You may soon be approached outside your grocery store by signature collectors urging you to sign a petition about lowering gas prices or stopping a so-called “energy shutdown.”
Here’s what it’s really about and why Californians shouldn’t sign it.
Last month, Governor Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 1137, which prohibits new oil and gas wells within 3,200 feet of homes and schools to protect public health and safety. Oil industry failed to defeat buffer zone bill in legislature – Like in the past – so days later he filed a petition to hold a referendum on the 2024 ballot to overturn the law.
effort is run by the California Independent Petroleum Assn., an industry lobby group that claims to have raised $8 million and began this week sending paid signature collectors who present the referendum as an opportunity to lower gasoline prices. But voters should look beyond this misleading message. This is an attempt by oil drillers to keep harmful and polluting operations in California neighborhoods. It is an attack on our health and safety that must be firmly rejected.
It’s no surprise that powerful interests that lobbied against these protections are now trying to prevent them from taking effect. The law eventually imposed restrictions on neighborhood oil drilling, which for decades was allowed to operate in a Wild West atmosphere that allows oil extraction virtually anywhere, even right next to schools, parks and houses.
It is important to note that supporters of the referendum, who have until December 15 to collect 623,212 valid signatures, would score a significant victory just by qualifying for the ballot. The law, which is due to come into force on January 1, would be suspended for nearly two years until voters decide its fate in the November 2024 ballot.
A delay would extend the damage caused by the drilling. Over 2 million people live in these approximately half-mile buffer zones. Proximity to oil and gas wells is associated with a range of health problems, including asthma, premature births and reductions in lung function.
There are still few details on who is backing the referendum, but the committee backing it, called Stop the Energy Shutdown, has received a contribution which was made public, for $1.15 million, by Macpherson Oil Co. A spokesman for the Western States Petroleum Assn., the industry’s most influential lobby group, said it does not was not involved.
State Sen. Lena Gonzalez (D-Long Beach), who drafted SB 1137, said the referendum was just one piece of a campaign to bully and misinform the industry about what would make the new law.
“It’s just kind of in the DNA of a lot of these industries and interests that they’re going to use money and power and greed to overturn good legislation,” she said.
The push is just the latest example of big business interests in California using their money and influence to try to crush new laws they don’t like. At the going rate of around $17 per signature, it can cost around $17 million to collect 1 million signatures and secure a ballot referendum, said Jamie Court, president of the nonprofit consumer advocacy group Consumer Watchdog. An industry faced with a tough new law may consider this money well spent, even if all it gets is the added benefits of a two-year delay.
The same thing happens with another new law signed by Newsom that creates a Fast Food Council empowered to set labor standards and raise the minimum wage to $22 an hour next year for fast food workers. The restaurant industry is also collecting signatures for a referendum to overturn this law. And in November, voters will decide on a referendum Big Tobacco was able to put on the ballot to stop a 2020 law that bans the sale of most flavored tobacco products, including menthol cigarettes. Even if voters respect the law by voting yes to proposition 31the industry succeeded in delaying the ban and reaping two more years of profit from these dangerous products.
Neighborhood drilling is unhealthy and should have stopped long ago. Californians should reject industry pressure to circumvent the new law by excluding the referendum from the ballot.