Big Oil's arguments against the SLO County anti-fracking initiative have a familiar ring
by Andrew Christie, Chapter Director
On June 19, the County Board of Supervisors deliberated on what should have been a formality: presented with a citizen’s anti-fracking initiative that the County Clerk had certified as receiving enough valid signatures to qualify for the November ballot (20,473 registered voters – more than twice the required minimum), they had the option of approving it outright for inclusion into the General Plan, approving it to go to the ballot for a vote, or approving it for the ballot along with an economic analysis.
It was the initiative’s first public trial by fire, and a preview of what we’re all going to be hearing from now until November.
For three hours, local oil executives, refinery employees and their friends trooped up to the microphone one by one to repeat, over and over, the same talking point: “This measure will mean a complete shutdown of the oil and gas industry in SLO County.” They often wore stickers emblazoned with the legend “STOP the Oil and Gas Shutdown in San Luis Obispo County,” the name of the astroturf – aka fake grass roots -- organization that first surfaced here in the May 7 edition of The Tribune via spokesman Aaron Hanke.
It was a not-so-instant replay of the industry p.r. campaign mounted to save the doomed Phillips 66 oil train proposal. From 2014 to 2017, we heard the litany recited at meetings of city councils, the County Planning Commission and Board of Supervisors: if the project were denied, it would mean layoffs and the closure of the oil company’s Nipomo refinery.
It was, and it didn’t.
Per the Coalition to Protect SLO County, “To be clear, the initiative to ban fracking and oil expansion in SLO County would not close, shut-down, or stop existing oil-field operations. It will do the following: (1) prohibit the use of hydraulic fracturing (fracking), acidizing, and other defined well stimulation treatments, which do not include steam flooding, water flooding, or cyclic steaming, the current methods of production in the Arroyo Grande Oil Field, and (2) prohibit the drilling of new wells in the unincorporated areas of the County. It will allow ‘routine oil cleanup work, routine well maintenance, routine removal of formation damage due to drilling, bottom hole pressure surveys, or routine activities that do not affect the integrity of the well or formation’ in existing wells.”
After an extended tussle, conservative board members won a requirement to tack on a 500-word fiscal impact statement, to be prepared by the County Auditor, when the measure appears on the ballot – despite the pleas of County Auditor-Controller Jim Erb that there is no way he can address the potential fiscal impact of all the potential issues the initiative presents in a 500-word statement (“It would be really hard to do justice to a thing like this”), and Supervisor Gibson noting that the initiative concerns future potential actions, which are “simply not calculable.”
The Sierra Club pointed out to the supervisors that a real analysis of fiscal impacts would have to incorporate the 2017 “Climate Change and Health Profile Report for San Luis Obispo County” issued by the California Department of Public Health, taking into account its descriptions of the health impacts of heat, drought, wildfires, vector-borne illnesses, food insecurity and socioeconomic disruption brought about by climate change, and its profile of health outcomes and inequities, social vulnerabilities and climate risks for SLO county. These impacts have price tags, and a ballot measure that curbs the expanded production of California crude oil, some of the most carbon-intensive petroleum in the world, must be counted in the plus column of avoided costs. Any economic analysis that did not factor in all of those impacts and the corresponding value of a measure designed to mitigate or avoid them would not be worth the paper it’s written on.
But one opportunity an otherwise worthless 500-word fiscal impact statement on the ballot can provide was the one that Supervisors Arnold and Compton were transparently intent on providing: Give the oil industry a final bite at the apple after what is bound to be months of expensive, deceptive campaigning, recycling and retrofitting all the lies about lost jobs and economic calamity left over from the Phillips 66 oil train p.r. campaign.
If, that is, Big Oil can bring enough pressure to bear on the Auditor-Controller’s office to produce an impact statement that misstates and exaggerates the alleged fiscal impacts on the oil industry if the measure passes, and omits the fiscal impacts on the county and its residents if the industry is allowed to expand and intensify its operations.
From now until November, listen closely and you will hear the oil men who cried wolf howling outside Mr. Erb’s door.