Given Santa Barbara’s long-standing equine obsession, it’s perversely fitting that two of the major players looming over the county’s latest knock-down, drag-out battle over climate change and greenhouses gases are both board-certified horse nuts. I am speaking about the fight over the proposal to vastly expand existing oil operations in Cat Canyon.
The ERG proposal — one of three massive onshore-oil-production proposals now hovering on the county’s horizon — is being gnawed upon by the county’s Planning Commission, a critical but often-overlooked governmental body. If built, those three projects combined could generate 760,000 metric tons of greenhouse gases a year. ERG alone — when operating all 187 steam-injection wells — could generate 250,000 metric tons. If those numbers seem big, that’s because they are. The county’s threshold is 1,000 per project.
The scrutiny the commission is now heaping upon the ERG proposal and its environmental impact report (EIR) is far from typical. What previously might have been accomplished in just one meeting is now taking at least three. And the outcomes — certification or approval — are by no means certain. That’s in large measure because of John Parke, the new chair of the commission. Parke, an athletic mid-sixties litigator who looks suspiciously like Monty Python member Michael Palin, is hardly the only commissioner whose opinion counts. But as chair, he is asking a whole lot of questions about information not found in the EIR. And he’s not satisfied with the answers.