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For Immediate Release
October, 06 2020, 12:00am EDT
Contact:
Gabby Brown, gabby.brown@sierraclub.org
New Report: CRC's Failure Could Leave California Taxpayers with $900 Million Burden
New analysis shows that, without action from CalGEM, California’s biggest oil and gas producer could leave the state to pay for remediation of thousands of abandoned wells.
WASHINGTON
A new analysis released today by the Sierra Club shows that the financial failure of California Resources Corporation (CRC) could leave California taxpayers bearing more than $900 million in costs for the remediation of thousands of CRC's abandoned wells.
CRC, which filed for bankruptcy in July, has an ownership interest in 17,971 wells in California, the vast majority of which produce little or no oil and gas. If left unplugged, idle wells can cause enormous environmental and economic harm, leaking greenhouse gases, contaminating soil and groundwater, and deteriorating property values. California law requires fossil fuel companies to pay to clean up their own idle wells, but when companies go out of business the state - and its taxpayers - are left with the obligation to close their wells.
As the bankruptcy court is scheduled to consider CRC's proposed reorganization plan on October 13, this new report, "The Risk of Unplugged Wells for California's Taxpayers; California Resources Corporation - A Case Study," digs into the company's current and projected finances to determine whether CRC will be able to cover its massive well remediation obligation or whether those costs will be left to California taxpayers. Key findings from the report include:
- More than three quarters of CRC's nearly 18,000 wells are past the end of their productive lives. Almost 2,200 of those wells have already sat idle for 15 or more years.
- In total, CRC's wells would cost in excess of $900 million to close today; a cost that will only rise going forward.
- Based on current market conditions, CRC is unlikely to generate positive cash flow between now and 2025, and it is unlikely that CRC will have any revenues set aside for closure obligations by 2025. CRC is also unlikely to generate positive cash flows after 2025.
- If the state fails to require CRC to set aside funds to pay for its well closure obligations as part of the bankruptcy proceeding, taxpayers could eventually be left to cover more than $900 million in costs to plug CRC's abandoned wells.
The California Geologic Energy Management (CalGEM) Division of the California Department of Conservation is entitled to participate in CRC's bankruptcy as the regulator overseeing the company's operations. But despite being responsible for ensuring that CRC satisfies its obligations, the state has yet to intervene.
Last year, despite struggling to turn a profit, CRC's CEO still took home a sizable bonus.
"Without intervention from CalGEM, CRC is on track to make sure its executives remain well-paid while workers are left behind and California taxpayers are left with the $900 million bill for cleaning up the company's mess," said Monica Embrey, Associate Director of the Sierra Club's Beyond Dirty Fuels campaign. "CRC may be the first major oil company to fail in California, but it certainly won't be the last. It's critical that the state use its authority to protect workers, communities, and our climate by holding these companies accountable for their massive well closure obligations."
The Sierra Club is the most enduring and influential grassroots environmental organization in the United States. We amplify the power of our 3.8 million members and supporters to defend everyone's right to a healthy world.
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'Cracks Are Beginning to Show': Even 79% of Trump Voters Want Quick End to Iran War
“While Trump voters by and large stand behind Trump, they overwhelmingly want him to declare an end to the war."
Mar 18, 2026
War hawks such as Sen. Lindsey Graham are pushing President Donald Trump to keep escalating the war he is waging against Iran, but a new poll of the president's base—those who voted for him in 2024, when he campaigned on "no new wars"—found that doing so would likely anger the steadily shrinking faction of Americans who have thus far continued to support him.
The poll, commissioned by the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and The American Conservative, found that 79% of those who voted for Trump in 2024 want a swift end to the US and Israel's war in Iran, which began on February 28 when the president abruptly ended talks regarding Iran's nuclear program and joined Israel in attacking the country.
The survey revealed a political reality at odds with Trump's recent claim that "MAGA loves what I’m doing—every aspect of it."
More than a year after they cast votes for Trump, who campaigned relentlessly on making life more affordable for Americans, the poll found that 55% of people who supported the president are concerned about rising gas prices as a result of the war. The average price of gas has been steadily rising since the US and Israel began the war, leading Iran to close the Strait of Hormuz, through which around a fifth of the global oil supply flows. As of Wednesday the average price in the US was up to $3.842 per gallon.
Fifty-eight percent of Trump voters said they would oppose sending US troops to fight on the ground in Iran, a step the president is reportedly considering taking in order to seize Iran's crucial oil hub on Kharg Island in the Strait of Hormuz.
Just over three-quarters of people who backed Trump in the last election said they supported the president's decision to go to war, but less than a month into the conflict, that number is down eight points from 84% on February 28, according to a Fox News poll at the time.
Quincy Institute executive vice president Trita Parsi noted that even the White House is seemingly searching "for an off-ramp from this widening conflict," in which 13 US troops have been killed and 200 have been wounded. More than 1,300 Iranians have been killed, according to the country's ambassador to the United Nations, as well as more than 900 Lebanese civilians, and at least 15 people in Israel.
"Trump’s base favors a face-saving declaration of victory by Washington that could enable a ceasefire and prevent further economic shocks."
Trump said earlier this week that "maybe we shouldn’t be there at all," and his advisers have reportedly been calling on the president to quickly determine an exit plan to avoid a political backlash.
Meanwhile, said Parsi, "neoconservatives are pressuring President Trump to double down on this war. But this poll shows that Trump’s base favors a face-saving declaration of victory by Washington that could enable a ceasefire and prevent further economic shocks."
In Responsible Statecraft, which is published by the Quincy Institute, Kelley Beaucar Vlahos noted that young MAGA voters, whose support was instrumental in delivering the White House for Trump in 2024, are "driving much of the rising opposition to the war among the president's base."
Only 54% of Trump voters aged 18-29 said they supported the war, while 46% opposed it.
"The cracks are beginning to show in President Donald Trump’s base" over the war, wrote Beaucar Vlahos.
Saagar Enjeti, conservative host of the popular Breaking Points podcast, told Responsible Statecraft that "the Republican base is clearly willing to trust President Trump up to a point but remain weary of any potential escalation."
“As evidenced by this polling the wisest move would be to declare victory and end this immediately," he said.
The poll, which was taken between March 12-14, was released a day after Joe Kent, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, announced he was resigning from his position because Iran had "posed no imminent threat to our nation" when Trump began the war. The president, said the longtime Trump loyalist, had attacked Iran "due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby."
Kent, whom critics noted has ties to white nationalists and conspiracy theorists, is the most prominent Trump administration official to resign from the White House in protest of the president's policies and actions.
On Wednesday, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said in her opening statement that the US intelligence community determined that US airstrikes last year "obliterated" Iran's nuclear enrichment program, before claiming that the president alone can determine whether a country poses an "imminent" threat.
While those who voted for the president "by and large stand behind Trump, they overwhelmingly want him to declare an end to the war,” said Parsi on Wednesday. “Trump risks losing significant portions of his base if he escalates the war with ground troops and allows the war to further push up gas prices.”
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Trump FBI and IRS Team Up to Probe US Nonprofit Groups for 'Domestic Terrorism' Links
"This is repression carried out by the state for electoral purposes. It's about stamping out your objections to their autocratic aims," said one critic.
Mar 18, 2026
A Wednesday CBS News report claimed that the FBI and Internal Revenue Service are "forming a new initiative to investigate nonprofit organizations over suspected possible links to domestic terrorism."
According to CBS News, the new initiative is the agencies' response to a December memo written by Attorney General Pam Bondi requiring the US Department of Justice (DOJ) to compile a list of potential “domestic terrorism” organizations that espouse "extreme viewpoints on immigration, radical gender ideology, and anti-American sentiment."
A government official told CBS News that the FBI-IRS initiative would focus on "exploring potential funding streams at nonprofits that support domestic terrorism or political violence."
But Tom Brzozowski, former domestic terrorism counsel at the DOJ's National Security Division, told CBS News he was concerned by the broad scope of investigatory activities outlined in Bondi's memo, and he questioned whether the DOJ had established the proper predication to justify amassing a list of nonprofit groups to be targeted in a criminal probe.
"If you're going to pull down information and retain it in a government data set, you have to have predication to do that," Brzozowski emphasized, "especially if you're looking at it through an investigative lens."
Bondi's December memo was written in response to National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7), a directive signed by President Donald Trump in September that demanded a "national strategy to investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations that foment political violence so that law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts."
Rights groups have for months been sounding the alarm about the implications of NSPM-7, which they said could be used to initiative a widespread crackdown against the Trump administration's critics.
Melanie D'Arrigo, executive director of Campaign for New York Health, wrote that news of the FBI-IRS initiative was a "periodic reminder that Trump’s DOJ changed the indicators of domestic terrorism to include pro-immigrant, pro-LBTQ, anti-Trump, and anti-capitalist speech."
Journalist Marcy Wheeler wrote that the FBI's initiative with the IRS shows it's "trying to criminalize dissent over protecting against Islamic and antisemitic terrorism that Trump has stoked with his illegal war" against Iran.
Journalist Diego Fonseca noted that going after nonprofit groups has long been a hallmark of authoritarian regimes seeking to consolidate power.
"[Salvadoran President Nayib] Bukele has treated nongovernmental organizations as 'foreign agents,'" Fonseca observed, while Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor] Orbán "has a 'Transparency Law' targeting civil society orgs. Left or right, it’s the authoritarian playbook: round up and paralyze any possible criticism."
Matt Ortega, a Democrat running to represent California's 14th Congressional District in the US House of Representatives, warned that the FBI-IRS initiative was a sign of a widespread crackdown against political opposition.
"They called Alex Pretti a 'domestic terrorist' and only backtracked because witnesses had NFL-like coverage of the incident," Ortega wrote. "This is repression carried out by the state for electoral purposes. It's about stamping out your objections to their autocratic aims."
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Emergency Lawsuit Filed to Stop Trump Admin Meeting That Could Drive a Whale Species to Extinction
“Burgum’s Extinction Committee is immoral, illegal, and unnecessary,” said the head of the Center for Biological Diversity, which warns it could put the final nail in the coffin of the extremely endangered Rice's whale.
Mar 18, 2026
An environmental organization is suing to stop the Trump administration from illegally convening a meeting that could allow oil and gas companies to drive an extremely endangered whale species to extinction.
On Wednesday, the Center for Biological Diversity filed an emergency lawsuit against Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum in a federal district court in Washington, DC, seeking to block him from convening the Endangered Species Committee, more commonly known as the “Extinction Committee,” on March 31.
This committee is sometimes referred to as the "God Squad" because its members have the power to grant exemptions to the Endangered Species Act that can result in the extinction of imperiled species.
Led by the interior secretary, it has seven total members who can vote to override regulations. Five of them are senior executive officials: the secretaries of agriculture and the Army, the head of the Council of Economic Advisers, and the administrators of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Each affected state also receives a delegate to the committee, but they collectively receive just one vote. Five votes of seven are needed to grant an exemption.
In the federal register, Burgum announced earlier this week that the committee would meet at the end of the month “regarding an Endangered Species Act exemption for Gulf of America oil and gas activities," referring to the Gulf of Mexico by the name preferred by President Donald Trump.
The Center for Biological Diversity said Burgum was seeking to override a requirement for oil and gas companies in the Gulf of Mexico to drive boats at safe speeds in order to protect the nearly extinct Rice’s whale from strikes.
These whales, named after the cetologist Dale Rice, who first recognized them as distinct from other whales in 1965, were not formally recognized as a new species until 2021.
According to the Center for Biological Diversity, only about 51 Rice's whales remain after BP's catastrophic Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, which devastated their population.
Last May, NOAA's National Marine Fisheries Service issued a biological opinion concluding that their continued existence—as well as that of other whale and sea turtle species—was under threat from boat strikes, since Rice's whales spend most of their time in the top 15 meters of water, which often puts them on a collision course with oil vessels.
The agency issued guidance requiring oil industry ships to travel at slower speeds in the eastern Gulf, saying that if they were followed, lethal collisions would be “extremely unlikely to occur” and that the species would be protected.
The Extinction Committee could override this rule, but it has only been convened three times in its history, and not since 1991, when then-President George H.W. Bush used it to open up timber harvests in the Pacific Northwest that endangered the habitats of spotted owls, which were considered threatened under the Endangered Species Act.
The Extinction Committee is invoked so rarely because the circumstances for its use, as outlined in law, are extremely narrow: It can only be convened within 90 days of a biological opinion by the US Fish and Wildlife Service or the National Marine Fisheries Service concluding that a federal action is likely to jeopardize a species. They must also determine that there is no “reasonable and prudent alternative” to the action the government plans to take.
In its lawsuit, the Center for Biological Diversity says that neither of these criteria has been reached, since the Fisheries Service issued its opinion 10 months ago and already established a reasonable alternative: slowing down the boats.
"Slowing boat speeds is not just reasonable, it’s easy, and it’s the absolute minimum the oil and gas industry can do to save Rice’s whales from extinction,” said Kierán Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity.
The group said Burgum is also flouting other requirements of the law, including that the meeting be presided over by an administrative judge and have a formal hearing with public comment. No judge has been appointed by Burgum, and the meeting is only scheduled to be livestreamed on YouTube, with no forum for public input.
“Burgum’s Extinction Committee is immoral, illegal, and unnecessary,” Suckling said. “There’s no emergency, no legal basis to convene the committee, and no legal way to approve the extinction of Rice’s whales. This sham is nothing more than Burgum posturing for Trump and saving the fossil fuel industry a few dollars by allowing its boats to drive faster and more recklessly.”
If Rice's whales were to go extinct, they could be the first ever large whale species to be driven out of existence by human activity in recorded history. Earthjustice says that the rollback of boat speed restrictions and other activities by the Trump administration—including the approval of the first BP oil field in the Gulf since the 2010 spill—are putting other species at risk too.
The scheduled March 31 meeting, said the group, "could kick off a months-long process to decide whether to give special treatment to the oil industry by allowing offshore drilling to go forward even if it would lead to the extinction of Gulf species."
“The marine species in the Gulf are our natural heritage. There’s no imaginable justification to sacrifice them,” said Steve Mashuda, Earthjustice's managing attorney for oceans. "It’s beyond reckless even to consider greenlighting the extinction of sea turtles, fish, whales, rays, and corals to further pad the oil industry’s pockets at the public’s expense. Giving carte blanche to industry also takes us further away from renewable energy that is cleaner, cheaper, more reliable, and more efficient than ever before.”
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