http://www.sacbee.com/2010/04/18/2685021/the-conversation-is-it-time-to.html
Sacramento Bee
Opinion – California Forum – The Conversation
Sunday, April 18, 2010

A 1969 oil spill off Santa Barbara caused 200,000 gallons of crude oil to spread over 800 square miles of ocean and shore.  VERNON MERRITT III / Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

The Conversation: Is it time to get beyond the Santa Barbara oil spill? No
Shorelines need protection from the ‘Drill, baby, drill’ ethos
By Richard Charter
Special to The Bee
Published: Sunday, Apr. 18, 2010 – 12:00 am | Page 1E
When President Barack Obama announced plans to open broad swaths of America’s waters to oil and gas drilling late last month, the Pacific Coast from California to Washington was left protected – for now. This was not a foregone conclusion, considering that some areas off California were proposed for new drilling just in the past few years. But it was the right decision for the Pacific Ocean.

America’s systems of national parks, forests and wildlife refuges, such as the national seashores and parklands that now embrace many of California’s beloved beaches and estuaries, are based on the principle that some places are best safeguarded for future generations. That means protecting them from damaging industrial development such as offshore oil drilling.

Since 1981, most of California’s coastal elected officials have backed a bipartisan congressional moratorium that set aside fragile coastal waters, and protected important fisheries and coastal-dependent economies from the effects of offshore drilling. But on Oct. 1, 2008, President George W. Bush, bowing to well-funded lobbying pressure from the oil industry and then Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s orchestrated chants of “Drill Baby Drill,” abandoned the offshore drilling moratorium supported by three consecutive presidents, and pushed Congress to do the same.

When Obama took office, he inherited a fast-track Bush drilling plan proposing three separate offshore lease sales extending up and down the length of the California coast. Areas from Arena Basin off of Mendocino County to the beaches of La Jolla and San Diego were to be offered up for drilling. So when Obama announced his decision March 31 to open up coastal drilling elsewhere around the country, the entire California shoreline and its $43 billion coastal economy breathed a sigh of relief. It had won a long-sought – though perhaps temporary – political reprieve from new federal offshore drilling leases until at least 2017.

But other areas were not so lucky. On the Atlantic Coast, tens of millions of acres of seabed starting only three miles off the shoreline, from Delaware down to Georgia, could now be opened to drilling. And on the white sand beaches of Florida’s Gulf Coast and Panhandle, the administration proposes to undermine a carefully negotiated 2006 bipartisan compromise to set aside a portion of the eastern Gulf of Mexico until at least 2022, to protect fisheries, critical military assets and environmentally sensitive coastal areas.

And last but not least, the administration has allowed drilling to proceed in the remote and fragile waters of America’s Arctic Ocean, where global climate change is already wreaking obvious environmental havoc, and where no effective cleanup technology has been invented to handle an oil spill amid the broken sea ice. Yet Shell has just been given the green light to start drilling there this summer.

Offshore drilling accidents and related oil spills happen with alarming frequency throughout the world, despite modern, “safe” drilling technology. Last fall, an out-of-control blowout from a “modern” offshore platform oiled more than 8,000 square miles of Australia’s lush Timor Sea for 10 weeks. And this month, at least 18,000 gallons of crude oil spilled from a broken pipeline extending from an oil drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico through the Delta National Wildlife Refuge in Louisiana. So far, about 160 square miles have been oiled by the spill, including 40 square miles of protected marshes.

Here in California, we can enjoy Obama’s drilling reprieve until at least 2017, but we must be aware that the oil lobby still has its eye on our coast. In fact, the oil companies have already refocused their efforts on Sacramento and Santa Barbara. Three small local citizen groups in Santa Barbara County have recently admitted that they are working with the oil lobby to help facilitate the first new offshore leasing in 40 years within California’s near-shore state waters.
A drilling plan by Plains Exploration & Production Co. includes a proposal to “slant-drill” from an existing federal drilling rig back toward shore and underneath our protected state waters.
The dangerous precedent set by allowing at least 14 new wells to be punched into protected waters would gravely undermine four decades of bipartisan statewide protection provided by the California State Tidelands Oil and Gas Sanctuary. This state sanctuary, sheltering our waters between the Mexican and Oregon borders, is now the only legal protection our state retains from new drilling.

Fortunately, California’s State Lands Commission has already wisely rejected the proffered Plains Exploration deal. An attempt to circumvent the authority of the State Lands Commission also collapsed in the California Legislature. We cannot fall for an oil company’s flawed and flimsy assurances that drillers will eventually retreat from their profitable project and voluntarily remove portions of their spill-plagued infrastructure. To lose our coast in this way would be tragic after decades of hard work by elected officials and grass-roots activists from Santa Monica to Mendocino to Washington, D.C.

The obvious take-home message: When you win big, as the California coast has now done, it is time to stop gambling and leave the casino.
Richard Charter is a senior policy adviser for marine programs for Defenders of Wildlife. He has been working on offshore drilling issues with local and state elected officials and the conservation community more than 30 years.