Occupy Forum: “What’s that Stench?” Fossil Fuel Infrastructure Expansion in the Bay Area.

Information, discussion & community! Monday Night Forum!!

Occupy Forum is an opportunity for open and respectful dialogue

on all sides of these critically important issues!

OccupyForum presents

 What’s That Stench??? 

Fossil Fuel Infrastructure Expansion

in the North Bay / Pittsburg

and the Campaign to Stop it in its Tracks

 

The WesPac Pittsburg Energy Infrastructure Project would transform Pittsburg CA 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. Do we want the Bay Area to be the locus of this scheme which threatens Pittburg and North Bay towns and our Bay,

not to mention the climate impact of burning all that fossil fuel???

Lyana Monterey from the Pittsburg Community, Diane Bailey (senior scientist with the NRDC), Valerie Love from the Center from Biological Diversity, Ernest Machen and Damien Luzzo from Sunflower Alliance, and Dr. Henry C. Clark from Richmond Progressive Alliance will give us the backstory and details about what a growing coalition of folks is doing to stop WesPac in its tracks. We will cover: how the community got organized; the science, health, air quality and regulatory laws; the ecology; the big picture re: tar sands and climate; crude by rail; the coalition-building and activism developing, community rights-based ordinances and how they might be applied in Pittsburg, and, with you, brainstorm how we can all work together to stop this.
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, cancer and birth defects, 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), — jeopardized property values, and critically, significant impact on greenhouse gas emissions warming the climate are the risks and threats. This development would include:

http://baykeeper.org/blog/better-pollution-controls-needed-proposed-pittsburg-oil-terminalhttp://pittsburgdc.org/