“The main human right is the right to breathe,” said Gustavo Aguirre Jr., the climate and environmental justice director for the Central California Asthma Collaborative (CCAC), in the opening of The Sacrifice Zone, a new film that follows the Aguirre family and their fight against new Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) projects.
Gustavo explained how his own family’s story reflects the health disparities created by the fossil fuel industries. He revealed that he was born on the coast in Oxnard, and his brother, Cesar, was born in Blythe. But his sister, the only one born in Bakersfield, is also the only one of the siblings to have developed asthma.
In Kern County, where the film is set, the air is among the worst in the nation. On a school playground, children play just steps away from pumpjacks on the other side of the fence.
“I’m hoping that no one else has to raise kids and be scared of raising them in an environment that they exist in, but that’s our reality,” he said. “And that’s what we’re fighting against right now.”
The film challenges the growing narrative pushed by the oil and gas industry that CCS is a viable climate solution. Gustavo breaks down the process simply: carbon is just one of many pollutants released from extraction sites, yet the industry promotes capturing only carbon dioxide and injecting it underground while continuing business as usual.
Scientists and advocates featured in the film say this framing is part of a long pattern. After decades of denying climate change, major oil companies shifted toward greenwashing, presenting themselves as partners in solving the crisis while backing technologies critics call “false solutions.”
Following the screening, a panel featuring Cesar Aguirre, Gustavo Aguirre Jr., and Maricruz Ramirez, a community organizer with the Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment (CRPE), expanded on themes from the film and called for a more honest conversation about the risks tied to carbon capture and storage.
Ramirez explained why environmental justice advocates consider CCS a “false solution,” stating that the technology not only maintains the status quo of fossil fuel extraction but also increases the pollution burden on already overburdened communities.
“A facility’s emissions can increase up to 25% when it comes to CCS,” she said. “Instead of reducing emissions, CCS is just another way of polluting and actually making our environments worse.”
Ramirez also urged attendees to look closely at who is promoting CCS and why.
“It’s the oil companies and industry themselves,” she said. “To me, that would be like trusting tobacco companies to come up with a cure for lung cancer.”
She added that billions of dollars in public funding are being directed toward CCS while far less is invested in real community solutions.
“Imagine if these billions went into improving the towns that we live in,” she said. “It would be a major difference.”
Gustavo expanded on who benefits and who doesn’t from CCS. He said CCS projects only deepen long-standing inequities by bringing more industrial activity into communities already living alongside oil wells, flares, and heavy truck traffic.
“When industries who have proven to be bad neighbors come back and say, ‘We’re going to fix our problems,’ they’re ignoring H₂S, PM2.5, ozone, NOx, carcinogenic chemicals, everything we’re already dealing with,” stated Gustavo.
When the conversation then turned to whether the oil and gas industry, or government regulators, can safely operate CCS projects, Cesar did not hesitate to answer by stating it’s a gamble.
Cesar compared the sales pitch behind CCS to a casino promising potential winnings while hiding the overwhelming likelihood of loss. “That’s what the ratio is for carbon capture and sequestration. They fail at an 80% rate to not meet their standards or keep carbon in the ground,” he said. “They try to sell us the positives while staying away from the reality.”
Aguirre added that despite being framed as a jobs program, CCS offers very few long-term positions.
“This multibillion-dollar project is only going to create five to ten full-time jobs,” he said. “And the best-paid jobs are so specialized they’ll come from outside Kern County.”
He also noted that the industry avoids hiring the workforce needed to operate safely.
“If they were to do things correctly, they would have thousands of people checking their wells every day. And they do not have that.”
Across the panel, the message was consistent: CCS brings significant risks, minimal benefits, and continues a legacy of environmental sacrifice in low-income communities and communities of color.
“Enough is enough,” Ramirez said. “We need to tell them no and defend ourselves as best we can.”
During the discussion, the panel was also asked why the Central Valley continues to be treated as a sacrifice zone by major polluters. Gustavo explained that companies often operate this way because “they think they can get away with it because they have before.” He noted that these sacrifice zones are disproportionately made up of working-class families, monolingual Spanish speakers, farmworkers, and communities of color. All groups with limited political power who bear the brunt of environmental injustices.
“Their quality of life is severely reduced and affected by horrible things, just cancer and cardiovascular disease and asthma, and other respiratory issues,” Gustavo said.
Panelists encouraged audience members to take action. Community members were urged to contact state senators or assembly members to advocate for protections against CCS projects and other industrial developments.
