Publisher’s Notebook

• Possible Resumption of New Offshore Oil Drilling •

ANNE SOBLE

An article posted on the Malibu Surfside News Blog last Saturday outlined an offshore oil deal brokered in Santa Barbara that could threaten coastal Malibu, as well as the rest of the state’s fragile coastline, by opening the door to new offshore drilling. The project has remained largely under the radar, and the MSN News Alert was the first time many local officials and environmental activists learned about the proposal.
At peril are not only coastal resources—the ocean and all marine life, but the coastal economy itself—from beaches, to visitor-serving businesses, to real state values, if new drilling is allowed in state tidelands at the time when environmentalists are asking the White House to consider reinstating the moratorium on federal oil drilling that has helped to protect the coast. California has to walk the walk, not just talk the talk of coastal resource protection
City, state and national legislators rightly voice concern that the deal brokered by the Environmental Defense Center between two Santa Barbara non-governmental organizations and Texas-based Plains Exploration and Production raises too many questions and sets too dangerous a precedent to be approved at this week’s State Lands Commission hearing.
As reviewed in greater detail in an article beginning on page two of this week’s issue of The News, the PXP precedent could also encourage more new offshore leasing in federal waters now that the federal moratorium has been lifted and the Minerals Management Service of the Interior Department has proposed new lease sale sites off the California coast.
In addition, despite EDC assurances that all “substantive” terms of the agreement have been made public, there are still concerns that the confidentiality agreement between the private parties to this deal may mean that its termsl have not undergone adequate public scrutiny.
Although some environmental support for the deal is ostensibly predicated on an end to PXP drilling by 2022, the State Attorney-General, the SLC staff, and others, question its enforceability.
The approval of the first new lease in state waters in close to 40 years—and the four decades since the catastrophic Santa Barbara oil spill in 1969—is a sea change from the state’s longstanding policy to oppose new offshore oil leasing and drilling in state and federal waters. California public agencies should not be co-conspirators in this policy’s demise.