In an effort to address the perils of climate change, the county supervisors voted 3-2 to adopt the most stringent greenhouse-gas-emission restrictions of any county in California, requiring all industrial facilities to limit their emissions to 1,000 metric tons a year or to offset any releases above that. The new rules will affect 50 industrial producers, all but one of which is an oil operation located in northern Santa Barbara County. Advocates for the oil industry had lobbied loud and hard for thresholds of 10,000 metric tons a year, arguing that new restrictions would damage the one North County industry to provide decent-paying jobs.
Just 18 months ago, the same oil-industry advocates had lambasted the supervisors for imposing that 10,000-metric-ton threshold on Santa Maria Energy, a fact that the three South County supervisors noted with varying degrees of theatricality. First District Supervisor Salud Carbajal noted archly he was “perplexed,” while Supervisor Janet Wolf said she felt she was “in another world,” having been told so recently how “the sky would fall.” Santa Maria Supervisor Steve Lavagnino sought to explain the oil industry’s change of heart, saying it had been “tortured.” Supervisor Peter Adam mocked “the dire doom-and-gloom” prognostications made over the years by environmentalists — the Arctic ice had not melted, he noted, as Al Gore predicted it would in 2007 — and suggested the planet would correct itself if, in fact, global warming was taking place, “as it’s done in the past.”
According to county energy staff, the new regulations will capture 99.2 percent of the greenhouse gases released in the county by stationary sources. Under the 10,000 metric ton threshold, the capture rate would have been 90.4 percent. These numbers, however, are somewhat distant if not hypothetical. The companies involved will continue producing and generating pollution, but they will have to purchase pollution offsets and credits. Since none of these offsets currently exist in Santa Barbara County, the affected oil companies will purchase credits available in states like Alabama and Texas. While environmentalists concede Santa Barbara should have its own offsets, they also argue that because climate change is a global problem, anything that reduces greenhouse-gas emissions anywhere is a good thing everywhere. Santa Barbara, they argued, had an obligation to do its part to solve the problem, no matter how small its contribution might be. “Sometimes incentives are not enough to get us where we need to go in the time we need to get there,” said Supervisor Doreen Farr.