PICTURE A FUTURE where sail boats dock at the long wharf in Richmond, on the spot where tankers once delivered crude oil. Picture windmills on the south-facing hills, instead of petroleum tanks, generating renewable energy for the city with turbines manufactured by Richmond residents. Now picture those projects seeded with a voter-approved tax on Chevron of $1 per barrel of oil processed at the refinery for the next 50 years.

Last week, the Richmond City Council voted unanimously to add the Oil Refining Business License Tax, dubbed the “Polluters Pay” measure, to the November ballot. If approved by voters, the potential $60 million to $90 million per year in tax revenue could propel the city’s Green-Blue New Deal, according to city councilmember Gayle McLaughlin. She said the city hired a consultant for the deal, and the final plan will be reviewed in the next meeting Tuesday or right after the council reconvenes in September.

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Ruth Dusseault is an investigative reporter and multimedia journalist focused on environment and energy. Her position is supported by the California local news fellowship, a statewide initiative spearheaded by UC Berkeley aimed at supporting local news platforms. While a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism (c’23), Ruth developed stories about the social and environmental circumstances of contaminated watersheds around the Great Lakes, Mississippi River and Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. Her thesis explored rights of nature laws in small rural communities. She is a former assistant professor and artist in residence at Georgia Tech’s School of Architecture, and uses photography, film and digital storytelling to report on the engineered systems that undergird modern life.