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It was 1981 and my first home in California, an apartment in Manhattan Beach, a few steps from the sand – and you could watch the sun set over Malibu across the wide stretch of Santa Monica Bay. But in between Manhattan Beach and Malibu were the oil tankers anchored off El Segundo, pumping their loads of Alaskan crude to the big Chevron oil refinery just to the north, by the airport. And sometimes it smelled awful, and always you come back from the beach with tarry oil stains on your feet from the little hard nodules of crude in the sand.
It all came back when I caught a glimpse of a trash container on Santa Monica Boulevard – Alaskan mountains and whales and all that, next to a Chevron station –
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