One Black community bearing the brunt of Trump's oil wars

From Capital B News, a stark article detailing how An Oil Explosion in a Black Texas Town Traces Back to Trump’s Iran and Venezuela Crises:

The evening blast at the Texas oil refinery jolted the long-polluted community [of Port Arthur, TX] awake to their role in a much larger situation, residents told Capital B. It exposed how President Donald Trump’s global oil maneuvers have turned the long-impoverished Black area into a front line of his energy war, residents and advocates said.

As U.S. airstrikes in Iran sent fuel prices soaring, the administration has leaned harder on Venezuelan crude, driving more of the dirtiest oil on the market into refineries like Valero’s Port Arthur plant, which sits within yards of Black homes, churches, and schools. The refinery operator, Valero, has been the largest receiver of Venezuelan oil since the January military action.

When affluent rural and suburban folks complain that they don’t want a wind or solar farm nearby because they don’t like how it looks, remember stories like this. Nobody living near one of those has to shelter-in-place until the explosions stop, or ends up in the only county in their state “having unsafe levels of the cancer-causing chemicals benzene, hydrogen sulfide, and sulfur dioxide.”

The other big difference, of course, is that communities near clean energy production (usually) get the benefit of that power. The people of Port Arthur pay just as much at the gas pump as anyone.