Save the Bay & Delta from the Army Corps of Engineers Dredging --Pennie Opal Plane and Shoshana Wechsler--

The Army Corps of Engineers, at the request of Trump, plans to dredge a deeper channel through San Francisco Bay and into the Delta to enable oil tankers to move greater amounts of crude, including Alberta tar/oil sands to and from Bay Area refineries. Dredging will unearth toxins from the fossil fuel, corporate agriculture and other industries that have settled on the bottom of the Bay and Delta. Additionally, dredging will also increase refinery production, impact the salinity of the Bay and Delta and have devastating impacts on life in the waters, including the threatened Delta smelt which is hovering on extinction and is an anchor species.

Several environmental groups have filed a joint protest letter about the "San Francisco Bay to Stockton Navigation Improvement Project." But the one and only public presentation on the plan was so poorly publicized by the Army Corps that no one in the grassroots heard about it in time to provide comment.

On Friday, July 19th from 10 am to 12pm, the Army Corps is holding a hearing on its Dredge Material Management Plan at the Federal Building, 90 7th Street in San Francisco. While the focus is on "beneficial reuse" of dredging material, local water protectors and Bay lovers will be there to speak about the thirteen-mile dredging project whose sole purpose is to enable more oil trafficking on the taxpayers' dime. The project would provide four refineries with nearly a $15 million annual subsidy, multiply the risk of oil spills, pump up the production of petroleum products, and increase greenhouse gas emissions.

The 2018 Climate Assessment Report warns that we must begin an immediate transition off fossil fuels or face extinction. The fossil fuel industry, elected officials and policy makers who continue to fund and promote new fossil fuel related projects are destroying what we and our non-human relatives need to simply exist. They are blindly leading us all toward a future that is unsustainable instead of investing in renewable technologies and climate mitigation. Investment in this project is like businessmen in 1910 investing in making thousands of new horse buggies and not seeing the writing the wall with the production of automobiles. Fossil fuels are the horse and buggies of our time.

You can stay up to date on this issue by checking the Sunflower Alliance and Idle No More SF Bay pages on Facebook, and checking back here on the Idle No More SF Bay as well as the Sunflower Alliance websites. There will be ongoing actions to prevent this disaster from occurring.

For more background, see an excellent KQED piece and Sierra Club blog post.