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Earth Day Op-Ed Contest Winner: First Place
More than 70 high school students across California submitted opinion pieces to CalMatters’ second annual Earth Day contest. The 2024 contest theme was “What solution should Californians running for office support to help address climate change?”
Guest Commentary written by
Emma Kavcioglu
Emma Kavcioglu is a junior at Granada Hills Charter High School in Los Angeles. She is the opinion editor for her school’s journalism program, the Plaid Press.
As I walked out of my third grade classroom on Oct. 23, 2015, I was immediately hit with a potent, suffocating smell. I instantly recognized it: gasoline.
Less than a mile away from my home, a faulty well at SoCalGas’ Aliso Canyon storage facility had caused the largest methane leak in U.S. history, releasing more than 100,000 metric tons of the potent greenhouse gas. It lasted over 100 days.
Roughly 8,300 families were forced to abandon their homes, mine being one of them. My school was completely relocated to a different campus, and my family moved into my grandmother’s home.
The worst part? People in my community suffered from heart issues, pneumonia and epilepsy because of these methane emissions. I felt the brunt of the pain when I ended up hospitalized with gastrointestinal issues for weeks after the leak.
Aliso Canyon is a major producer of hydraulically fractured gas. Also known as fracking, it’s a process that uses pressurized water to create cracks in shale rock to release oil and natural gas. While fracking wasn’t the cause of the leak, allowing it so close to residential communities increases the probability of dangerous methane exposure – like what happened at Aliso Canyon.
Despite this, SoCalGas downplayed their negligence and labeled the leak as an inconvenience, rather than a genuine health risk that devastated communities. Like so many other corporations, SoCalGas got a slap on the wrist from the government. They agreed to a $4 million settlement and reopened the plant a few years later.
That’s not surprising given how much oil and gas companies spend to convince government officials to support their businesses. In 2021 alone, these industries spent $55.6 million on lobbying to sway votes on environmental policy. In California last year, the Western States Petroleum Association and Chevron spent a combined $15.3 million, the most of any lobbying group.
Given the environmental, health and safety implications, we need to support candidates in California who rally behind legislation to ban fracking.
On the environmental level, fracking-produced methane heats up the planet 80 times more than an equal amount of carbon dioxide over a 20-year span. Fracking sites also cause earthquakes – the Journal of Seismological Research identified 730 sites where fracking activity caused earthquakes over the past 150 years. When experts are predicting a major earthquake will strike California before 2032, fracking increases the likelihood and magnitude of future tremors.
Despite what cynics and special interests say, banning fracking is possible, but anti-fracking legislation continues to be shot down in the state Legislature. Gov. Gavin Newsom is partly to blame because he has never fully supported an outright ban – he’s only halted new permits.
More importantly, fracking poses an inherent danger, and for voters this should be nonnegotiable. The fracking process intrinsically releases radon, a radioactive gas that causes 21,000 lung cancer deaths a year. There is no way to hydraulically frack without releasing radon, which is why it is so important for candidates to support a complete ban, rather than slow reforms like California has adopted.
It’s 2024, and many of the children that were affected by the Aliso Canyon gas leak are now registering to vote for the first time. For candidates to win our votes in upcoming elections, they need to prove that they are willing to fight dangerous oil and gas companies so that what happened in my community will never happen to another.
That starts with a statewide ban on fracking.