By Andrew Christie, Chapter Director
Thanks to John Peschong for the shout-out to the Sierra Club in Sunday’s tribune. In his bi-weekly op ed, “Abandon ridicule and discuss issues,” Mr. Peschong bemoaned the uncivil state of local political discourse and quickly identified liberal Democrats, his traditional foes, as the sole source of the malaise of ridicule.
Then, building to his climax, he offered the ultimate proof that “the trend of ridicule has spun dangerously out of hand.”
Not to put too fine a point on it: Us.
He wrote:
“Even I am not immune – the local Sierra Club ridiculed me in its February newsletter when it took on an op-ed I wrote earlier this year. In its newsletter, the Sierra Club listed my work, my associations and my perceived biases while only briefly addressing the actual issue at hand.”
Mr. Peschong was referring to “Taking Issue,” a beloved occasional feature of the Santa Lucian that analyzes local environmental news and commentary. The edition he cited was not the first time we felt the need to critique Mr. Peschong’s bi-weekly punditry. He might just as easily have mentioned this one or this one instead, to the same purpose.
A bad sign: He got the issue wrong. (It was featured in the April edition of our newsletter, not February.)
Another bad sign: He got the math wrong. (The cited article had a total of 24 lines of helpful background on the subject of Mr. Peschong’s work, associations and perceived biases, and 116 lines “only briefly addressing the actual issue at hand.”)
A third bad sign: He accused us of doing essentially what The Tribune does at the end of each one of his columns: providing a thumbnail bio. We just added a few more specifics from his resumé -- i.e. his work with the oil industry on defeating Santa Barbara’s anti-fracking measure and his labors for the Koch Brothers.
A fourth bad sign: He didn’t explain how such a listing constitutes ridicule.
And perhaps the baddest of bad signs: He didn’t mention “the actual issue at hand” that he and we were addressing in the midst of all that alleged ridicule: fracking and the safety record of the oil industry and its regulators.
I can well understand why someone who was vigorously defending the oil industry’s record in California last February may not want to revisit that subject in June. It was actually not a very good idea at the time he wrote (Google “DOGGR scandal”), but today one need only take a stroll down a nine-mile stretch of closed Santa Barbara beaches to understand why the founding partner of a public relations and affairs company (quoting from his bio) may wish to move on from that particular issue at hand.
Because he was wrong. That, not ridicule, has been the point of all our media engagements with Mr. Peschong. He has been wrong to cite bogus, inflated reports by the cement industry that new pollution regulations would bankrupt the industry; wrong to claim that a national marine sanctuary for the central coast would just duplicate existing regulations and throw people out of work; wrong to perpetuate the falsehood that fracking ban initiatives would shut down all existing oil production, not just problematic future high-intensity oil extraction projects, a falsehood promulgated to great effect in his work on the campaign to defeat the Santa Barbara measure.
In his latest op ed, his defense of Supervisor Lynn Compton’s epic filibuster at the Las Pilitas Quarry appeal is a case in point. At that May 12 hearing, Mr. Peschong claims that Supervisor Compton was subjected to ridicule for “asking too many questions.” She “read the entire Environmental Impact Report and had questions prepared for County staff…that helped inform not just the supervisors, but also the community…. Don’t you want your supervisors to thoroughly vet every proposal that comes before the county?”
The problem was not that Supervisor Compton allegedly read the whole EIR and asked a lot of questions; it was that she apparently had never read any other EIR, and was basically asking Planning staff how land use planning works. For over an hour, she repeated the same questions from slightly different angles, did not appear to register the answers she got, and most of the questions she asked had nothing to do with the job of the supervisors at that hearing: to determine if it was possible to make findings that could support a vote to override the project’s seven Class 1 environmental impacts, certify the EIR and approve the project.
She sounded like a prosecutor seeking a conviction. She did not sound like someone engaging, as Mr. Peschong would have it, in a “true, honest debate over policy stances and issues facing our county.”
Neither does Mr. Peschong.