Our latest report, Linked Fates, reveals that California is the world's largest consumer of oil from the Amazon rainforest. The state converts 50% of the Amazon oil exported globally into fuel for airports, corporations such as Amazon.com, trucking fleets such as PepsiCo, and retail gas giants such as COSTCO. Because of this, California officials and corporations must play a key role in ending Amazon crude.

In Amazon Watch's over 25 years of solidarity with Amazon Earth defenders, keeping it in the ground and ending Amazon crude has been central to our rallying cry. In 2016, we published From Well to Wheel, which tracked crude extracted from oil wells in the western Amazon to refineries in the United States, after which it makes its way into cars and trucking fleets throughout the country. This new report picks up where we left off.

Linked Fates further defines the ways in which Amazon crude destroys the environment, violates human rights at every step of the supply chain, and affects our climate's future. When extracted, it affects the ancestral territories of Indigenous communities – the world's best protectors of the rainforest and its vast biodiversity. In the Amazon, the oil industry causes deforestation and pollution, violates Indigenous peoples' rights, and spreads corruption. En route to destinations like the U.S. or Europe, it pollutes waterways and our oceans. When it arrives, it is refined in the backyards of “fenceline” communities that are often low-income. Black, Indigenous and people of color, are more likely to live near refineries and industry as well.

While this research focuses on California's outsized role, with the rainforest at the tipping point, ending Amazon crude will require us all to take swift action and demand accountability.