Opinion: The fight for the planet shouldn’t come with pink slips and $8 gas

By ANTONIO VILLARAIGOSA

Somewhere between the sunbaked oil fields of the San Joaquin Valley and the cracked sidewalks of East Los Angeles, where my mother once waited in the dark to catch a ride to work, lies a truth that Sacramento too often refuses to say out loud: you can’t fight climate change on the backs of the poor.

I’ve lived this story. The smog wasn’t a theory in my neighborhood — it was what we inhaled. It clung to our lungs the way poverty clung to our dreams. When I became mayor of Los Angeles, I carried those memories into office. We planted trees in asphalt deserts. We rewrote the energy playbook at City Hall. We cut ties with coal-fired power and led a clean energy revolution powered by wind, sun and grit. I fought for subways, solar panels, and the idea that a working-class Latino kid from Boyle Heights could help turn the “city of cars” into a blueprint for mass transit and renewable power.

And yet, here I stand, being told by some of my fellow Democrats that to stand with the families I grew up with — who still can’t afford an electric vehicle, who still wait at that same bus stop — is somehow a betrayal of the climate cause. That’s not just wrong. That’s dangerous.

Let me paint you a picture. A single mother in Bakersfield, juggling two shifts, tears in her eyes as she fills her gas tank at $8 a gallon. Restaurants and grocery stores shuttering their doors because they can’t afford the energy bills. Thousands of union workers — men and women with mortgages and pensions — laid off from refineries with no real plan or paycheck to guide them into the so-called “green economy.” In the Bay Area, a UC Berkeley Labor Center study found that many displaced refinery workers were forced into jobs with steep pay cuts, casualties of a wage gap widening like a fault line under our feet.

This isn’t leadership. This isn’t climate justice. This is a crisis of empathy masquerading as progress.

I am not defending oil. I am defending affordability. I am defending the dignity of the people who keep this state running. The closures of Valero and Phillips 66 refineries are not triumphs. They are warning shots. You don’t tear down the bridge while you’re still crossing it. But that’s what some in this debate are doing — dismantling the working-class economy before the clean-energy one is built.

Here’s a dirty truth no one wants to say: California imports 75% of its oil. In 2023 alone, 40% came from Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Another 45% was pulled from the Amazon rainforest. We shut down our own production — some of the cleanest in the world — and outsource the environmental destruction to places with weaker protections and no union labor. That’s not climate leadership. That’s climate hypocrisy.

Meanwhile, schools, public safety and emergency response services lose billions in tax revenue from refinery closures. Our gas prices remain the highest in the nation. And we tell working families they must either buy an electric vehicle they can’t afford or continue to bleed at the pump. That is not a choice. That is a surrender of common sense.

I’ve been called a turncoat because I haven’t signed a pledge. But my signature lives in what I’ve done. I helped shut down coal plants. I transformed the Port of Los Angeles into one of the cleanest in the nation. I didn’t do that with slogans — I did it with strategy.

And that’s what I’m calling for now. A strategy. An “all-of-the-above” approach— solar, wind, geothermal, hydro, even nuclear — and yes, gas, for now. Not forever. But until we build the grid, the charging stations, the transmission lines, the backbone of the future we keep promising, we cannot leave our working class behind.

To the climate warriors who once marched beside me: march again — but this time, for both clean air and kitchen-table economics. The Earth is warming. So is the frustration in places like Porterville, Pacoima, and Wilmington — where people are tired of being lectured to while their wallets empty.

This isn’t a pivot. It’s a reckoning. If our climate policy is going to last, it has to belong to everyone. Not just those in Pebble Beach or Palo Alto. It has to reach Bakersfield and Boyle Heights. It has to work for the janitor and the bus driver and the single mom on the night shift.

We can do both — fight for the planet and protect the people. I still believe in this fight. But let’s make sure it’s one we all survive. The truth is this: climate change is real. So is rent. And until we solve for both, California’s future is at risk.

Antonio Villaraigosa is a former speaker of the California State Assembly, 41st mayor of Los Angeles and a former infrastructure adviser for the state of California.

Published in Bakersfield.com