by Karen Telleen-Lawton, Noozhawk Columnist (read the original in Noozhawk by clicking here)
In the excitement of this year’s welcome and feared rains, you may have missed a spectacular event commemorating the 50th anniversary of the 1969 UNOCAL oil spill.
More than 1,800 Santa Barbarans attended the event at the Arlington Theater on Jan. 27. We watched historical video of the catastrophe, remembered the local and national events that followed, and learned about the imperatives going forward for our one and only Earth.
The Jan. 28, 1969, blowout of UNOCAL’s oil platform A lasted eight days, creating a slick that covered more than 800 square miles of ocean down to the Mexican border.
Three million gallons of oil and thousands of bird and marine mammal deaths later, the event birthed the modern American environmental movement.
Besides the enactment of protections such as the National Environmental Policy Act and the Clean Water Act, California found its muscle and has not issued a new oil lease in state waters since.
Local groups such as the Community Environmental Council (CEC), Get Oil Out (GOO), Environmental Defense Center (EDC), and UCSB’s Environmental Studies, came into being at this time. These four groups co-sponsored the commemoration.
Congress member Salud Carbajal and state Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson attended and marked the anniversary by introducing new legislation to decrease the likelihood of future off-shore oil spills in California.
Jackson’s state Senate bill improves pipeline safety requirements, while Carbajal’s U.S. house bill bans future offshore oil and gas leasing in areas of California’s Outer Continental Shelf.
The EDC focused our attention on upcoming onshore oil project proposals in Cat Canyon. The Cat Canyon Oil Field is in the Solomon Hills, about 10 miles southeast of Santa Maria. Wikipedia names it the largest oil field in Santa Barbara County, and the 20th-largest in California by 2010 cumulative production.
Three projects are being proposed for the canyon by three companies: Aera Energy, ERG, and PetroRock. Among them, more than 700 wells would be drilled or redeveloped.
The companies are in various stages of completing draft and final Environmental Impact Reports (EIR). Santa Maria tentatively has scheduled a Planning Commission hearing for ERG for March 13.
The next public comment period begins with the issue of the final Environmental Impact Reports, according to EDC’s Betsy Weber.
Over a century of conventional drilling has depleted the fields close to the surface: the low-hanging fruit. Further drilling requires more dangerous and dirty methods, such as cyclic steam injection and steam flooding.
Nevertheless, the companies are promising good-neighbor concessions such as no hydraulic fracturing (fracturing), removal of “only 1 percent” of the native oak trees, and leaving 94 percent of the land undisturbed.
They dangle benefits of “hundreds of good paying jobs and tens of millions of dollars in tax revenue.”
Perhaps, if implemented 50 years ago after the oil spill, this type of care for the consequences of natural resource mining would be sufficient. But instead, natural resource companies, particularly oil, willfully forestalled protections. They bear a huge proportion of the blame for our current predicament.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), representing the world’s leading climate scientists, warns that we have fewer than a dozen years for global warming to be reined in at 2½ degrees F.
Beyond this, intones the October 2018 report, “even half a degree (C) will significantly worsen the risks of drought, floods, extreme heat and poverty for hundreds of millions of people.”
Greenpeace USA’s Annie Leonard translated this hard-to-grasp goal into action in her address at the 50th anniversary commemoration: “We can afford to approve zero new oil projects if we are to protect our climate,” she said.
Fossil fuel-energy companies could better honor their earth good-neighbor policies by keeping the oil in the ground. They could provide those good-paying jobs and tax revenue by investing in clean energy solutions. They can join and sponsor campaigns like CEC’s “fossil-free by 2033.”
Conservatives and progressives, young and old, of all creeds and colors now need to work every angle — technological, scientific, artistic, consumptive — with an earth-first ethos.
We can improve existing fossil fuel programs while holding the line on every new project. We can attend hearings for new drilling as posted on the EDC website. This is the last decade to rein ourselves in, for our children and grandchildren.
Karen Telleen-Lawton, Noozhawk Columnist
Karen Telleen-Lawton is an eco-writer, sharing information and insights about economics and ecology, finances and the environment. Having recently retired from financial planning and advising, she spends more time exploring the outdoors — and reading and writing about it. The opinions expressed are her own.