yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

When Big Oil Owns Your Soil | Parched


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

California is the third largest oil-producing state in the country. A lot of people don't realize that. When they think of California, they think of vineyards and Hollywood. But we've been living with oil and gas production since the late 19th century. Kern County is really the epicenter of oil production in California, where about 80% of our state's oil is produced.

NARRATOR: The Central Valley, where half of Kern County lies, produces 25% of America's food. Oil and agriculture have always had a tenuous relationship here. I make my living on the surface. They make their living below.

NARRATOR: Keith Gardiner and his business partner, Holly King, have farmed in Kern County for 22 years, right alongside big oil.

HOLLY KING: You have two owners on the same piece of property, one who owns the minerals and the farmer who owns the surface.

KEITH GARDINER: A land man from an oil company will call or come out to your office and say, hey, the trucks are lined up. We're gonna be in there tomorrow. We want to drill here and here. Well, immediately, you get into a fight. You say, no, you're not. Yes, we are. No, you're not. Well, we're gonna sue you. And I'm just a little guy, you know. I can't stand to be sued by an oil company. So a lot of times, you just acquiesce, say, go ahead, you know. I can't fight you. We do have an obligation to allow them to access their minerals, and we're OK with that. We're not OK with we can do anything we want on your surface, because we're the big guys.

NARRATOR: Like Earl Tennant in West Virginia, they have seen substantial damage on their farm.

KEITH GARDINER: We noticed the overall health of the trees was not good. We started testing the water, and we found out that we had a lot of high salts. A lot of high chlorides. And those are just the death of almond trees. We took out about 8,000 trees. We suspected that billions of barrels of saltwater was getting injected into our freshwater zone. When you start taking our trees out, it's a problem.

More Articles

View All
Integration using completing the square and the derivative of arctan(x) | Khan Academy
All right, let’s see if we can find the indefinite integral of ( \frac{1}{5x^2 - 30x + 65} \, dx ). Pause this video and see if you can figure it out. All right, so this is going to be an interesting one. It’ll be a little bit hairy, but we’re going to w…
Who Am I? | The Philosophy of Alan Watts
Who am I? Am I the mind? Am I the body that contains the mind? Am I a descendant of an alien race that, long ago, set foot on Earth? Am I created by God? The English philosopher, writer, and speaker Alan Watts believed that the most important question a h…
Thomas Hunt Morgan and fruit flies
Where we left off in the last video, we were in 1902-1903, and Mendelian genetics had been rediscovered at the turn of the century. Bovary and Sutton independently had proposed the chromosome theory, that the chromosomes were the location for where these …
Is the 2024 Gold Rush a Warning to the US Economy?
Have a look at this price chart over the last 2 years. Up 65% phenomenal growth! Now, with returns like that, you’d probably expect it to be some sort of up-and-coming tech stock, right? One with a foot in the door of the artificial intelligence Gold Min…
Solve by completing the square: Integer solutions | Algebra I | Khan Academy
So we’re given this equation here. What I want you to do is pause this video and see if you can solve it. What x values satisfy the equation? All right, now let’s work through this together. One technique could be just let’s just try to complete the squa…
Walking away from marriage, children, and other stuff we're supposed to have
You want someone to grow old with? You want someone to be a mother for your children, assuming you want children? And if you don’t want children, well, you probably will, and if you don’t, you’re either deluded or immature. And you might say, “Well no, th…