They're going up against Trump and the largest proposed expansion of offshore drilling in U.S. history
By Andrew Christie, Chapter Director
The California Coastal Commission's meeting of February 7 at Cambria Pines Lodge will mark the first time a state agency will formally weigh in on Presidents Trump's plan to open the entire coast of California to the first sales of offshore oil leases since 1984.
Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke proposes to make more than 98 percent of technically recoverable offshore oil and gas resources "available to consider for future exploration and development." The Trump administration's Draft Proposed Program for 2019-2024 includes 7 potential lease sales in the Pacific Region -- two each for Northern California, Central California, and Southern California, and one for Washington/Oregon. In other words, the entire West Coast.
At their Feb. 7 meeting in Cambria, the Coastal Commission will be deliberating on a draft letter to Secretary Zinke, to be delivered the following day in Sacramento at the only public meeting the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) has seen fit to schedule to take input on the plan from any residents of California who might have something to say about that plan.
Unless you want to make the trip to Sacramento, via Santa Barbara (and if you do, go here ASAP to reserve a seat on the bus), Cambria Pines Lodge on Feb. 7 is the place to be heard.
The worst place to be on either date and over the months to come is in a state of complacency and/or denial. If that's where you are, it's probably because you read or heard a confident pronouncement somewhere that state regulators will block this. Or SLO County has an ordinance that will prevail against the wishes of the Trump administration and Big Oil. Or the price of oil at $60 a barrel makes offshore drilling economically infeasible for oil companies.
Assuming any of those things will assure a future of off offshore rigs and catastrophic spills.
Here are the prospects for $80-a-barrel oil, which would mean Big Oil moving heaven and earth to pull out all they can, wherever they can.
Here's how the oil companies can get around SLO County's ordinance.
And here's how close Big Oil's friends in Sacramento came to gutting the authority of a state regulatory agency in their quest to expand existing oil extraction operations into state waters during the Obama administration.
And for a final bout of complacency-jolting, here's the San Jose Mercury News from December 2016:
Working to lock in environmental protections as the clock runs out on his presidency, President Barack Obama on Friday released a plan for offshore oil drilling in federal waters that bans until 2022 any new drilling off the coasts of California, Oregon or Washington. The move puts up a roadblock to President-elect Donald Trump, who has vowed to expand offshore oil and gas drilling. U.S. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell said the decision “is consistent with the longstanding position of the Pacific coast states in opposition to oil and gas development off their coasts."
Remember when? We used to think you could “lock in environmental protections.” We used to think there was such a thing as “roadblocks” for our new president. Those who believe the offshore drilling plans of the Trump administration can't happen in California are still living in the quaint, distant past of 2016. That was the world that was. Even the rabidly right-wing Coalition of Labor, Agriculture and Business (COLAB) didn't grasp – or pretended not to grasp -- the reality shift in its newsletter of Feb. 5, 2017, when it reprinted the very same Mercury News quote above as part of a fact-deficient 8-page rant against the proposed Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary, citing it as proof that we don’t need a marine sanctuary to protect us from new offshore drilling on the Central Coast. COLAB eagerly endorses new drilling, but believes -- or believed a year ago -- that it can't happen here because "new oil and gas development is already banned."
We must now live in the world as it is. In Cambria on Wednesday, Feb. 7, we need to show the Coastal Commission overwhelming public support for push back against Zinke, Trump, and their world-beating crew, or else get ready for the rigs. The Commission’s draft letter to BOEM is Item 6b on the day’s agenda. It's a barn burner.
To prepare for that meeting, join the Sierra Club, Surfrider, the Coalition to Protect SLO County and ECOSLO at French Hospital Medical Center's Copeland Pavilion at 7 p.m. on Feb. 3 for an evening of "ShoreStories," a series of short films that provide an object lesson in how East Coast activists beat back coastal oil lease sales two years ago. We will provide instruction on how to submit your comments the Dept. of the Interior.
If anybody tells you that what the Trump administration has planned for California's coast won’t happen here, tell them this: When we don't fight, we lose.