Kamala Harris skewered both a refinery’s plan to use trains to move potentially huge amounts of oil to a San Francisco Bay Area refinery and local oversight of the project when she served as California’s attorney general.
Although the episode did not draw the national spotlight accompanying Harris’ work on a landmark emissions cheating settlement with automaker Volkswagen and other higher-profile initiatives, some see it as an equally telling example of her environmental priorities as the state’s top lawyer.
Harris “didn’t have to get involved,” Craig Segall, a lawyer for the California Air Resources Board at the time who is now vice president of Evergreen Action, a climate policy group, said in a phone interview and ensuing text exchange.
That she did, Segall said, meshed with a focus on community health and getting ahead of emerging problems. The oil industry was also advancing “truly radical legal arguments,” he added, that would have made it hard for communities to address crude by rail in the future.
