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“EVERY ONE OFYour browser does not support the element. those wells has a name and a personality,” says Mike McCoy, the director of the Kern County Museum. He is standing on a bluff overlooking Bakersfield, Kern’s biggest city, and pointing towards the oilfield below. “It’s like going to a dance and there’s a bunch of pretty girls, and every one of them is different.” That one is where so-and-so cut his finger off. Over there is where he contemplated getting married. When Mr McCoy was younger, the roughnecks called him “Sunshine” for his golden locks. Now a baseball cap covers his grey. His father (“Tex”) spent a career on the pipelines, having moved here back in the days when Texans flocked to California, rather than vice versa.Kern County, California feels as far from the Pacific coast as Iowa. Squint past the palm trees and foothills, and it resembles the Great Plains. From Mr McCoy’s vantage point, the horizon is littered with pump jacks, bobbing up and down, sucking the oil out of earthen canyons like thousands of metal mosquitoes. Here, oil is not just a commodity; it is part of people’s identity. If you’re not in oil, you know people who are. California is still the eighth-largest oil producer among American states, and three-quarters of its oil comes from Kern County. As recently as 2016 Kern produced more oil than any other county.Yet times have changed. California has taken a sharp green turn in recent decades. It aims to be carbon neutral by 2045; only China, the European Union and South Korea boast larger carbon-trading markets. Its car-emissions standards are tighter than the federal government’s. By 2030, 60% of its utilities’ power must come from renewables. Oddly enough, the Golden State is now both a large producer of oil, and aggressively trying to end its production. State-issued permits for drilling have become vanishingly rare.All this means trouble for Kern County. As oil production has plunged in the state (see chart), it has fallen in the county, too, from a peak of 256m barrels in 1985 to 90m in 2023. Locals fear that their jobs and towns are being sacrificed. Resentment and anxiety are spreading. As the world shifts away from hydrocarbons, there will be many places like Kern. So it is useful to examine how its people respond to the green transition. Will they push back politically, or adapt economically, or simply up sticks and leave? What happens in Kern County could offer a road map to other carbon-dependent places—or a warning.Historically, Kern has had three big booms. In the 1850s miners came hunting for gold in the Sierra Nevada mountains. After the American civil war, southern farmers and homesteaders moved west, and irrigated cotton became king. The third boom was oil. In 1899 a group of men hacked away at the dirt until they had dug a well 21 metres deep. They struck black gold in what would become the Kern River oil field. A small stone monument still marks the spot.Towns sprang up in the shadow of towering oil derricks. In Oildale, some houses are so close to the Kern River field that pump jacks are visible from backyards and church car parks. The Standard School District there is named after Standard Oil, John D. Rockefeller’s petroleum empire. (When the Supreme Court ordered its break-up in 1911, Standard Oil of California was born.) The mascot of Bakersfield High School is the Drillers. Murals of oilmen decorate its walls. Taft, a small town in the western foothills, was built with oil money. It was near here that the Lakeview Gusher erupted in 1910. An average of 18,000 barrels exploded skyward from the well’s mouth each day for 18 months. Workers rushed to stop the river of oil from surging into a nearby lake used for irrigation. The black geyser became a tourist attraction, but only for those who didn’t mind getting coated in inky slime.In the early 20th century, migrants from the Plains began to roll into the region, escaping from the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. Oildale became a “Little Oklahoma”. “This was all Okies, Arkies and Texans,” says Mr McCoy, driving around the part of Oildale where he grew up, explaining in his Texas drawl where his parents settled after the second world war.Thousands of migrants ended up as farmworkers. John Steinbeck’s fictional Joad family in “The Grapes of Wrath” settles in a government-run camp based, in part, on one that still stands on the outskirts of Bakersfield. Others found work in oil. “The first three words an Okie baby says is mommy, daddy and Bakersfield,” says Fred Holmes, who began work in the oilfields when he was 13. Now 80 (pictured), he owns a drilling firm and swaggers around wearing a golden belt buckle that depicts the Lakeview Gusher.These migrants nurtured a distinct culture. The “Bakersfield sound”, a twangy strain of country music pioneered by local stars like Merle Haggard and Buck Owens, still rocks the city’s honky-tonk bars. “In the old days you’d go in some of these places...and get your ass kicked,” jokes Mr McCoy. Your correspondent meets him at one nonetheless. A singer with a gravelly voice and a guitar serenades the crowd. No punches are thrown. Honky-tonks are more respectable now, though patrons may still hear a song with crude lyrics. Literally. “Loaded with crude oil, headed for town, the boxcar would tremble from the top to the ground,” warbles Merle Haggard in “Oil tanker train”, recalling his childhood living in a converted boxcar in Oildale.Long-resident families can remember being mocked for their Oklahoma roots. “Okie use’ ta mean you was from Oklahoma,” wrote Steinbeck. “Now it means you’re a dirty son-of-a-bitch.” These days people take pride in it. Suzanne Garrison gives tours of the old migrant camp where her mother was born in 1946. “My grandpa said…‘Be proud that you come from Okies,’” she remembers, “we come from the dirt and the lowest point of life, and we overcame it.”Bakersfield is still hard-up. About 19% of Kern residents live below the American poverty line of $31,000 a year for a family of four, compared with 12% of Californians. Oilfield work, though dangerous and gruelling, offers opportunity. Kenny Pearson grew up in foster care. Back in 2008, when he was 20, he took a job cleaning the inside of oil tanks. “We would pop open the manhole covers and crawl in,” he says. He lived in fear of the rotten-egg smell of hydrogen sulphide, a deadly gas. But he made $20 an hour, more than twice the state’s minimum wage. Many Latinos like Mr Pearson have found their way into oil work. Now Kern County is around 60% Hispanic.When the price of oil was high, the county prospered. Tax coffers were full. Donations from oil firms paid for school sports teams. Local businesses thrived. The busts hurt, but were quickly forgotten. “We could hunker down. We would have our money saved, and we could go through it,” Mr Holmes says. Previous crashes, however, were followed by booms, and he doubts there will be another. “If I had time to do a little math, I could tell you the day we’ll be out of business.”Local drilling faces practical obstacles. Kern’s crude is thick like molasses, so it must be heated expensively to extract it. However, the main problem, as drillers see it, is government. Chevron, the successor to Standard Oil of California, argues there is still enough demand for oil that drilling in Kern would make financial sense, but the state has imposed a de facto moratorium on drilling. A decade ago, in 2014, nearly 3,200 new oil and gas wells were permitted in the county. As of December, just 11 had been permitted in 2024. California recently banned drilling near homes and schools, and increased fees on idle wells. Sometimes the state tries to have it both ways, insisting that oil must be curbed but petrol must still be reliably available and cheap. In 2024 Gavin Newsom, the Democratic governor, called a special session of the legislature to tackle petrol-price spikes when refineries undergo maintenance and supplies run low. A new law will require them to maintain emergency oil supplies. Kern residents argue that the state is choking off production, and trying to put a band-aid over the effects of doing so. Mr Holmes texted your correspondent when news of the special session broke: “The governor is after us again.”What locals call a “war on oil” has deepened a rift between Kern and the state government. California is run by Democrats; the county is deeply conservative. Kevin McCarthy, the former Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, is a son of Bakersfield. But there are not enough hydrocarbon-loving Republicans in California to mount an electoral revolt against Mr Newsom and his party. Democrats don’t have to worry that harassing oil firms will endanger their majority (though lefties running in Kern County may suffer). Lorelei Oviatt runs the county’s planning and natural resources department and is the architect of its energy transition. Yet she never says “transition”, preferring “evolution”. “Climate change is urgent, and now the state of California’s policies are urgent because they’re going to put us out of business,” she says, sitting in an office decorated with photos of sunflowers.Some 13,000 people work in oil and gas in Kern County, 36% fewer than ten years ago. In 2020 the industry contributed nearly $200m to the budget via property taxes, says Ms Oviatt. Without that money schools, parks and police will be squeezed. “We probably have five years to stabilise the situation here in Kern...and then we may be approaching a cliff that we’re going to fall off,” she says.Certain refrains can be heard around the county. California makes the cleanest oil in the world because of all of the regulations, Kern residents argue. So why cut drilling here just to import dirtier oil from abroad? Imagine that you spy a golden nugget in a riverbed and you’re asked not to pick it up. That, locals insist, is what it’s like being unable to drill in their backyards. The old guard hope the state will be shocked into bringing back oil-friendly policies by a supply shortage, or that Donald Trump’s election on a platform of “Drill, baby, drill” will turn the tide. Some younger workers are optimistic. They understand that when production stops, someone will have to plug all those wells. That could take years and a lot of manpower. There is opportunity even in decline.Advocates of a green transition usually say it should be “just”, and include re-training or new jobs for fossil-fuel workers. But wages in logistics and manufacturing, which are growing in Kern County, are paltry compared with oilfield money. And rather than learning new skills, rig hands and executives whisper about an exodus to less-regulated states. Workers “won’t be retrained”, says Ms Oviatt. “They’ll move.”Tim Paulsen, who oversees Chevron’s San Joaquin Valley operations, says he has recently transferred a few dozen staff to Texas and Colorado. “How long do we have?” he recalls them asking. “Can I make it another two years here before I need to move?” He doesn’t expect to finish his own career in Bakersfield, either; Chevron is moving its headquarters to Texas.The American West has hundreds of ghost towns: settlements that died when a mine or a sawmill closed and residents moved on. Yet it is far from certain that Kern county will follow that path. Renewables are booming: the desert is ideal for solar panels and the foothills for wind turbines. Ms Oviatt hopes carbon, of all things, can be Kern’s saviour. She wants to build a “carbon management park”, where steel and hydrogen plants, for example, can store their carbon waste below the oilfields. There is no guarantee the park will ever be built, but if it is, she reckons it can make up some of the lost jobs and tax revenue. “I am the bringer of hope,” she declares, a county planner in a cape.Bakersfield is big and diverse enough to survive. But storefronts in Taft are boarded up. Meth, and later opioids, have ravaged Oildale. Homeless people camp on Beardsley Avenue, “the worst street in Oildale”, according to Mr McCoy. He points out some neat houses in his old neighbourhood that have weathered the hard times, but now sit between trailers and shacks with tin roofs.Some residents want Kern to look beyond carbon, and think about what Chevron’s canyons could look like returned to their natural state. Locals hope tourists will stop by on their drive north from Los Angeles to the Sierras. Conservationists have restored a strip of land beside the Kern River and the oil field that bears its name. Cottonwood trees offer shade. A coyote yips nearby. The waning sun glints off nearby pump jacks as it dips below the western horizon. The metal mosquitoes bob up and down, up and down, in their monotonous rhythm. Until, one day, they will stop.
