There Will Be Crud: Jeremy Miller on Kern County, CA Water & Oil Issues

California’s Kern County is the state’s primary producer of oil. But the stuff that comes out of the ground in this desert region of southern California isn’t the black liquid many of us imagine rushing like a geyser out of the earth, but a thick goopy substance that must be forced out of the ground. What do they use to do that? A resource that’s nearly as valuable in this dusty corner of California’s Central Valley: water. For this episode from the March 2011 Sea Change Radio archives, our guest is Jeremy Miller, an investigative journalist who’s written an article in the February issue of Orion Magazine. He tells us all about Kern County, how the methods used to extract the cruddy crude are pitting agricultural interests against oil interests, how water is being expended in the endless pursuit of petroleum, and how, by reducing our dependence on oil, we’d also be preventing the waste of that life-giving compound, H2O. They say water and oil don’t mix, today on Sea Change Radio, we discover what happens when they do.