Target: Xavier Becerra, Attorney General of California
Goal: Support efforts to hold environmentally destructive pipeline corporations accountable for their devastation.
Oil spills caused by reckless, irresponsible corporations bring a dark stain upon the environment and its inhabitants. This ForceChange petition and other dedicated efforts brought attention to some of California’s most devastating oil spills in decades. Thanks in large part to this consistent outcry, the entities responsible for this death and damage will pay the price.
Plains All-American Pipeline, based in Houston, was convicted on about ten charges (including two felonies) for its failures when an underground oil pipeline burst along a California coastal highway in 2015, sending nearly 150,000 gallons of oil onto beaches and into the ocean. Compounding this tragedy, much of the oil seeped into a marine preserve that hosted dolphins, whales, and other wildlife. Oil-covered sea birds attempting to flee from the devastation invoked some of the most stirring images from a preventable disaster. Of the charges leveled against this careless organization, eight involved the harm brought upon innocent animals like the brown pelican and the sea lion.
The scope of this tragedy could have been curtailed if the company had overseen its corroded pipelines and acted more promptly when the rupture occurred. Even though the organization allegedly disabled an alarm that could have quickly alerted employees to the rupture, and even though it caused millions of dollars in damages and untold loss of wildlife, this environmental destroyer remains defiant in the face of a verdict by a jury of its peers. In fact, they are now seeking permission to rebuild and restart their damaging pipeline.
Sign this petition to celebrate the decisive declaration that this pipeline’s devastation will not go unrecognized and unpunished.
PETITION LETTER:
Dear Attorney General Becerra,
The stains left by the 2015 Santa Barbara oil spill still resonate today. They are an unfortunate reminder of the instant devastation brought by incidents like this and the 1969 Santa Barbara Channel tragedy. The devastation is not just measured in millions of dollars in repairs and cleanup or in the loss of tourism. It is most stirringly embodied in the hundreds of sea birds and scores of majestic marine dwellers literally smothered by carelessness and ineptitude.
Thank you for taking a stand for these innocent beings, and congratulations on securing a verdict that reaffirms the environmental integrity of California and of precious lands nationwide. At the December sentencing hearing, seek the fullest punishment available to Plains All-American Pipeline. Please do everything in your power to ensure that such preventable destruction never be visited upon your shores again.
Sincerely,
[Your Name Here]
Photo Credit: Brocken Inaglory
my message is to stop polluting the earth.