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The Great Coastal Places Campaign

On Monday, April 9^th, 2007 more than 2,000 Sierra Club members and other Southern California residents put on blue “Terminate the Terminal” t-shirts to attend the California State Lands Commission hearing in Oxnard.   While Commissioners inside the packed hearing room listened to community leaders, public officials and concerned citizens speak out against the project, around 1,500 others, unable to squeeze into the overfilled room, waited outside in the courtyard, listening to the proceedings on speakers.

For years, Sierra Club's Great Coastal Places Campaign had worked to stop BHP Billiton’s dirty and dangerous floating Liquefied Natural Gas terminal which had been proposed to live off the coast of Oxnard and Malibu for at least the next 40 years.  The terminal and its tankers would have pumped out more than 200 tons of smog-producing air pollution every year, failed to comply with federal laws designed to protect our health and safety and would have posed grave threats to migrating whales and dolphins.

At the end of that thirteen hour hearing, two of the three State Lands Commissioners, Lt Governor John Garamendi and State Controller John Chiang voted against the project giving us a major victory and setting us up for yet another win later in the week.  Just three days later, when another 500 people attended the April 12^th California Coastal Commission hearing in Santa Barbara, that commission too voted against the project.  This second defeat left BHP Billiton’s massive and polluting “factory at sea” essentially dead in the water

It took more than three years from the first time Sierra Club members began to work on this issue to these decisive victories.  And the victories were only possible because of the powerful and diverse coalition we helped created.  The final hearings showed Sierra Club members, Latino groups, business leaders, union members, public officials, realtors, farm workers, community leaders and surfers standing together to stop the project. The work could not have been done without the hard work of many and this victory is one that is shared by all the people of California.

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