The Refinery Next Door: My Babies Made Me a Climate Activist
I was pregnant, living next to an oil refinery. America had just invaded Iraq. Oil giants reaped billions in profit. Climate reports piled up on my bedside. Refinery accidents were so close to home.
When I was pregnant with my first baby I lived next to a Shell oil refinery. From the front door I could see a tall smokestack with a gas flare burning 24/7, like the eye of Sauron.
It released gaseous pressure from the bowels of a colossal tangle of pipes, tanks and boilers. Sometimes it was a gassy blue cough. Or acrid black smoke. And sometimes it exploded into a terrifying orange column ten stories high.
“A flame is good,” a refinery worker told me. “No flame is very bad.”
Then there was the stink. I would cover my mouth with my t-shirt as I walked past from the train station.
A local doctor asked the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) to set up a database to monitor respiratory problems in the community. “If it's an easterly (from Shell), they lock themselves in their houses all day and don't go out," he said.
Benzene is a carcinogenic hydrocarbon linked to leukaemia, cancer of the body's blood-forming tissues, including bone marrow, white blood cells and the lymphatic system.
Fence-line communities are badly exposed to environmental pollution. An unusually high number of oil refinery workers in the US will end up with leukaemia, according to Chicago lawyer and benzene specialist Andrew Hughes. A study of Australian petroleum industry workers found the same thing.
Hughes says at the point where you can smell benzene (the “odour threshold”), you are inhaling unsafe levels of the chemical.
Shell shock
One night as I settled to sleep, my dreaming blood circling through the unborn child in my womb, the refinery siren blared. I startled.
I felt my baby kick.
Maybe I was already on edge. I’d been reading a report by renowned climate scientist James Hansen saying fossil fuel burning must stop urgently to prevent irreversible melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets causing several metres of sea level rise in coming decades and centuries.
“I suggest that the highest prudent level of additional global warming is not more than about 1°C,” he said.
My brain couldn’t fit what he was saying into my life decisions.
During the time I was pregnant, the Shell refinery breached their licence conditions almost 100 times. They were fined 11 times by the EPA for discharging oil into the bay. When my belly just started to show, there was a “systems breakdown” at the fifty-year-old refinery.
They did not explain to the community what that meant.
In the few years prior, Shell had been fined $53,000 for a gas leak after the EPA took them to court. There were fuel spills, acid spills, and failed containment ditches, but without court action, the fines were tiny. Shell racked up 28 tiny $5000 fines and three $800 fines.
It was chump change for a global oil corporation.
America had just invaded Iraq.
Shell had doubled their earnings, joining other oil giants reaping billions in profit.
That year Shell, globally, was responsible for 40,674 million tonnes of climate pollution.
The refinery alarms blared often. A fridge magnet had arrived in the mail, explaining that a constant siren means, “the incident is contained on site.” An up and down siren means, “an incident has occurred which may affect other areas.”
Was the siren I heard that night constant, or up and down? It was wailing and I wasn’t sure. But as I contemplated my baby’s future, it was becoming clear to me that when it comes to fossil fuel pollution, no incident is contained onsite.
Up close to environmental pollution
Within minutes of exposure to benzene vapour, around 50% of the dose is absorbed by the lungs. It passes to the placenta and the foetus straight away. Within a couple of hours, levels in blood and bone marrow are elevated. It spreads to the brain, liver bile, and fat – and into high fat breast milk. Umbilical cord blood may hold higher concentrations than maternal blood. Benzene is gradually eliminated, mainly through breath and pee.
An air monitoring station near my house clocked benzene, toluene, xylenes, ethylbenzene, 1,3-butadiene, nitrogen dioxide and sulfur dioxide.
One EPA report stated they held, “significant doubt in the accuracy of benzene data being generated by Shell.”
Some studies suggest childhood leukaemia can be associated with exposure of the mother - and even the father preconception – to solvents, petroleum products, car pollution, benzene, or plastic.
Twice while I was pregnant with my first son, the benzene levels outside the refinery spiked to more than five times the EPA's intervention level. They claimed most of the time the air quality was similar to Melbourne.
If I passed the refinery mid-morning, I would see a woman in a white coat park her ute by the stream that flowed out of the refinery grounds directly into the bay. Sometimes the water steamed it was so hot. She climbed down and took a sample.
Pelicans and plovers congregated on the piers where pipelines pumped oil from berthed tankers to the refinery. Barbed wire fences kept people out, making it peaceful for the birds.
When my belly was large and my baby was kicking hard, there was another spill from a cracked pipe on the jetty. Men in tinnies fished nearby, catching pinky snapper which swam near the warm water at dawn and dusk. At low tide, the mud barrier of the lagoon exposed, they pulled in trevally, whiting and flathead. I wasn’t keen to share their catch.
I was not afraid for myself. But my baby was another thing. It wasn’t analytical. My pregnant nose reacted to strong chemical smells like a chained wildcat sensing a mortal enemy.
And cancer was personal.
Twelve years earlier, my mum was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer. She defied the odds and was still there to love her grandsons, with her joy and sunshine, until they were 11 and eight. Then the cancer returned and took her life.
My dad never met his beautiful grandsons. Peter died of bowel cancer four years before my first son was born.
And when dad was a young child, his older brother, Dougal, died at just 13 years old. He had leukaemia.
The pulse of life
I found pregnancy astounding. A new human was growing inside me. My blood and my heart pumped strong. My breasts grew full. At the slightest sniff of dodgy food, a massive alarm bell would ring. I left nuts and blueberries on my bedside table to grab, ravenous at 3AM.
My intense climate alarm was partly about fear for my baby’s future. But it was more than that. Holding my newborn, and three years and three days later, his brother, meant feeling a ferocity of love, not just for them, but for everyone’s children, and for the creative force of life itself.
It was time to step into action
I’d been working as a journalist. I’d woven climate change into my stories, but back then editors weren’t very interested. I was telling stories to people I would never meet. And I couldn’t openly advocate for change.
I knew it wasn’t enough. Being an observer would not cut it. I needed to step into collective action. And I needed to step into community.
So that’s how I came to meet ten strangers in a Geelong living room who all shared my question – how do we talk about climate change in a town full of smelters and refineries? The group we formed that night quickly became one of the largest community groups in the region and it’s still active two decades later.
And that was the beginning of 20 years of full-time climate activism to hold big polluters accountable with some of the best campaign groups in the country, like the Australian Conservation Foundation, GetUp, and now Climate Action Network Australia.
I have tried to talk to my boys honestly about the climate crisis, but I haven’t gone into depth on how dire the climate science is, or explicitly about what it means for their lives.
I think very young children should be free to climb trees, stare at wallabies, maybe go find frogs, and think about looking after a local waterhole, before they are expected to grapple with global pollution.
And as they got older, I figured they would absorb a lot from witnessing my work, and make their own choices about their passions. Now we have lots of conversations about who does and does not have power and how change happens. They seem curious about this.
I wish for them all the creativity, collaboration and determination we can muster.