Environmental Justice and Racial Justice are Intertwined🤞🏾

Business practices that harm the environment can end up harming everyone. For example, burning fossil fuels speeds up climate change. And climate change increases extreme weather events. Extreme weather events, like California wildfires, can destroy mansions as well as shacks.

But, often, the business practices that worsen climate change harm working and poor people of color more than wealthy people. For example, Chevron has a refinery in Richmond, California. The median income for a household in Richmond is lower than the median household for California as a whole. More than 15% of Richmond residents live in poverty, and more than 80% are non-white. Chevron’s oil and gas refinery in Richmond causes 63% of the PM2.5 (the most harmful kind of pollution) in the city. Meanwhile, kids in Richmond are twice as likely to have asthma as other kids in the United States. Plus, when extreme weather events happen, partly as a result of Chevron’s fossil fuel business, working and poor people of color have less money to rebuild their lives, compared to wealthy people.

We everyday people can demand that companies and our government do more to protect our communities. For example, California residents have long pressured their elected representatives to hold Big Oil and Gas accountable. And crude oil refineries have said that increased regulation forced them to change. From 2008 to April 2025, six plants in CA closed. Two of those switched to making renewable diesel energy. Further, in October 2024, Phillips66 said it would close a Los Angeles plant within one year. And, in April 2025, Valero said it would close or restructure a Bay Area refinery by spring 2026.

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~Lisa, Manager of Coalitions and Worker Power

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Published August 18, 2025