What’s That Stench??? Rude Crude Threatens our Bay!!!

Categories:

When:
November 7, 2013 @ 3:00 am – 5:00 am
2013-11-07T03:00:00+00:00
2013-11-07T05:00:00+00:00
Where:
Berkeley Ecology Center
2530 San Pablo Avenue
Berkeley, CA 94702
USA
Contact:

As we step up a concerted transition to alternative energy, Big Oil lurches towards its last gasp: exponential development of fossil fuel infrastructure at West Coast ports for transport, storage, refining and shipping to Asian markets.

The WesPac Pittsburg Energy Infrastructure Project would transform Pittsburg (a dormant industrial, residential area in our Northern San Francisco Bay) into a major crude oil receiving, storage and shipping facility. WesPac develops, constructs, owns and operates infrastructure throughout North America for petroleum products handling, and Pittsburg is the next target for modernization and reactivation of its existing marine terminal and oil storage and transfer systems.

Plans are to move Canadian tar sands crude to the Chevron and Shell refineries through pipelines and extended rail systems, load it onto ships and send it to Asia to the tune of 242,000 barrels per day. This is the same dirty crude slated for the Keystone XL pipeline, a project drawing widespread opposition. Even dirtier crude oil would be shipped to the WesPac facility from southern California. Oil would also come from a huge deposit in North Dakota, which, like the California oil, would be extracted by fracking.

This development will include:

— Pipelines: Expand existing pipelines and add new lines from rail cars to tanks;
— New Rail: Build crude-by-rail transload facility; extend tracks, greatly increase rail shipments thru town;
— Storage: Modernize and reactivate the site’s tanks and build new ones;
— Tanker trucks, diesel trucks: Mobilize for construction and transport: (congestion, diesel fumes, road deterioration, traffic hazards);
— Shipping: Dredge and pile drive to deepen the Bay and reopen, expand and modernize Marine Terminal

Spills, leaks, blow-ups, smog, gas, fires (like the one in Richmond), soil contamination, prolonged effects on area air and water quality and health effects such as asthma, birth defects, and cancer, loom. Increased pollution from idling trucks, rail cars and ships — affecting wildlife, marshes and wetlands, the shoreline, polluted water in the delta (water used for drinking and agriculture), and decreased property values — will result. Pittsburg will become a fossil fuel backwater, and critically, greenhouse gas emissions, warming the climate, and threatening the integrity of our global ecosystem, jeopardize us all. Do we want the Bay Area to be the locus of this scheme to expand fossil fuel extraction and use? Do we want the health of Pittsburg and North Bay residents to be undermined by these environmental threats? And can we stand by as life on our planet is under attack?

Stand with Pittsburg and the Bay Area to Say “NO” to

Expansion of Fossil Fuel Infrastructure on our Bay

Come to the Berkeley Ecology Center to meet the groups forming to fight this and get involved in the upcoming actions and campaigns. We’ll hear the background and plan the backlash.

Coalition to fight massive tar sands export from our Bay: Pittsburg Defense Council, Idle No More, Baykeeper, Communities for a Better Environment, 350Bay Area, National Resource Defense Council, Sierra Club, Groups from North Bay refinery towns, OccupySF Environmental Justice, Forest Ethics, Richmond Progressive Alliance, Refinery Action Collaborative, Sunflower Alliance, No Tar Sands, Steelworkers, Occupy Action Council, and more joining every minute!!!

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