.Saving the Coast —Again

“New oil rigs loom just over our horizons, and we can stop it. The companies would have us believe that the technology is safer now. The fact is that no oil rig in the world is impervious to a bad storm.” —Chuck Lehneis, surfer (Surfer.com). 

Our coastline is renowned for its stunning beaches. Each of our crown jewels is unique, from rugged cliffs to the north to endless golden sand in the south, from surf lanes with big waves to secluded coves. Tourists from around the globe come to our coast. It’s where our families gather, where we get married, where we dream.

California has 27 operating offshore oil platforms, but they’re way out there, mostly out of sight, safe and sound. Except when they aren’t. What could possibly go wrong?

With Oil Rigs Come Oil Spills

The largest oil spill to occur off the California coast was the Santa Barbara spill of 1969, which spilled 3 million gallons of oil. Over a 10-day period, beginning Jan. 28, 1969, a blowout of Union Oil’s Platform A washed crude oil onto beaches from Pismo to Oxnard.

The resulting tar killed an estimated 10,000 birds, suffocated marine plant and animal life over 35 miles of Santa Barbara coastline, left it covered with tar, smelling like an oil refinery.

It keeps happening.

In California alone: Amplify Energy Corporation spilled 144,000 gallons of oil into the Pacific Ocean at Huntington Beach (2021), the Refugio Oil Spill (2015) dumped 100,000 gallons of oil off Santa Barbara, the Cosco Busan Oil Spill (2007) dumped 53,000 gallons of oil into San Francisco Bay, the American Trader Oil Spill (1990) unloaded 416,598 gallons on Huntington Beach, the Standard Oil Company Oil Spill (1971) dumped 800,000 gallons of oil in San Francisco Bay.

To be clear about how oil companies view making the victims of spills whole, after the Gulf of Mexico Deepwater Horizon blowout (2010) killed 11 men and injured scores, British Petroleum paid 79% of the victims a mere $1,300 each.

Comedian Stephen Colbert said, “If I learned anything from playing whack-a-mole, the oil spills will stop once we run out of quarters and our mom picks us up.”

After taking a look at the failed methods used to contain the oil spill in the Gulf Coast, Colbert realized, “So, no one knows what the fuck they’re doing.” He offered authorities alternative ways to clean up the spill: “Breaded Juggalos delivered by trained dolphins,” or “ultra concentrated packing peanuts delivered by monkey submarines.”

Big Oil has perpetuated the myth that offshore drilling is safe, but 509 oil rig fires have broken out in the Gulf of Mexico since 2006. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reports that with deeper drilling depths comes increased danger including higher risks of accidents, spills and fires.

Former Shell Oil civil engineer and UC Berkeley professor emeritus Robert Bea says, “You’ve got equipment and steel strung out over a long piece of geography starting at surface and terminating at 18,000 feet below the sea floor. It has many potential weak points.”

If Project 2025 Should Come Knocking

The Heritage Foundation–driven Project 2025 has a 922-page handbook that is a crafted manual of actions the next president’s appointees could take and details the steps to take them. Former President Donald Trump has tried to disavow the politically toxic project, but the work has been done to set policy and to prepare him to replace thousands of members of the “deep state” with MAGA loyalists.

Two years into Trump’s presidency, the Heritage Foundation touted that he had instituted 64% of its policy recommendations—like leaving the Paris Climate Accords and increasing offshore drilling. They opened more than 90% of the country’s coasts to oil and gas leasing, including the Pacific Coast.

If that administration should return to power, Project 2025 proposes that California open to the offshore oil industry. California Rep. Jimmy Panetta says, “New offshore drilling threatens millions of jobs and the safety of our families … we simply cannot afford the environmental and human impacts of new leasing off our coasts.”

Winning the First Round

In 1985, back when current state Senator John Laird was up for re-election to the Santa Cruz City Council, he went all in on protecting California shores by blocking the oil companies from offshore drilling with zoning laws. Laird was running in an off-year election, and he wanted to get people to the polls with an exciting ballot measure.

He went to an environmental activist and said that he would like to have a ballot measure on offshore oil drilling. The activist pushed back, suggesting the measure would have no teeth. Laird was flummoxed. He thought, “Jeez, we’re a city … it’s federal leasing. The state has a role, but cities and counties are not really there.”

Then in a flash, Laird was granted the wisdom of Shazam: it occurred to him that the one constitutional power granted to cities and counties is zoning, and if you pass a measure that says there can’t be a zoning change in support of offshore drilling without a vote of the people, that would allow the cities and counties along the California coast to shut down the oil companies’ ability to build on-land infrastructure.

Laird says because the measure changed the way zoning was approved and was not an outright ban, that made it defensible in court. When Western Gas and Oil Association sued 13 local jurisdictions, they lost. The locals won them all.

Laird says, “By making it need to have a vote of the people, that meant that some city council or some board of supervisors could not be purchased. The right is vested in the people. You have to go to the voters to be able to change zoning laws.”

That 1985 measure passed in Santa Cruz with over 80% of the vote, and it authorized money in the city budget to educate other cities and counties on how they might do the same. Save Our Shores was contracted to spread the word.

A Coastal Wall of Resistance

Former Save Our Shores Executive Director Dan Haifley says that for coastal jurisdictions to fight offshore drilling, they need to prohibit onshore drilling support facilities such as a pipeline or helicopter platform or dewatering facilities—things oil companies need on land to be able to drill offshore.

Laird agrees: “That is exactly it, and why we tried to keep infrastructure in local control. All those ordinances are still on the books. They are in place in case this 2025 change of administration happens.”

Many dedicated people were involved back in ’85—Gary Patton, Mardi Wormhoudt, Mike Rotkin, Kim Shunts, Leon Panetta (Jimmy Panetta’s father), and others—but most of the legwork came from Laird and Haifley. Save Our Shores hired Haifley to drive up and down the state in his Ford Pinto to convince other communities to pass this ordinance.

Haifley remembers, “My total budget was $30,000 a year; I slept on a lot of couches. I had a slideshow with the old-fashioned slide carousel, with a little lamp and the slides. We had sent out a letter to every coastal community, I called people, called elected officials, then I would go make presentations and drive up and down the coast.”

By the time Laird termed out in 1990, 26 cities and counties on the coast of California had adopted the ordinance.

What Can California Do Now?

Let’s fast forward to a possible Jan. 20, 2025, that moves Project 2025 closer to realization.

Laird says, “The ordinances are still in place, and it is such a long and complicated process. We were able to fight it back then, and they [the oil companies] were not able to accomplish it in four years. We’re ready to do it again. If offshore drilling comes now in a second round of a conservative administration, then it’s up to us to throw everything in the way of it … and fight to block it for four years.”

While Monterey Bay is a National Marine Sanctuary and will remain untouchable for oil companies, there may be no clearer nightmare of losing our precious coastline, leaving our beaches and coastal animals covered with tar, than the Project 2025 proposal to open offshore drilling in the coastal waters south of Monterey Bay.

To stop the dangerous expansion of oil drilling platforms off our coast, Dan Haifley says we start with areas that already have marine sanctuary protection, places where you cannot drill.

In California, that includes the national marine sanctuaries of the Greater Farallones, Cordell Bank and Monterey Bay, as well as those south to the Channel Islands around Santa Barbara off southern California. Everything outside of these sanctuaries—a lot of Southern California and everything north of Mendocino County—would be fair game for offshore oil development.

Haifley says the idea is to infill between these sanctuaries by going to local jurisdictions and showing them how they can pass local zoning laws to keep the oil companies from setting up supply bases on land.

The oil companies’ technology has improved; now they can use floating oil rigs, known as FPSOs (floating production storage and offloading) without having to build a pipeline to shore. A giant ship can fill up with oil and then go to a port or refinery.

Laird says, “The technology does exist for offshore oil transfer, but it’s more expensive and much more dangerous, the worst for an oil company.”

Laird adds that there are other tools to fight offshore drilling: Oil companies need to go through environmental review and different public hearing processes. “We really weigh in, we require them to state what the impact will be,” he says. “Those impacts will not be mitigated in environmental review, and that will give us an opening to sue.”

Monterey Bay is now a National Marine Sanctuary, known as the “Serengeti of the Sea”—a diverse ecosystem that plays host to 34 species of marine mammals, more than 180 species of seabirds and shorebirds, over 525 species of fishes, and countless invertebrates.

While Monterey Bay is off limits to oil leasing, south of Monterey is currently fair game. But there is a proposed national marine sanctuary designation immediately south of Monterey called the Chumash Heritage Sanctuary, a grassroots effort led by the Northern Chumash Tribal Council.

NOAA/Marine Sanctuaries says, “The proposed sanctuary stretches along 134 miles of coastline and would encompass more than 5,600 square miles of water. Examples of prohibited activities include causing seabed disturbance such as seafloor cables … or the removal of structures on the seabed such as oil and gas platforms.”

If the Chumash sanctuary designation goes through, then the Central Coast from Mendocino to Santa Barabara would be protected from offshore drilling. U.S. Senator Alex Padilla and San Luis Obispo’s member of congress, Salud Carbajal, are pushing hard to get NOAA’s designation. Laird says that Carbajal believes they can get the designation before January 20, 2025.

The Northern Chumash Tribal Council has led this campaign since 2015. Laird says, “They are way into it, they’ve taken all the public comments (over 27,000), done the environmental work, I think it’s on track to be done by Jan. 20.”

What Do We Do Now?

Dan Haifley and John Laird have been there before. Haifley says that the 26 communities that took action in the ’80s, each organized in their own way—“either persuading their local government to act or organizing to get a ballot measure passed, it broadened and deepened a citizen ocean protection movement then, and if necessary, it will do it again.”

As to what Californians can do now, Senator Laird says we have a chance to do the real prevention with the November election. If we must defend the shoreline ourselves, “We should be vigilant, we should always stand ready to organize.”

He quotes fabled former Coastal Commission Director Peter Douglas: “The coast is never saved.”