John Beard is a former Exxon Mobil oil refinery operator and firefighter from Port Arthur, Texas. Like his father before him, he labored his whole life in the refineries that surround this lower-income city on the Gulf Coast east of Houston. When Beard finally retired after 38 years in 2017, he decided to make a radical change. He devoted himself, full time, to fighting against the air pollution, chemical threats, climate change and coastal flooding caused by the fossil fuel industry that he saw devastating the mostly African-American community where he grew up. Working with the Environmental Integrity Project and Lone Star Legal Aid, he recently succeeded in petitioning the Biden EPA to launch an investigation of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality for allegedly violating the civil rights of Port Arthur residents by allowing a petroleum processing plant owned by billionaire William Koch to release tons of potentially deadly sulfur dioxide air pollution every year without any modern pollution control equipment.
