By Adam Mahoney with photographs by Damon Casarez
F
or Daniel Delgado, the Fourth of July marked a turning point in 2020. It was the first holiday after COVID-19 had kept much of America locked down. In nine days, he’d be entering his 20s. He planned to spend his birthday relishing the Arizona sun with friends, but in the meantime, the holiday offered him an opportunity to be celebrated by family and friends, surrounded by love and human connection — things that had been hard to come by that year. He spent the day at his aunt’s home in the Los Angeles Harbor Area neighborhood of Wilmington. His parents, Sonia Banales and Roberto Delgado, and his large extended family remember laughing, grilling ribs and setting off fireworks. Shortly after midnight, as the celebration died down, Delgado left the house to drive a few friends home. He never made it back. About 2 a.m., Delgado was shot and killed in the only place he ever called home, a small corner of Los Angeles tucked between the largest port in North America and the largest oil refinery in California. He was one of at least 160 people in the U.S. who lost their lives to gun violence that weekend. The exceptional deadliness of Independence Day weekend is one of the few American norms that the pandemic did not disrupt. In the 20 months since Delgado’s death, his family has found little solace and fewer answers as they grapple with what happened that night. They’ve expressed disillusionment at the social support available to them— the police have not discovered a motive or firmly identified a suspect. [See Pollution, p. 10]
Graphic by Brenda Lopez
By Paul Rosenberg, Senior Editor
“1.5°C is dead.” Following the report’s release, Scientist Rebellion staged direct non-violent actions of civil disobedience in 27 countries, involving more than 1,000 arrests. In Los Angeles, four members chained themselves to the doors of JP Morgan Chase, the bank that’s funded more new fossil fuel projects than any other, according to a recent NGO report “Banking on Climate Chaos.” One of the four, NASA climate scientist Peter Kalmus, tweeted ahead of time, “Brief summary of the
new IPCC report: We know what to do, we know how to do it, it requires taking toys away from the rich, and world leaders aren’t doing it.” “Climate activists are sometimes depicted as dangerous radicals, but the truly dangerous radicals are the countries that are increasing the production of fossil fuels,” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said in a press briefing when the report was released. “Investing in new fossil fuels infrastructure is moral and economic madness.” Yet, that’s just what’s being contemplated at every level from President Joe Biden, who announced the intention to expand production and export liquefied natural gas to Europe in response to Russia’s war, down to the Port of Los Angeles, where staff is pushing a proposal to nearly double crude oil throughput at the Phillips 66 terminal without even doing an environmental impact report. The report itself was almost as clear: “the Paris
April 14 - 27, 2022
A remembrance of LA’s Queen of Jazz — Barbara Morrison p. 15
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, released April 4, warns that global emissions must peak in just three years to stay below the 1.5°C warming ceiling for a livable future
LA Maritime Institute celebrates 30 years p. 2
‘I
started to think about the parallels between climate change and this war,” Ukraine’s leading climate scientist, Svitlana Krakovska, told The Guardian. “It’s clear that the roots of both these threats to humanity are found in fossil fuels.” But also in delay. The world has known about fossil fuels’ climate threat at least since James Hansen’s congressional testimony in 1988, shortly after which President George H.W. Bush promised to counter the greenhouse effect with “the White House effect,” the first of countless broken promises over three plus decades of delay. As a result, the most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, released on April 4, warns that global emissions must peak in just three years to stay below the 1.5°C warming ceiling for a livable future — a target that could easily have been hit with gradual changes begun decades ago, but that now calls for cuts so drastic that scientists involved with Scientist Rebellion declared flatly that
Earth Day Edition
Turning salty water drinkable ― LA water agency protects regional groundwater p. 2
The Oil War And Climate Change
[See Oil, p. 7] 1