Will SLO make Kern County’s mistake?
By Andrew Christie, Chapter Director
2016 is on track to be the year in which San Luis Obispo County makes the most fateful choice of its existence.
It won’t be a single choice made at one moment. It will be embodied in a series of choices:
- Whether to allow Phillips 66 to bring the world’s dirtiest oil here -- on mile-long trains that have shown a penchant to derail, spill and explode -- and subject residents to the environmental and health impacts that come with the refining of that dirty oil.
- Whether to allow Freeport McMoRan to drill 31 new oil wells on a ten-year-old permit without requiring an updated environmental review of the potential impacts.
- Whether to hand FMMR another permit to drill another 450 wells in the A.G. field, a ten-fold increase in current production.
And so on.
Across the country, Big Oil is drilling wells, laying pipe and building rail and port terminals so they will be ready when the price of oil recovers from its present swoon. They are playing the long game – if you define “long game” as being positioned to break all the carbon-cutting promises made in the Paris climate agreement and turn up the heat to commence the final frying of the planet because the profit margins look right.
What happens when you irrevocably wed your future to the interests of Big Oil, forsaking all others? We have an example close at hand. Kern County entered into oily wedlock over a hundred years ago. Since then, their union has been blessed with some of the dirtiest air and highest poverty rates in the country.
Last November, Kern renewed its vows in dramatic fashion: A county ordinance, sponsored by the oil industry and passed by the Kern County Board of Supervisors, allows the suspension of environmental review for oil and gas drilling and eliminates the requirement to notify the public of any impending oil or gas project – including well pads, roads, pipelines, fracking and the disposal of toxic wastewater via injection into aquifers.
The ordinance is scheduled to remain in effect for the next 20 years, which means that the 70,000+ oil and gas wells expected to be drilled between now and 2035 in Kern County have been “fast tracked” to zip through the process and right past local residents.
Actually, that’s understating the case. There will be no process to zip through; just frictionless permitting, with no oversight or review. Which is why a vp with the Western States Petroleum Association said “We’re exceptionally pleased with not only the county staff’s effort that they put into the development of this project, but now, as well, the board’s unanimous approval.” Which is also why, on December 10, Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council sued Kern County, in coordination with the Center for Biological Diversity and the Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment. (Read all about it at ClimateProgress: “Oil Groups Paid $10 Million and All They Got Was a 20-Year Pass to Frack This County.”)
Like every kid who grows up in Los Angeles, I was fascinated by the La Brea Tar Pits. The primordial death trap and fossil factory at the corner of Wilshire and Fairfax was long ago turned into a monument to the doomed prehistoric creatures who ventured too close to the ooze, unaware of the fate that awaited them as they waded into what looked like a pond. Life-size statues of flailing mastodons breaking the surface of the oil-slicked water greet the city’s commuters as they inch their way down Wilshire, windows firmly rolled up against the tar pits’ petroleum reek. You can probably see where I’m going with this.
At the Nov. 12 SLO County Planning Commission hearing on the permit extension for those 31 new oil wells that Freeport wants to drill – three days after the Kern County Supervisors went all-in on deregulated oil drilling - the commissioners turned aside the vocal dismay of the neighbors of the Arroyo Grande oil field and gave Freeport a thumbs-up, noting there was “no appetite” on the Commission to require them to get a new permit to replace their expired one, a requirement that would include a new environmental review of the project’s potential impacts that we know about now but were not contemplated in 2005.
The Center for Biological Diversity has appealed the Planning Commission’s approval of that permit extension to the Board of Supervisors. We’ll see if the idea of an updated environmental review causes the supervisors to likewise lose their appetite.
If the supervisors decide that they, too, have timid tummies, we will have a strong indicator of what the future has in store for SLO unless we start getting vocal about what we do and do not want to see in that future. A review-free three-year extension on an expired drilling permit is not the same as the twenty-year apocalyptic free-for-all upon which our eastern neighbor is determined to embark… but it’s in the ballpark.
Also in that ballpark would be a mastodon dipping her toe into a pond at the future corner of Wilshire and Fairfax and thinking about going just a little further.