Government accountability
NewsomWellWatch.com
Tracking California oil and gas well permits against the administration's own stated policy — a public accountability instrument.
NewsomWellWatch does one thing: it counts. It tracks oil and gas well permits issued in California and sets them against what the administration said it would do.
Why a counter is a good argument
Advocacy usually argues in prose. This site argues in a number that updates, and that is a fundamentally stronger position, because the number comes from the state's own permit records. There is nothing to rebut except the data, and the data is public.
That constrains the build in a useful way. The pipeline has to be defensible: where each figure came from, what date range it covers, and what counts as a permit have to be stated plainly, because the first serious response to a site like this is an argument about methodology.
Ingest is the whole project
The visible site is a scoreboard. The actual work is upstream — pulling permit records, normalising them across format changes, and handling the reality that a public agency will reorganise its exports without notice and without a changelog.
A pipeline that silently produces a stale number is worse than no site at all, because the number is the credibility. So the failure mode that matters is not "the site is down" — it is "the site is confidently wrong," and everything in the ingest is built to fail loudly rather than quietly.