Last Thursday, State Senator Monique Limon and Assemblymember Gregg Hart hosted a hearing on the new effort by Sable, a Texas-based oil company, to reopen some offshore oil drilling that has been shut down since the Refugio Oil Spill that took place a decade ago.
Before I talk about the hearing a bit, I want to make it clear that everyone wants to make sure that California’s beautiful coastline is preserved for current and future generations. But it is also the case that if you want California to simply be pristine and untouched by humankind, clearly the best plan for that would be to eject the people from the Golden State, and make it one big nature preserve. But of course that is not realistic. There is a reality of 40 million of us living here. That many people are enormous consumers of — everything. Which includes, of course, energy. So it is the job of public policy makers to have a balanced public policy, that both safeguards our natural resources but which has an intense focus on allowing the people in California to flourish in their lives.
I do not think I need to write too much about this in this space, but tens of millions of people require a tremendous amount of oil and gasoline to have a decent quality of life. Whether you are heating or cooling your home, or the food you serve in your home. Almost everyone owns a gas-powered automobile. And if you have an electric vehicle, guess where a lot of the power comes from to keep the state’s electrical grid going? Never mind that nearly every consumer product out there has at some base level parts that are made from oil.
There is a basic responsibility of state government to ensure that there is an abundance of oil to keep our society lubricated. Go look at the quality of life for places where oil is scarce, and you will see that it is an essential ingredient to our standard of living as Californians, and Americans. I know there are concerns by many about the impact of human-created carbon emissions on the temperature of Planet Earth. And there are a lot of efforts here in California especially to reduce the “carbon footprint” of our population, but the reality is that this pursuit, if accomplished, would take at least fifty years, if not a century or more. And the cost of doing this will be astronomical. But we need to focus on the here and now. And the needs of this generation of Californians. So the issue before us is how to both preserve the natural beauty of our state, and produce a vast quantity of oil. Both are required if, in fact, human flourishing is our first priority – as it should be.
The hearing, if you want to call it that, was really an opportunity for every different California regulator, agency or department with some sort of control over whether this project moves forward or not. Let me tell you, there were a lot of speakers. Too many to list them all, but I can tell you that introduced to speak to each of their regulatory roles by California Secretary of Natural Resources Agency Wade Crowfoot were: the Coastal Commission, the State Lands Commission, the Department of Fish and Wildlife, the California Office of Spill Prevention, the State Fire Marshal, the State Parks System, the Department of Conservation, and State Water Resources Control Boards (State and Regional). Good news, you have enough fingers to count to EIGHT different government organizations with some role in an approval (or denial) of this project. Not including the State Legislature and the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors.
It is very clear that this group of folks could pretty easily just stop the reopening of this pipeline, if they view that as their mission. But instead they should all be asking what reasonable and prudent safeguards need to be in place to get this oil out of the ground. Californians in 2022 (the last year of available stats) used 628 million barrels of oil. Where is this oil coming from if not here? From other states via rail and tanker trucks, or from other countries brining it in via oil tankers. The transportation of oil from afar adds tremendously to the cost of the oil. This project, at full production, could alone provide as much as five percent of all of the oil we would consume in the state! A huge infusion of locally produced oil that would significantly reduce costs for everyone – especially in Southern California.
So there is a big problem for California Democrats who have dominated public policy in California for a long, long time — can they in fact produce a balanced outcome? A party that is captive of extreme environmental causes would be all about shutting down efforts to pull “evil oil” out of the ground, seeing higher prices for all things that use oil (most visibility gasoline) and doom-speaking about the end of the planet. That party sees higher oil and gas prices as a feature, not a fault. But a party that is balanced, and perhaps has learned a lesson after losing the Presidency when swing voters and blue collar voters saw President Trump has a preferable alternative to Vice President Harris, would be trying to figure out how to produce needed oil for our massive California population, while at the same time making sure that solid safeguards are taken to try to avoid any spill, and to mitigate the effects it one occurs. This latter path requires prudence on the part of California’s Governor and legislators, and an understanding of the needs of the people they represent.
It is worth a reminder, on a closing note, that it’s not the wealthy folks hugging the California coast that are hurt when gas and power prices are through the roof, it’s lower and middle class folks, who are forced to make tough choices on limited budgets.