California’s Clean-Air Program for Polluted Communities Faces Crossroads

On Aug. 6, 2012, a fire broke out at the Chevron refinery in Richmond. Liquid hydrocarbon spewed from a leaky pipe in the crude unit and ignited, sending smoke plumes into the air that could be seen across the Bay.

Nearby residents struggled to breathe and reported headaches, chest pains and itchy eyes. More than 15,000 people sought medical help. For Luna Angulo, then in middle school, it was an awakening.

“As someone who is 12 and you see the sky suddenly turn black, you’re like — the city is on fire,” Angulo, now 25, said. “What is this about? What is going on?”

Chevron later agreed to upgrade the refinery, which was first established in 1902, and pay more than $1 million in fines. The company also settled a lawsuit with the city of Richmond for $5 million.

For Angulo, the flames revealed the human cost of living in the shadow of California’s third-largest refinery.

“The 2012 fire in particular was a big catalyzing moment for me in terms of how I saw the role of Chevron in Richmond,” Angulo said. “But I think also for a lot of the youth from Richmond that I organized with, it was a big ‘Oh s—’ moment.”

The 2012 Chevron fire was a key flashpoint in the yearslong effort to empower frontline communities like Richmond to fight for cleaner air. That work culminated in the Path to Clean Air — a hyperlocal pollution-reduction roadmap that places decision-making in the hands of residents, not regulators. With such lofty goals, the Path to Clean Air could be a community-powered blueprint that dramatically reshapes Richmond’s local economy and the health of its residents. Or it could collect dust.

Over the next decade, Angulo became deeply involved in local activism, often pressing state and regional agencies to adopt tougher regulations on Chevron. Then, in 2021, she heard about an opportunity to claim a seat at the table.

Four years earlier, Gov. Jerry Brown had signed Assembly Bill 617, aimed at improving air quality in California’s most polluted communities. Crucially, the law created local steering committees — made up of residents, not experts — with the power to craft plans to measure and reduce air pollution.

“It’s a sick concept — you’re putting decision-making power in the hands of community members in this very direct way,” Angulo, 25, said. “And I was like, ‘This is incredible.’”

Many local activists saw AB 617 as a breakthrough for community power-building. But statewide environmental justice organizations viewed it as a half-measure, meant to win support from progressive Democrats for Brown’s true priority: extending California’s landmark environmental program known as cap-and-trade.

Cap-and-trade sets a declining limit on greenhouse gas emissions from industries such as refineries, power plants and factories. But it does not require reductions at specific sites, such as Chevron’s Richmond refinery, and it only regulates climate-warming greenhouse gases, not local air pollutants like particulate matter.

“Cap-and-trade is really looking at the broader scale, looking at overall greenhouse gas emissions at the statewide scale,” said Jonathan London, a UC Davis professor who has spent years studying the AB 617 program. “So local communities that are facing these significant air quality burdens can sometimes not be on the map and not actually show up as a key topic of concern when things are at that really broad level.”

Assemblymember Cristina Garcia hoped to spotlight local air pollution when she brought Brown on a 2017 tour of her hometown of Bell Gardens. She walked with the governor along freeway overpasses above backlogged trucks spewing exhaust and invited him to speak with local environmental activists. After months of negotiations, Brown and legislative leaders included AB 617, written by Garcia, in the deal to renew cap-and-trade.

Eight years later, leaders like Angulo have used AB 617 to create local plans for reducing pollution. But those plans lack real enforcement power, making it difficult to gauge how much AB 617 has actually reduced pollution in the frontline communities it was designed to help.

Now, Gov. Gavin Newsom and state legislators are weighing another renewal of cap-and-trade, which could change the way AB 617 is funded. Environmental justice advocates view the negotiations as a chance to strengthen the program and deliver on the promise of clean air in California’s most polluted neighborhoods.

Ten communities were selected in 2018 for the program’s rollout by the California Air Resources Board. These were predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods — such as West Oakland, Carson and East Los Angeles — where decades of discriminatory planning had placed backyards near industrial facilities.

The goal was for local steering committees to work with regional air districts to monitor pollution and draft community emission reduction plans, or CERPs.

The rollout was rocky.

In West Oakland, established environmental justice advocates were ready to use new state funding and authority to push for emissions cuts from trucks at the Port of Oakland.

But in Richmond, North Richmond and San Pablo, London found the Bay Area Air District still largely controlled the steering committee process. Local environmental justice groups did not participate because of their opposition to AB 617, and residents who did join struggled with procedural hurdles.

“We had to make ‘motions,’ get ‘seconds,’ make a ‘friendly amendment,’” Angulo remembered. “We operate under consensus very much in these community spaces — no one knows how to make a motion.”

In a 2020 survey, London asked members of the 10 steering committees if they believed the process benefited their communities. Richmond’s steering committee members gave themselves the lowest score.

Gradually, through turnover and years of monthly meetings, the steering committee found its footing. Data from AB 617’s expanded air monitoring helped identify local pollution hotspots — from highways to rail yards to auto body shops. Angulo pushed through a change to the committee rules to give community members more control over meetings and agendas.

“Issues that we found early on … many of those really have been addressed,” London said. “Fixes have been put in to improve community engagement, to ensure that community priorities are well reflected in the eventual emission reduction plans.”

Richmond’s CERP, called The Path to Clean Air, was finalized in November, years behind schedule. It calls for the Bay Area Air District to adopt new rules limiting refinery emissions, invest fines collected from polluters back into Richmond and neighboring San Pablo, and move toward a “just transition” away from fossil fuels.

A large focus, to no surprise, is Chevron, which the roadmap cited as “by far the largest single generator of emissions in the Path to Clean Air community for many air pollutants,” including PM 2.5 — microscopic particles linked to asthma and emphysema.

“The [Path to Clean Air] community is a frontline community that has long been subject to historical and systematic racist policies and impacted by the largest refinery in Northern California, the Chevron Richmond Refinery,” the report reads. “In order to reach our climate and equity goals, we must end the refining and combustion of fossil fuels as soon as possible.”

That’s an audacious goal for a city whose local economy and tax base have long been tied to Chevron.

The company participated in the process as a non-voting member of the steering committee. It declined an interview request but said in a statement that it “values the program described in AB 617 as an important initiative to address local air quality.”

“We believe the AB 617 framework is important to the program’s success, including inclusive engagement, data-driven assessments, and clear objectives to cost-effectively reduce local emissions,” Chevron spokesperson Caitlin Powell said. “For the past few decades, California’s energy policies have discouraged investment, reduced fuel reliability, and ultimately hurt consumers through higher prices and broader economic strain.

“It is crucial that policies aimed at reducing emissions do not unduly burden California families.”

But in a 2024 email to the Bay Area Air District, Chevron manager Kris Battleson criticized the CERP’s call for a just transition.

“The concept of a ‘just transition’ does not relate to emission reductions and is more akin to providing a safety net for workers and residents impacted by the State’s goals of eliminating an entire industry,” he wrote.

BK White, a former Chevron refinery operator and current policy director for Richmond’s mayor, said the plan is not a “shot” at Chevron, but responsible planning for a future in which demand for gasoline refined in California is projected to decline.

“Any city that is too dependent on one industry — we’ve seen it with coal, with the automobile industry in the Midwest — you have to transition your tax base to where you’re more diversified,” White said.

Bay Area air regulators have said the local CERPS have driven the rules they make to limit pollution. But a core flaw of AB 617 is that the community plans carry no legal weight, said Dan Ress, attorney at the Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment.

“They put together these really thoughtful and nuanced plans,” Ress said. “And then they’re told, ‘Well, that’s really a nice document you put together, gold star.’”

While Ress praised the work of residents on the 617 steering committees, he warned that the lack of enforcement could erode trust.

“I think that causes some real problems where you’re saying, ‘Community members, tell us what you want. OK, cool, we’re going to ignore that now,’” he said.

In Shafter, a Central Valley AB 617 community, members demanded earlier notice before pesticides were sprayed on local fields. With an advanced heads-up, parents could keep their children inside on a day when chemicals were being sprayed in the area.

The Kern County agricultural commissioner refused, even though the data was already available. The steering committee turned to state regulators, and after a five-year campaign, California launched a statewide pesticide notification program earlier this year.

“So we see both the main benefit of 617 in that organizing and power building,” Ress said. “And the main drawback in its lack of weight.”

Advocates want lawmakers to expand the program beyond the current 19 communities, add environmental justice-aligned regulators to local air boards and give the local plans real enforcement power.

“The core concern is that [AB 617] pits disadvantaged communities against each other in competing to get into the program,” Ress said. “Then once they’re in the program, it takes a ton of resources and focused effort with relatively small payback for that effort.”

The program’s future may hinge on the upcoming cap-and-trade negotiations, which are expected to intensify when the Legislature returns from recess on Aug. 18.

A key point of debate is how to allocate the revenue generated from the sale of emissions credits purchased. Since 2017, the Legislature has dedicated $1.4 billion in support of AB 617. The funds have paid for EV charging stations, bike paths, urban greening programs and staff support for the local steering committees.

Newsom has touted the AB 617 projects as a reason to renew cap-and-trade, which he is proposing to rename Cap-and-Invest.

“We’re cutting harmful pollution across California with a special focus on communities that have some of the dirtiest air in our state,” Newsom said in a statement. “Thanks to Cap-and-Invest, we’ve invested hundreds of millions of dollars in projects that are proven to clean the air.”

But Newsom and legislative leaders also want to use cap-and-trade funds for other priorities, such as funding high-speed rail, firefighting and lowering electricity bills. A Chevron executive told Politico that cap-and-trade should be paused for up to 20 years to avoid harming refineries.

Supporters of AB 617 argue that cutting the funding would break the promise that communities breathing the dirtiest air would not be left behind on the state’s path to global climate leadership.

“This program was made with the intention of using this polluter money to help reduce the impact of these industrial facilities,” said Angulo. “If we’re not using that money to fund programs like these — that are putting decision-making power directly into the hands of community members —what are we doing?”