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For Immediate Release
February, 16 2024, 05:08pm EDT
Contact:
Linda Krop, Environmental Defense Center,
LKrop@EnvironmentalDefenseCenter.org
Julie Teel Simmonds, Center for Biological Diversity, jteelsimmonds@biologicaldiversity.org
ExxonMobil Drops Court Bid to Truck Oil in Santa Barbara
LOS ANGELES
ExxonMobil’s dangerous proposal to truck massive amounts of oil along California highways is dead after the company dropped its lawsuit challenging Santa Barbara County’s denial of the plan.
Exxon’s plan would have helped the company restart three drilling platforms off the Santa Barbara coast. The platforms, built in the 1980s, have been shut down since the disastrous 2015 Refugio oil spill that leaked more than 140,000 gallons of heavy crude on the Gaviota Coast and into the ocean. Exxon notified the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California late Thursday that the company is dismissing its lawsuit.
The Environmental Defense Center and the Center for Biological Diversity successfully intervened in the lawsuit in 2022 on behalf of several environmental and Indigenous groups opposed to the trucking plan and the company’s intent to restart its platforms.
“ExxonMobil’s plan to restart its offshore platforms and truck millions of gallons per week through Santa Barbara County was reckless, dangerous and totally unwelcome by this community,” said Linda Krop, chief counsel of the Environmental Defense Center, which represents Get Oil Out!, Santa Barbara County Action Network, Surfrider Foundation and Sierra Club. “Recent oil tanker truck accidents and offshore oil spills show just how dangerous this plan was. Our research revealed that there have been eight serious accidents involving tanker trucks along the proposed route in the last several years, resulting in deaths, oil spills, injuries, fires, and road closures.
The county’s denial was based on the project’s significant and unavoidable harms to biological, water and cultural resources in the event of a spill, as well as threats to public safety.
“Santa Barbara hosts some of the most spectacular coastlines and natural coastal resources in our country,” said Angela Howe, Surfrider Foundation senior legal director. “This dismissal affirms the action of the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors, protecting the area from the additional risks of oil spills, traffic accidents, as well as air and water pollution from ExxonMobil’s dangerous project to transport crude oil through this sensitive region.”
The court upheld the county’s rejection of the plan in a September 2023 decision but had not ruled on all the claims brought in the case. Exxon’s dismissal will terminate the lawsuit entirely. The company’s abandonment of its remaining claims coincides with its sale of its Santa Ynez Unit assets to Sable Offshore Corp.
“The dismissal of this case puts an end, once and for all, to this ill-conceived proposal,” said Michael Lyons, board president of Get Oil Out! “Each tanker truck and its full load of oil would have been a ticking time bomb, threatening the lives of those on the highways and our environment. An oil spill catastrophe has been prevented.”
ExxonMobil’s proposal would have allowed the company to truck vast quantities of oil on coastal Highway 101 and Route 166. The plan to haul millions of gallons of oil per week through Santa Barbara County would have been a step towards restarting the company’s offshore platforms and resuming operations at its Las Flores Canyon processing facility, which was the largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the county.
“It’s welcome news that Exxon’s dangerous trucking scheme is done with, but the fight to keep California’s coast safe from oil spills is far from over,” said Julie Teel Simmonds, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. “All oil companies should take note that California’s coastal communities don’t want oil drilling and transport that puts people and wildlife at risk. We’ll work hard to make sure no company has an opportunity to cause California’s next catastrophic oil spill or accident.”
“Exxon has long been one of the most heinous polluters of Chumash homelands,” said Mati Waiya, executive director of the Wishtoyo Chumash Foundation. “We celebrate this massive victory against Exxon and warn any and all future resource extractors that we will not stop fighting.”
“From corroded pipelines to tanker trucks to attempting to finance a sale of this troubled project to Sable to avoid direct liability, Exxon will stop at nothing to endanger the Santa Barbara coastline,” said Sierra Club Santa Barbara-Ventura Chapter director Jonathan Ullman. “The whole aging oil operation should be withdrawn along with the lawsuit.”
California suffers hundreds of oil-truck incidents a year, and many result in oil spills. There were 258 trucking accidents along the planned route from 2015 to 2021. Since 2007 eight oil tanker truck accidents have occurred that resulted in six deaths, multiple injuries, fires, road closures, and oil spills. In 2020 Santa Barbara County planning staff recommended a prohibition on oil tanker trucks on Route 166 after a major accident spilled more than 4,500 gallons into the Cuyama River.
At the Center for Biological Diversity, we believe that the welfare of human beings is deeply linked to nature — to the existence in our world of a vast diversity of wild animals and plants. Because diversity has intrinsic value, and because its loss impoverishes society, we work to secure a future for all species, great and small, hovering on the brink of extinction. We do so through science, law and creative media, with a focus on protecting the lands, waters and climate that species need to survive.
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'Holding The Line': Municipal Workers' Strike Enters Second Week as Philly Refuses to Pay Living Wage
"We got people that work and repair the water mains and can't afford their water bill," said union leader Greg Boulware last week. "I don't want to be rich. We just want comfort inside the city that we serve daily."
Jul 07, 2025
Philadelphia's largest municipal workers' strike in over 40 years is entering its second week after negotiations with the city broke down this weekend.
Over 9,000 sanitation workers, 911 dispatchers, water services workers, crossing guards, and other city employees walked off the job last week, demanding that the city increase their salary enough to meet the rising cost of living.
But even with trash piling up on the streets and other city services understaffed, Mayor Cherelle Parker (D) would not agree to the demands made by AFSCME District Council 33, Philadelphia's largest blue-collar union.
Parker has offered a pay increase of 8.75% over the next three years, which she described as historic.
But DC 33 president Greg Boulware said that's far too little for municipal workers, many of whom are among the city's "working poor," to survive.
"It's not like as if our members are making $80,000, $90,000 a year," Boulware said. "A 2% increase on those would be significantly higher than it would be on somebody making $40,000-$45,000 a year. So, her math truly is not mathing, and you're clearly not paying attention to the working people that are going on in this city."
The average municipal worker in Philadelphia makes around $46,000, which is $15,000 less than the median income in the city and less than half of what a single adult needs to live comfortably, according to a study by SmartAsset.
"We got people that work and repair the water mains and can't afford their water bill," Boulware said at a rally last week. "We got people that repair the runways at the airport and can't afford a plane ticket. I don't want to be rich. We just want a comfort inside the city that we serve daily."
The union initially asked for an 8% raise for the next four years, which the city dismissed. This weekend, they pared their proposal down to 5%, but the city still did not budge.
Parker has insisted that her smaller proposed increases are merely what is "fiscally responsible," and that the city cannot afford to offer more.
The union has disputed this, pointing out that Parker herself is budgeted to receive a 9% increase to her salary of more than $240,000. That increase alone is nearly half the current salary that the average DC 33 member makes in a year.
As of Monday, negotiations have stalled, with no clear end in sight. With a throng of picketers behind him, Boulware told NBC 10, a local affiliate, that the union was working on a third proposal, and that negotiations may resume Tuesday. But he seemed to expect more obstinacy from the city.
"We've been there to be able to sit and meet and negotiate," he said. "It doesn't seem like the city quite honestly wants to entertain any of the questions that we have about things and actually have a true dialogue... That's how you negotiate and that's not truly what's been going on."
Despite the city's refusal to budge, momentum around the strike has continued to grow. On Friday, rapper LL Cool J dropped out of a 4th of July festival in the city, saying, "There is absolutely no way I can perform across a picket line."
Other AFSCME councils around Pennsylvania have joined pickets in solidarity. This includes Philadelphia's Council 47, which represents thousands of "white collar" city workers.
With mounds of trash accumulating on streets, sometimes becoming as "tall as people," the environmental activists with the Sunrise Movement have also joined in the effort to pressure the city. On Monday, activists hauled bags of trash into the lobby of City Hall, labeled with the words "Meet DC 33 Demands" written in yellow tape.
AFSCME, meanwhile, has stated its resolve to fight on as the strike has gained national attention.
"City workers are holding the line until they get a FAIR contract with the wages and benefits they deserve," the national union's account wrote on X Monday. "One day longer, one day stronger, no matter what it takes."
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LA Residents Hurl Profane Insults at Border Patrol After Agents Sweep Local Park
"You are not helping by snatching people!" yelled one local woman.
Jul 07, 2025
Los Angeles residents lobbed profane insults at U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents on Monday after they swept through the city's MacArthur Park.
Los Angeles-based news station KTLA reports that masked, heavily-armed federal agents were in the park as "part of an apparent immigration raid" although exact details about the operation are not known as of this writing. A video taken on the scene by Mel Buer, an independent labor journalist in the California city and posted on social media website Bluesky showed many agents riding through the park on horseback.
Border patrol walking McArthur park here in LA
[image or embed]
— Mel Buer (@melbuer.bsky.social) July 7, 2025 at 1:49 PM
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass (D) reacted angrily after seeing reports of the agents—some of whom had visible Border Protection patches—in the park and she went to the area to tell them to cease their operations.
"Minutes before, there were more than 20 kids playing—then, the MILITARY comes through," Bass wrote in a post on the social media website X. "The SECOND I heard about this, I went to the park to speak to the person in charge to tell them it needed to end NOW. Absolutely outrageous."
Additional videos posted on Bluesky by Buer showed angry Los Angeles residents following the agents as they drove slowly down the street away from the park while pelting them with verbal abuse.
"Get the fuck out of here!" one male resident can be heard shouting at the agents.
"You guys are a bunch of pussies!" yelled another.
Shortly after this, a woman can be heard scolding the agents: "You are not helping by snatching people!"
After Bass spoke with what I assume is a DHS rep, they packed shit up and headed out. The whole neighborhood turned out to chase them out of the park. Some fruit was thrown, alot of yelling
[image or embed]
— Mel Buer (@melbuer.bsky.social) July 7, 2025 at 2:29 PM
California Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat, condemned the federal operations in Los Angeles shortly after they occurred.
"The actions of [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] and CBP during the raids in Los Angeles are not about safety or justice—they're about meeting enforcement quotas and striking fear in communities," he wrote on Bluesky. "We've filed a brief supporting a challenge to ICE and CBP's unlawful practices. We won't back down and we won't be silent."
Los Angeles has become a focal point in the Trump administration's mass deportation operations. President Donald Trump last month deployed the National Guard to the city after some protests against ICE operations there turned violent.
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Top Medical Organizations Warn RFK Jr. Putting American Kids 'At Grave and Immediate Risk'
"Truth and transparency are not desired by the secretary... he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies," stated a new lawsuit.
Jul 07, 2025
Six major medical organizations on Monday filed a lawsuit against Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. alleging he is putting American children at "grave and immediate risk" because of his policy on vaccines.
The plaintiffs in the lawsuit—including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Physicians, the American Public Health Association, the Infectious Diseases Society of America, the Massachusetts Public Health Association, and the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine—charged that Kennedy earlier this year made a "baseless and uninformed policy decision" when he removed vaccinations against Covid-19 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) official immunization schedule for "healthy" children and pregnant women.
The organizations emphasized that unless Kennedy's decision is reversed, "all children remain at grave and immediate risk of contracting a preventable disease" and further warned that it "exposes... vulnerable populations to a serious disease with potentially irreversible long-term effects and, in some cases, death."
The plaintiffs further charged that Kennedy's directive removing the Covid-19 vaccines from the immunization schedule was "but one example of the secretary's agenda to dismantle the longstanding... science- and evidence-based vaccine infrastructure that has prevented the deaths of untold millions of Americans."
The complaint then documented Kennedy's long history of statements and articles that have peddled false claims about the safety of vaccinations and pointed to his mass dismissals of staff at HHS and his appointment of likeminded vaccine critics to argue that "it has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies."
Given this, the plaintiffs argued that Kennedy's decision to remove the Covid-19 vaccine from immunization schedules was "arbitrary and capricious" based on what they described as "vast and irrefutable evidence," including congressional testimony delivered by Kennedy in which he acknowledged that people shouldn't "be taking medical advice from me"; that Kennedy's directive directly contradicted an article published by the Food and Drug Administration days earlier stating that pregnancy was a condition that "increased a person's risk of severe Covid-19"; and that Kennedy did not identify specific recommendations from professional staff that he used as justification to restrict the availability of the vaccine.
Should courts find that Kennedy's decision was "arbitrary and capricious" as alleged by the plaintiffs, they would have the power to enjoin the policy under the Administrative Procedures Act, which was also employed recently to halt planned mass layoffs at HHS. The medical organizations urged courts to declare Kennedy's policy change "unlawful" and demanded "the restoration of the Covid vaccine recommendations for pregnant women and healthy children ages six months to 17 years" of age.
The medical organizations' lawsuit against Kennedy's vaccination policy comes at a time when infections of measles in the United States have hit a level not seen in more than three decades. The Washington Post, citing data from Johns Hopkins University, reported on Monday that there have been at least 1,277 confirmed cases of measles so far in the U.S. this year and the paper noted that this development "marks a public health reversal in defeating a highly contagious, vaccine-preventable disease as the anti-vaccine movement gains strength."
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