Submit some Articles Dirty Power’s Last Stand in California

It would be fitting for Oxnard to be the last stand of fossil fuel power plants in California. Like so many other low-income communities of color who live in the shadow of power plants, oil refineries, and drilling sites, burdened by the nation’s insatiable appetite for dirty energy, the residents of Oxnard are fighting back, pitting high-school students from farmworker families against Fortune 500 company lobbyists in a power struggle whose effects could ripple across the state. “This could be a battle over the last fossil fuel power plant in California,” says Matt Vespa, senior attorney with the Sierra Club. And it’s beginning to look like a battle activists might win. Oxnard is the largest city along California’s Central Coast—a sweeping rural region stretching along the Pacific Ocean between Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area—with an economy built on agriculture, the military, and the oil industry, dotted with beach towns and farmworker enclaves. The coastal city of 200,000 sits atop some of the most fertile soil on earth, and is bordered by the last major free-flowing river and the largest wetland habitat left in Southern California. People of color make up 85 percent of Oxnard’s population (74 percent of the city is Latino), and nearly half of all adults have less than a high school education. As a low-income, predominantly immigrant community, Oxnard has long been used as the dumping ground for the Central Coast’s most polluting industries. The city ranks in the top 20 percent of the most environmentally burdened communities in the state, with some parts of the city ranking within the top 10 percent, according to the California Environmental Protection Agency (CalEPA). Oxnard’s beaches are home to three gas-fired power plants and an EPA Superfund toxic waste site. California Department of Public Health data shows that Oxnard has more students attending school in close proximity to the highest levels of toxic pesticide use than anywhere else in the state.