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Being  a resident of California almost requires you to be some form of environmentalist and I certainly am one who is concerned about the environment and making sure we do what we can to protect it. But I also believe we need a level of realism in balancing the environment with the economy. Unless we plan to move  into caves again we need to recognize that work  and environment need to go hand in hand.

It is in this light that I find this ruling to be disturbing. Chevron was working to upgrade their equipment from the old 1930’s level of technology that was in place. In doing so they not only were working to make things cleaner and safer but were also providing jobs to 1,000 people.

But a radical environmental group decided  that this was not enough, so they sued  to stop Chevron. Having won the battle they now expect Chevron to keep paying the workers for doing no work while they work to try and satisfy the complaints of the environmentalists.

Again I am no fan of big oil and I do think we need cleaner air. But when you have radical groups like this (note, their own web site discusses their goals of ‘radical change’) things tend to get out of hand.  Based on their statements here as well as stuff on their web site they seem to expect a company to pay workers for  doing no work (IE Chevron) and to produce oil without any pollution (looking at what they expect Chevron to do as well as  what they expected  in other lawsuits).

With ideas like this you have to wonder if they live in the real  world.

PATRICK EDABURN, Assistant Editor
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Copyright 2009 The Moderate Voice
  • Don Quijote

    A link to their website would be nice…

    It ‘ll give the rest of us to see how radical they really are.

  • DR. CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTÉS, Assistant Editor, Columnist

    http://www.earthjustice.org/

    Hope that helps dear DQ

  • archangel

    http://www.earthjustice.org/

    I think this is the right one DQ. There were several groups who enjoined to push Chevron back from their project.

    Hope this helps your inquiry

    dr.e
    assistant editor, columnist TMV

  • Don Quijote

    But a radical environmental group decided that this was not enough, so they sued to stop Chevron.

    Earth Justice? Radical?

    so you’re a radical if you go to court and defeat a multinational conglomerate.

    What are you if you stand in front of the plant waving placards?
    What are you if you boycott the company? encourage other people to boycott the company?
    What are you if you blow up parts of the plant? what are you if you kill people who work for the company? about the executives?

  • superdestroyer

    Welcome to the future. When Congress passes cap and trade it will be virtually impossible to build anything new in the U.S. that emits greenhouse gases will require an environmental assessment and the eco-socialist activist will be able to tie it up in the courts for years.

    My guess is why the U.S. needs an EPA when ever decision has to be approved by a court before it can go forward. Why not just skip the EPA permitting process and have the courts regulate industry directly.

    I wonder if all of the so called environmental activist know how hard poverty can be on one’s health? Since the EPA believes that the U.S. can go back to subsistence farming while maintaining a life expectancy of over 70 years, my guess is that the activist do not know.

  • GeorgeSorwell

    Here’s a news article about this.

  • Patrick, I nominate your hometown to be home to the high sulfur heavy crude refinery and the 1,000 jobs. Congratulations.

    Please tell me EarthJustice was not the organization you described as radical. Pretty highly respected, actually. Here’s a list of some of their radical treehugger victories:
    http://www.earthjustice.org/our_work/victory/

  • Lathamisajoke

    FAIL.

    Chevron announced in May that they were putting off replacing the 1930’s boilers from the power plant. That’s not what this lawsuit was about.

    What Chevron was attempting to build now was two major components of the project that relate to heavier crude. They hid that fact in the report, beause it would blast an already polluted community with even more pollution. They wrote a bogus EIR and got busted by the court.

    Now they have to try again.

  • Don Quijote

    Please tell me EarthJustice was not the organization you described as radical.

    Don’t you know that anyone who stands up to Corporate America and it’s sycophants is a radical as far as moderates are concerned.

  • superdestroyer

    So should all refining take place outside of the U.S. since it will be cheaper and easier. Remember, the EPA is not allowed to consider the health risks of being unemployed and the health risks of a shrinking economy when considering impacts.

    I guess the U.S. is back to the question os how can there be employees without employers. If everyone works for the government then who pays the taxes?

  • DLS

    “I also believe we need a level of realism in balancing the environment with the economy.”

    That’s not only politically incorrect. That is sacreligious, in some cases (see “global warming”).

    I grew up in California and don’t miss the worst lefty lunacy for which that state is known. I’m normal and healthy — I despise and even abhor it. Yeech.

    * * *

    “But a radical environmental group decided that this was not enough, so they sued to stop Chevron.”

    “So should all refining take place outside of the U.S. since it will be cheaper and easier.”

    These idiots are also anti-coal here in the Eastern USA (mindlessly so; they have no realistic, economical, practical alternative, as they typically are idiotically anti-nuclear, too) and those I’ve seen before in California are also typically anti-natural-gas, in part responsible for the decision to locate new liquefied natural gas facilities south of the border in Baja California. Oh, and they wanted San Onofre shut down as well as opposing Diablo Canyon before and after that nuclear facility was built, too, naturally.

    They’re often also opposed to new transmission facilities, long overdue, too. They even already oppose _wind_ projects where they make sense, in the case of Cape Wind in the eastern USA at a top wind resource site. (The latest objection is that it is a private sector, i.e., likely successful commercially as well as obviously well-situated, project. But I suspect part of this, as in California’s case, is not radical enviro-lunacy but just plain NIMBY-ism.)

    http://www.saveoursound.org/site/PageServer

    Meanwhile, the result of their foolishness in California is that California is reliant upon other states for much of its electrical power supply (and eventually, if not already, natural gas from LNG facilties put elsewhere). Presumably they can expect other states to do the refining of petroleum, too, though wherever else it would be situated, it would still be opposed by the worst of the fools.

    “When Congress passes cap and trade it will be virtually impossible to build anything new in the U.S. that emits greenhouse gases will require an environmental assessment and the eco-socialist activist will be able to tie it up in the courts for years. ”

    Some of the activists will be so radical they even will irritate the little green fascists in Washington and their counterparts in Sacramento.

    Note that Washington is compounding the radical-environmental idiocy in this country with its recent garbage climate bill. It includes not only silly wave-a-wand greenhouse-gas reduction goals to assuage many of the global-warming religious-cult totalitarians, but also begins imposing minimum “alternative” (“clean” or “green” or whatever other happy words you’d rather insert) energy requirements on utilities.

    I.e., it’s taking a notorious political problem (dishonestly garbed as “science” [sic] or “a better future” [sic], etc.) that we already see in many states (notably including diseased behavior directed against both coal _and_ nuclear power in addition to irrational and irresponsible expectations about alternatives that are less practical or impractical, as well as costlier), and directly implementing them (or trying to, for now) as _federal_ policy. Sacramento goes to Washington, in other words. [gag, cough the _polluting_ nature of such a phenomenon]

    * * *

    “Patrick, I nominate your hometown to be home to the high sulfur heavy crude refinery and the 1,000 jobs.”

    Well, plenty other people would take that, or any new prisons, and of course California is so pathetic it can’t house all its prisoners, so less-pathetic-but-also-pathetic Michigan is offering to house them here in numerous prisons Michigan is set to close. Hell, stuff the radicals resist as well as the dirty stuff the NIMBYs seem happy to export, too, can all go to the Rust Belt, which stands otherwise to be depopulated as well as deindustrialized, and thus substantially downsized otherwise in our future. (I don’t hear enviro folks clamoring to convert so much of this older, declining part of the country into parklands or exchanging land here in the East for the grossly excessive lands in the West still locked up by a colonialist federal government.)