I love Martinez!

So down in the news ticker this morning on the morning news i catch my home town "Martinez" abuzz by and wait for it to come around again.. it said.. Shell to pay almost $3M fine for Martinez refinery emissions. Shell being the giant oil refinery i've lived in the shadow of my whole life. The same Shell Oil that sent a spokesman to my high school who told us they didnt release anything other than steam.. water vapor and that it was completely safe.

The web article says;

The Bay Area Air Quality Management District announced today that the Shell Oil refinery in Martinez has paid $2.8 million to settle a series of violations of the Federal Clean Air act and local air district regulations ... beginning on March 9, the refinery released around 925 tons of carbon monoxide over a seven-day period...

i want some of that 2.8 mil! I was waiting for the part where it said it was going to pay the residents of Martinez. but uh.. nope.


anyway i love thier statements in defense.. imagine these read with the tone of a kid who just got caught eating cookies trying to make excuses.

" No one from the public called Shell to complain about the releases during seven days"

how would we know? like i'm gonna call and complain every day and say "are you SURE youre not releasing carbon minoxide into my air today? does carbon minoxide have a scent? a scent different than the fart chemical smell that comes from that place all the time?

they went on in defense of themselves;
"Under normal operations, the boilers convert carbon monoxide, a poisonous gas, to carbon dioxide, before it is released into the atmosphere"

oh nice. dont tell Al Gore. we convert poison into clean good for the environment, carbon dioxide!

but he kept digging...
"According to Ross, the entire Bay Area puts out about 3,000 tons of carbon monoxide per day. With Shell's emissions in March, the Bay Area's total carbon monoxide emissions only went up about 5 percent"

only 5% thats cool. so its like stubbing your toe after you get shot in the face?

they finished the interview with this whopper .."We want to run this place in a way that puts people and the planet first, and in cases in which we don't live up to that, we want to step up and do the right thing."

and "the right thing" i guess includes having minimum carbon monoxide limits. that they claim "had never before exceeded" so the govt. allows "poisonous' carbon monoxide into our air? sweet new born baby jesus!

dude when can we get off oil? seriously? i've been breathing this shit my whole life.
fuck you and your multibillion dollar profits Shell!!