Under ridiculously sunny blue skies and with five oil derricks silhouetted hazily against a distant horizon, Santa Barbara’s newest congressmember Salud Carbajal announced this Saturday he would introduce a bill to ban any new oil leasing or drilling in federal waters off the coast of California. “We’ve seen time and time again the damage done to the environment by the threat of offshore oil drilling,” Carbajal declared to a cheering, enthusiastic crowd of about 125 well-wishers at a combination press conference and anti-Trump rally at Shoreline Park.
The timing of Carbajal’s event — announcing what’s billed as the California Clean Coast Act — coincided with the 48th anniversary of Santa Barbara’s now-legendary oil spill of 1969, in which 100,000 barrels escaped from a Union Oil’s Platform A located in federal waters six miles off the Santa Barbara coast. That spill is frequently credited for the start of the modern environmental movement. While that may be an overstatement, it certainly helped create the political propulsion that resulted in the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency nationally and many local organizations — the Community Environmental Council, the Environmental Defense Center, and Get Oil Out — that have defined Santa Barbara’s environmental movement.
While the administration of President Donald Trump has taken no steps to open up California’s coast to new development, Carbajal said Trump’s executive actions to greenlight two multi-state oil pipelines bitterly fought by environmentalists, as well as his selection of Rex Wayne Tillerson, former ExxonMobil CEO, as Secretary of State, gave serious cause for concern. “It is clear that the priorities of our president do not conform to those of the Central Coast’s,” he declared.
