CBE Commun for Better Environ

<div>=<a href="https://www.desmogblog.com/2017/04/03/youth-color-lawsuit-los-angeles-drilling-discrimination-oil-industry">https://www.desmogblog.com/2017/04/03/youth-color-lawsuit-los-angeles-drilling-discrimination-oil-industry</a>After Los Angeles Youth Sued City for Discriminatory Drilling Practices, the Oil Industry Sued BackBy Ashley Braun • Monday, April 3, 2017 - 03:58
Boy playing basketball at Beverly Hills High School next to a covered oil derrickLos Angeles is a city built on oil, and even today more than a thousand derricks still pump it from the shallow reserves beneath the city. While some oil wells are camouflaged behind colorfully painted towers or bland beige structures resembling office buildings, many of them draw up crude oil in the open, surprisingly close to homes, stores, restaurants, schools, and churches. 
“Every time I go to school,” 18-year-old Brandon Molina told DeSmog, “I walk by these oil drilling sites. They’re around my school. So, it’s something that I see every day.”
In LA, the number of residents living less than a mile from an oil well is in the tens of thousands. But how close you live to a drilling site may depend on the color of your skin and socioeconomic status, placing communities of color disproportionately at risk, according to a lawsuit brought by three LA youth groups against the City of LA. 
And while the City took steps to address the complaints by amending its drilling application process and ultimately settled with the youth groups in September 2016, both parties are currently facing a counter lawsuit.This legal battle has been brought by a state-based oil and gas trade group, the California Independent Petroleum Association (CIPA), which argues that after a judge granted it permission to participate in the youth lawsuit settlement discussions, it was allegedly blocked from doing so.Molina is a freshman attending community college in the LA neighborhood of Wilmington. He is a youth organizer with one of the groups filing the original lawsuit, Youth for Environmental Justice, a program of the California-focused nonprofit Communities for a Better Environment. These youth groups, which also include the South Central Youth Leadership Coalition and youth members of the Center for Biological Diversity, first filed suit against the City of LA in November 2015. ...</div><div>==</div>