The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has just proposed to dredge a deeper channel through 13 miles of the San Francisco Bay and the Carquinez Strait. This is not your typical maintenance project: It would enable transport of greater amounts of “crude oil imports and refined product exports to and from several oil refineries and two non-petroleum industries.”1 The Corps calls this the San Francisco to Stockton Navigation Improvement Project.

Your constituents living along the shoreline of the bay don’t see this as an “improvement.” We ask your support in stopping it.

At a time when we should be steadily ramping down fossil fuel production, this project encourages just the opposite. It gifts four oil refineries with a nearly $15 million annual subsidy, pumps up the production of petroleum products, multiplies the risk of oil spills in our waters, threatens marine life, and increases greenhouse gas emissions and toxic pollution along the refinery corridor.

The improvement the Corps intends is more oil trafficking at the public’s expense. In our view that’s a real setback, not progress.

This latest attack on California by the Trump administration and the fossil fuel industry is part and parcel of previous attempts to expand offshore oil drilling and open public lands to oil and gas leasing. We’re calling upon you, our federal representatives, to do everything in your power to stand with your constituents in opposing this misguided project.

U.S. taxpayers already foot the bill for more than $20 billion in fossil fuel subsidies each year.2 Clearly this industry does not need further handouts from us. And the Army Corps of Engineers, whose funding has been flat for decades, should not be diverting its limited resources to the promotion of oil industry expansion in the Bay Area.

The dredging proposal coincides with current Bay Area refinery plans to process greater quantities of dirty Canadian tar sands oil, or dilbit. This non-floating oil is shipped down the Pacific Coast, across San Francisco Bay and into the Carquinez Strait, along the pathway of the proposed dredging and channel deepening. The San Francisco to Stockton Plan could also enable the Port of Stockton to export more coal to Asia.

California is decreasing its consumption of fossil fuels, even as its refineries export more and more of their refined petroleum products—roughly a third of their total output. The San Francisco to Stockton plan, if approved, will ensure that production for export keeps increasing.

We urgently call upon you, our federal representatives, to raise your voices in opposition to this project. Please safeguard our bay and the health of our communities, and let's steer together towards a renewable energy future.

1 Draft integrated General Reevaluation Report and Environmental Impact Statement, San Francisco Bay to Stockton, California Navigation Improvement Project, https://usace.contentdm.oclc.org/utils/getfile/collection/p16021coll7/id/11171

2 http://priceofoil.org/fossil-fuel-subsidies/