Oil made Southern California. That’s evident every time a freight train rumbles out of the Long Beach-Los Angeles ports heading east to the sprawling Colton railyard. It’s clear each day as 18-wheelers and cars jam up the 10, 60, and 210 freeways, concrete corridors of carbon monoxide.

However beneficial, this movement of goods and people comes at a steep price. This summer we rediscovered how steep and who disproportionately bears that burden.

Start with anyone residing near this region’s complex transportation grid or its major oilfields or refineries. For them, oil’s downwind consequences are literally in their faces. No surprise, these areas are home to some of Southern California’s poorest and least advantaged.

Or spend time in University Park, a poor, majority-Latino neighborhood within sight of USC, whose residents had to file hundreds of public-health complaints against AllenCo’s oil operations before the EPA and the city intervened.

Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is also worrying hundreds of thousands of people living adjacent to the productive Inglewood/Baldwin Hills and Brea-Olinda oilfields, anxious about the impact on air and water quality.

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