A century-long legacy of drilling in Los Angeles will come to an end, thanks to climate justice organizers and the funders backing them. The victory is part of a multi-faceted movement effort to transform California’s massive energy economy.
The gloss of modern L.A.’s trillion-dollar economy outshines an oil-stained history, in which thousands of wells fueled the region’s rapid growth throughout the 20th century. And while production has decreased over the years, a powerful oil and gas industry never stopped fighting to keep the product flowing.
As with any fossil fuel town—whether it’s in Appalachia, the Gulf Coast, or Southern California—certain neighborhoods in Los Angeles have been made to suffer the consequences of industry pollution, and it’s those very communities that were able to finally bring the city’s extractive economy to an end.
A decade of organizing by a coalition of environmental justice and community groups—with several key players funded by The Solutions Project (TSP)—pulled off a flurry of victories in 2022 and 2023 that will see the oil and gas industry entirely phased out in L.A. County. As a result, Los Angeles has become a remarkable example of how, as unrelenting as an undead fossil fuel economy can be, it’s those closest to the ground who have the power to drive a stake through its heart.
The L.A. victory is one of several examples of impact generated by sustained climate justice funding in recent years, as documented in a series of new research reports commissioned by The Solutions Project, charting 53 policy and campaign wins secured by more than 300 frontline groups.
It’s a historic climate win, and will yield tangible benefits for nearly 10 million Los Angelenos, mostly in Black, Latine, and other communities of color. But the oil and gas bans are also just one plank of a broad-based push to kick California’s reliance on fossil fuel production, while simultaneously expanding clean energy and building community resilience to climate impacts.
Long before entertainment was the chief export of Los Angeles, the region’s wealth surged with the production of oil. In the 1920s, Southern California was a free-for-all when it came to drilling rights and regulations, and quickly became one of the top oil-exporting regions in the world.
With the rise of other local industries and natural gas production elsewhere, drilling in Los Angeles has waned, but the industry still looms large. Los Angeles County produced 11.7 million barrels of oil in 2019, meaning it still ranked second in production in California. There are about 20,000 wells scattered across the county, either active, idle, or abandoned.
Oil drilling in modern L.A. and in California brings with it a certain amount of cognitive dissonance, especially for those who consider the state a leader on climate action and clean energy. California has long been a champion for expansion of renewables, setting ambitious targets well ahead of the nation. At the same time, under the watch of deep blue governments, the oil derricks just keep pumping away. It’s an echo of the uneven and ambivalent climate progress in the United States overall, where we’ve seen landmark climate legislation take effect at the same time as record oil and gas production. To meet the climate crisis, these two things simply cannot exist side by side. And for frontline communities, especially those living close to oil and gas sites, ramping up renewables must be paired with shutting down dirty energy production.
Much of that expanded production flows from the incredible power of the fossil fuel industry, which has proven difficult to match since the start of the climate fight. But new research released by The Solutions Project builds the case that a critical solution is the organizing power of those living in communities where extraction and processing is happening. A report by Just Solutions cites successful campaigns in New York and California, and in Louisiana, where communities are fighting toxic petrochemical plants in what’s become known as Cancer Alley.
In the case of Los Angeles, years of steady power-building led by a coalition of local groups pushed the drilling phase-out across the finish line, clearing City Council in December 2022 and at the county the following month. TSP grantees such as Stand-LA, SCOPE, and Communities for a Better Environment were routinely credited as leading the charge in local media coverage. Council President Paul Krekorian called the decision perhaps “the most important step towards environmental justice that this council has taken in recent memory.”
As in the case of the Renewable Ravenswood victory in New York, the power that drives these climate victories is a direct product of the demand for equity and community well-being that undergirds the climate justice movement.
The devastation caused by fossil fuel extraction in Los Angeles is perhaps less immediately visible than in coal country, but oil and gas wells are pervasive, and the victories in L.A. will yield tremendous benefits. The phasing out of oil drilling county wide will benefit 9.8 million residents of L.A. County, 75% of whom are people of color, according to the Just Solutions report commissioned by TSP.
The positive impact of the phase-out will be widespread due to the insidious placement of fossil fuel infrastructure county-wide over the years. Industry did its best to hide storage tanks and rigs inside buildings and behind walls, nonetheless leaking pollution into surrounding areas. One third of county residents live within a mile of an active drilling site, and three fourths of active wells, some hidden by nothing more than plywood boards, are located within 1,640 feet of sensitive locations like homes, schools, parks, and senior living facilities.
There are, of course, more conspicuous examples—the Inglewood Oil Field is one of the country’s largest urban oil fields. Covering 1,000 acres, the surrounding area of Baldwin Hills/Crenshaw is 71% Black and 17% Latino. Initially exempt, the field will now be shut down as part of the phase out.
The benefits for these communities will be significant. Active, but also idle wells, are known to spew out harmful pollutants like benzene, hydrogen sulfide, and formaldehyde, which can lead to poor respiratory health, preterm birth, and cancer. A 2021 USC study connected living near urban oil wells with wheezing and reduced lung capacity among the mostly BIPOC residents of two neighborhoods near the Las Cienegas oil field in South L.A. In some cases, proximity to wells caused respiratory harm comparable to daily exposure to secondhand smoke or living next to a busy highway.
The end of oil and gas drilling in Los Angeles County will create direct positive impacts for people in the region. But one of the driving points in the growing body of evidence supporting climate justice funding is that it builds a persistent, broad-based network of organizing groups that are advancing systemic change.
A report from Frontline Solutions, commissioned by The Solutions Project, analyzed the impact of funding from 2021 to 2023, with a focus on its movement-strengthening approach, which has compounded to yield greater impact. For example, in addition to strengthening the organizations themselves, 90% of grantees said TSP funding opened up opportunities to be part of the larger climate justice movement. “Consequently, TSP’s funding has helped to support and strengthen an emergent ecosystem of deeply committed and impactful organizations,” the report found.
The work happening in California is a prime example of this approach, with 19 grantees receiving TSP funding in 2022 and 2023, several of which are coalitions of other organizing groups. This creates a more dynamic element to their work, in that different local victories are able to interact with each other and build up to transformative change.
For example, when looking at the L.A. drilling ban and phase-out, one could anticipate that such a local victory would merely push oil production into other regions within the state. But this campaign did not happen in a vacuum, and local wins do not end locally, with a concurrent statewide victory also banning oil and gas wells within 3,200 feet of homes, schools, nursing homes, and hospitals, to the benefit of 2.7 million more people.
The combination of these movement wins creates cascading market impacts. Each piece of fossil fuel infrastructure that is blocked or dismantled prevents fossil fuel companies from producing cheap energy at the expense of frontline communities, and raises the cost of production.
As one example of how this plays out, in 2024, after decades of increasingly successful local community organizing, Chevron decided to move the company from Richmond, California to Texas, concluding that it made better economic sense than staying and fighting new regulations. TSP’s Bay Area grantees—APEN, Communities for a Better Environment, and Urban Tilth—also won a negotiated settlement of more than $500 million from Chevron to the city of Richmond, shortly after the company’s relocation decision was announced. Meanwhile, movement peers in Texas will now enact their own campaigns to prevent new plants being built there.
All the while, renewables become cheaper and more competitive. Especially as the next federal administration fills with climate deniers and “drill, baby, drill” dreams, these ground up, long-term, and coordinated strategies may be our last defense against a catastrophic climate future.
This work is also not isolated to banning fossil fuel infrastructure, as climate justice grantees do not operate in such silos. The same organizations chasing oil development out of their backyards are advocating for renewable energy deployment, affordable housing, just access to transportation, immigrant rights, and disaster relief, all of which are interwoven in the climate crisis. With the close of one campaign, the California climate justice movement emerges stronger than ever and poised to take on new battles on any number of fronts.