewables,
and with the rise of electric car use,
Kern leaders need to adapt.
We cannot deny the reality of the world.
We cannot deny that we're moving into a different direction.
Once the oil is done, that's it.
there's nothing that is going to bring back the oil, right?
So it's going to happen
either way, you know?
Whether it's a political decision or it's nature.
At the oil festival,
I spoke to people, and I really understood their
existential attachment to oil.
If it were to end,
it would probably be a big devastation to this town.
Without this oil,
none of these towns would even exist.
It would become a ghost town.
This town’s gonna dry up.
What's your response to that?
If anybody would come and tell me,
"We're going to take your job away."
Oh! I'm going to be defensive about it, right?
We have to have a plan.
We call it a just transition.
A just transition involves moving an economy
away from fossil fuels
while providing a path to clean, high-quality jobs.
Juan says there could be plenty of work
in cleaning up oil wells.
One report estimated that just plugging current idle wells
would create more than 9,000 jobs.
Governor Newsom’s office told us in an email that
“promoting...inclusive economic
diversification in Kern...is a key priority.”
They pointed to a new fund
that will help support local communities
but didn’t respond to further questions.
Juan says that if any state can do it, it’s California.
We are the fifth largest economy of the world.
Right?
We always claim that we're the most progressive
state in the nation.
Well, it's time to prove it.
We have what it takes to come
and support the communities
and not leave these communities behind.
A spokesperson for the oil industry
didn’t answer our questions
about the health impacts of extraction
but told us when it comes to California’s future,
He said the best way to support communities like Kern
“is to allow safe production to continue.”
If Kern County can't figure out how to transition away from fossil fuels,
what hope do you have for the rest of America?
The hope that I have for the rest of America
is that everybody gets behind the whole idea of
a just transition and prove Kern County wrong.
That's what I'm pretty hopeful for.
Hey guys, thanks for watching.
In the next video, I head to Los Angeles
to investigate what’s left of the oil industry there.
Yep, before there was Hollywood,
there was a lot of oil.
And the remnants still linger
above and below the city streets.