To the editor: Based mostly on the framing of this story, the Los Angeles Instances seemingly needs readers to consider that sickness close to the Murphy oil website proves the working wells are accountable (“L.A. considers the rare closure of an active oil site in Jefferson Park,” Oct. 3). It proves nothing of the type.
Since 2019, California has imposed stringent new emissions guidelines. And so they have labored. Peer-reviewed research on my own and colleagues discovered that present operations emit lower than 2% of what escapes from pure seeps and deserted wells — as a lot as 100 occasions much less.
Los Angeles sits atop oil fields riddled with pure seeps and century-old wells. Petroleum emissions affecting residents are much more prone to originate beneath their properties than from the Murphy website.
Worse, closing producing wells may very well hurt the setting. Eradicating oil reduces the underground hydrocarbons driving seepage. Elsewhere in California, a long time of oil manufacturing have dramatically reduced pure seepage.
Closing L.A. oil websites whereas leaving oil underground to flee via uncontrolled pathways isn’t environmental safety. It’s politically motivated, scientifically ignorant, anti-environmental habits. Shameful.
James Rector, Oakland
This author is a professor of civil and environmental engineering at UC Berkeley.
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To the editor: Referenced with out elaboration was the truth that the Roman Catholic Archdiocese started leasing its land for the Murphy drill website in Jefferson Park within the Sixties.
It’s been almost 40 years since scientist James Hansen testified earlier than Congress about human-induced international warming, or local weather change. In 2015, Pope Francis’ encyclical letter “On Take care of Our Frequent Residence (Laudato Si’)” tied human exercise to international warming. Pope Leo XIV has condemned the indifference to the struggling attributable to such. The Vatican has pledged to realize carbon neutrality by 2050, primarily by way of infrastructure equivalent to photo voltaic farms.
The Church clearly acknowledges air pollution as an ethical and social situation. Shouldn’t the lease resolution have been reconsidered a long time in the past, given the well being and environmental impacts? My Catholic mom would have been appalled by this obvious indifference.
Jennifer Pinkerton, Glendale
