Last week was a strange week for oil: At one point, House Republicans, hoping to block President Biden's ability to lower gas prices, passed a bill saying that oil could not be released from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve until the Secretary of Energy made a plan to produce an equal amount from oil and gas leases. It was a head-scratcher, if only because the Secretary of Energy doesn't control the Interior Department or its oil and gas leases. Then Democrats in Congress introduced their eighth bill to ban all offshore drilling along the West Coast, while oil interests sent a petition to the Supreme Court asking the justices to overturn the fracking moratorium in the very same area.
To much public fanfare, fracking off the California coast was banned in a settlement between Santa Barbara's Environmental Defense Center (EDC) and the Department of the Interior in 2014, and the federal government seems to have regretted it ever since . Fracking attempts to juice up a well in thick crude through "well stimulation techniques" that use pressure and sometimes the introduction of caustic chemicals. The federal agencies that regulate offshore oil say they were totally unaware that fracking was taking place in the Pacific until weeks of diligent paper-chasing by the EDC in 2013 found at least 15 instances at platforms Gail and Gilda. The settlement required an environmental review that once completed was anemic at best; it determined that fracking — which uses hydrochloric and hydrofluoric acids, among others — would have few cumulative effects on the environment.
The EDC and Santa Barbara Channelkeeper sued again, this time joined by the Center for Biological Diversity, Wishtoyo Foundation, and Kamala Harris's Office of the Attorney General of California and the Coastal Commission. The questions for them were whether the state's coastal zone would be adequately addressed, whether the endangered southern sea otter would be affected, and if federal environmental policies had been flouted.