S.B.Historical Museum

HOIST BY OUR OWN PETARD: It was the fart heard ’round the world. Last week, the Board of Supervisors—by the narrowest possible majority—voted to send a letter to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to consider opening up the waters off the California coast to more oil drilling. As critics noted, the action was largely an empty gesture. But as empty gestures go, it was nothing less than historic. Given Unocal’s infamous oil spill of 1969—which darkened Santa Barbara beaches with silent, oil-soaked waves and littered our sands with the carcasses of untold goo-encrusted birds—Santa Barbara has long been endowed with a powerful iconic status when it comes to illuminating the dark side of the nation’s petroleum industry. Given this history, it’s no little thing for Santa Barbara County to have repudiated the moratorium, in place since 1989, that’s prevented the federal government from leasing new tracts to the oil industry in the federal waters off not just our coast, but that of the entire Outer Continental Shelf. Little wonder, then, that the supervisors’ rhetorical showdown at high noon last week—which lasted no less than eight hours—provided serious grist for the media mill, both nationally and internationally. And you ain’t seen nothing yet.

The fact is this historic reversal will prove to be exceptionally short-lived. Third District Supervisor Brooks Firestone led the charge to change the county’s course, and he’s a political lame duck, about to be replaced by either Doreen Farr or Steve Pappas in November’s general elections. Both Pappas and Farr have blasted the supervisors’ vote last week and both have pledged to rescind the supervisors’ now infamous letter. But the soonest that could happen is January. In the ensuing four months, however, much strategic mischief can and will be made. You can bank on it.

Next week, Congress will commence debating whether we should lift the moratorium and allow even more leasing and drilling off the coast. That’s what presumptive Republican nominee John McCain wants; his running mate—strategically designed to bring out the pivotal God ’n’ Guns constituencies—has never seen an oil derrick she doesn’t love and has rapturously described some key Alaskan oil ventures as nothing less than “God’s work.” In the ensuing debate about energy policy, the Republicans will remind the rest of the nation, ad nauseam, how even the effete elites of Santa Barbara have seen the error of their oil-hating ways and are now willing to do their part if not for energy independence then at least for cheaper gas prices.

This is so wrong in so many ways that I hardly know where to start.

There’s the obvious fact that the oil companies already have vast swaths of offshore lands under lease that they’re just sitting on. Let them develop what they already have before opening up new coastal properties to potential industrialization. There’s the fact that all of the oil off our coast, if tapped, would provide only enough oil to keep the United States chugging along for about a month. Or that the soonest that oil could come online is maybe 10 or 15 years away. And when that happens, the relief provided at the pump will be, at most, only a few pennies’ worth.

But all that’s been said many times before.

What really poked me in the eye and bit me on the ass about last Tuesday’s debate was the naked dishonesty—“nude, nude, nude,” is more like it—with which the pro-oil crowd made its case. I understand that reasonable minds can and will differ, but this was different. One of the central arguments put forth in the supervisors’ letter is that oil drilling actually is good for the environment because it reduces oil seeps. “Studies have been conducted on the offshore natural seeps that conclude that oil extraction actually mitigates the natural seepage,” the letter stated. “Extraction reduces the pressure that causes seeps to occur, thereby reducing the amount of oil and gas that is introduced into the water and air.”

That’s a common enough argument one hears these days, though usually from people on the Venoco payroll or those who’ve been on the receiving end of Venoco’s well-known corporate largesse. But attending last Tuesday’s hearing was one of the key authors of the very studies cited by Firestone and the board majority, UCSB marine geophysicist Bruce Luyendyk. It’s safe to say that few people on Planet Earth have studied natural seeps as thoroughly as Luyendyk. And he put Firestone and the supervisors on notice that they were dangerously distorting his work. Luyendyk emphatically argued that just because the natural seepage by Coal Oil Point can be reduced by drilling the underwater reserves nearby, the same could not be said for the rest of the Santa Barbara Channel. Such “extrapolations,” he said, could not be justified by the existing scientific evidence. And major changes in public policy should be based on something more substantial, he argued, than a mere hypothesis. He gave the supervisors a brief tutorial in what is known and what is not known about the wide world of seeps. The geologic conditions that exist at Coal Oil Point are unique and may or may not be found elsewhere in the channel. Many oil reservoirs don’t leak seeps at all, so drilling these would reduce nothing. Likewise, some seeps aren’t anywhere near oil reservoirs, so there’s nothing to drill. And, for good measure, he noted that in some more mature oil fields, current drilling techniques can actually increase the seepage, not reduce it.

In the face of such testimony, most people might reverse field and run. But not Firestone. If anything, he was blithely unconcerned that the author of the very studies he himself had cited vehemently disagreed with Firestone’s interpretation. In fact, Firestone wanted to argue with Luyendyk, challenging the UCSB professor by reading passages from articles he had written. But Luyendyk wouldn’t budge. There’s a big difference, he cautioned, between making a hypothesis and finding the scientific evidence to support it. But Firestone had little interest in letting the facts get in the way of a good story, and neither did supervisors Joni Gray and Joe Centeno. Despite Luyendyk’s protest, not one single change was made to the supervisors’ letter relating to oil seeps.

In reality, seeps are a rhetorical sideshow. If the supervisors argued that by tapping the oil wealth of the channel, the county could use the royalties to fund new alternative energies to take us into the 21st century, they might have had a case. The fact is no such royalty agreements now exist, and the feds and the state—painfully strapped for cash in their own right—will be loathe to give the County of Santa Barbara any additional perks of the petroleum trade. If the country is serious about weaning itself from foreign oil, maybe it should get serious about conservation. Matthew Tirrell, an engineering professor with UCSB’s Institute for Energy Efficiency, estimated that if all California commercial buildings were retrofitted to save energy, we could obtain the same amount of energy that we could by maxing out the petroleum potential of the Santa Barbara Channel and in only five years. Tam Hunt of the Community Environmental Council noted that the United States is currently exporting 1.4 million barrels of oil a day; that’s eight times the amount of all the new oil that could be brought online by plundering the Outer Continental Shelf by the year 2030. Hunt also noted that 13,000 wind turbines—distributed throughout the country—could produce the same amount of new energy as the Republicans’ coastal drilling program.

At a time when the top four oil companies have reported profits of $100 billion, McCain is touting an economic stimulus plan that would give the five biggest oil companies a tax break worth $4 billion. The only thing stupider is the argument that, thanks to new technological breakthroughs, oil development is now safer than it was at the time of the 1969 oil spill. It’s never been a question of technology; it’s always been a matter of human error. And human error will always have the last word. Trust me; nothing is more infallible.

Even way back in 1969, the technology was firmly in place to prevent what became the worst oil spill to hit the continental United States. They just didn’t use it. The same was true in 1997 when several hundred barrels’ worth of crude spilled off Platform Irene. Failsafe mechanisms were in place to prevent that spill, but were overridden by human error. Likewise, human error was at work on Exxon-Mobil’s Platform Hondo, also located in the Santa Barbara Channel, between 2003 and 2005, when 400 gallons of cancer-causing PCBs were allowed to leak from two of the platform’s massive energy transformers. We know about that leak only because a whistleblower came forward, detailing how platform operators took a series of half-assed stopgap measures to deal with the leak for two years rather than fix it outright, which is a relatively simple operation. Ultimately, Exxon agreed to replace both transformers and was fined $2.64 million by the Environmental Protection Agency just last month for its transgressions.

Really, how many times do we have to be reminded that the oil industry is a risky business? And you don’t have to go back to 1969. Even with the best of intentions, accidents happen. And the best of intentions are sometimes not in evidence. Look at Greka, which is so ruthlessly contemptuous of environmental safeguards that it’s become an ongoing embarrassment to the entire oil industry. Or what about Unocal’s 400,000-gallon oil leak, discovered in 1989, which required the entire town of Avila Beach—one of the coolest, least pretentious burgs anywhere along the coast—to be destroyed and rebuilt. In the process, 300 homes were knocked down and replaced, but today’s new-and-improved Avila, a sadly cute-ified town where the whiff of potpourri hangs heavy in the air, is a far cry from what it used to be. What about the Guadalupe Dunes, one of the great wonders of the natural world, where for 20 years Unocal allowed nine million gallons of industrial oil thinners to leak into the soil. Today, the Guadalupe sands are so contaminated they pose an unacceptable risk to the dunes’ delicate web of life and have to be hauled off by the truckload to Santa Maria treatment facilities. For this, Unocal was fined nearly $50 million. Criminal charges were never filed, but only due to the blithering incompetence of local prosecutors. When it comes to the risks posed by the oil industry, Santa Barbarans don’t have to remember the past. We need only recall the present.

If that’s not reason enough to start looking seriously at solar, wind, geo-thermal, and the least sexy of them all, conservation, then look at the map. The geo-political entanglements required to maintain an adequate oil supply have grown exponentially more lethal. Oil might not be the sole reason the United States finds itself enmeshed in Iraq, but without oil, we surely would not be there. Russia’s fight with Georgia would be one of any number of global power plays were it not for the massive pipeline running through Georgia that feeds the West. While the oil connection isn’t getting much play in most reports, Russian strongman Vladimir Putin tried to highlight this point by having Russian jets attack the pipeline, and narrowly “miss” their target. Green energy is no longer the domain of the eco-groovies; it’s a matter of national security. In the meantime, it would behoove three of our county supervisors to extract their heads from the rectums of their petro-pasts.

Related Links

• More Angry Poodle columns
• More articles on the Offshore Oil controversy

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