RISK OF UPSET OR UPSET ABOUT RISK? It’s probably the case that ExxonMobil — the world’s biggest, baddest oil company — was doomed from the outset . Still, it would have been nice had they made a better effort.
To be fair, it may not have mattered. It wasn’t just that Santa Barbara’s political reality was against them, though it undoubtedly was. It’s that the facts — the ones you can see with your own two eyes, as opposed to the ones magically conjured by the cookie-cutter algorithms of traffic engineers — were dead-set against them, too. Accordingly, the county supervisors voted 3 to 2 this Tuesday to indefinitely pull the plug on ExxonMobil — long a looming presence along the coast and a foundational player in Santa Barbara’s offshore oil industry. A couple of months earlier, the Planning Commission did the same thing.
In the world of petro-politics, that’s staggering. Think Jack and the Beanstalk meets David and Goliath. Think Bambi kicking Godzilla’s ass.