On May 13, the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors should sunset oil and gas production in the county, and prohibit any new fossil fuel development here.
The county’s 2030 Climate Action Plan aims to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions by 50%, of 2018 levels, by 2030.
The plan includes strategies for reducing emissions in various sectors, including reducing emissions from electricity and natural gas use, promoting electric vehicles, reducing emissions from buildings by increasing energy efficiency, converting to all-electric systems, and improving the county’s resilience to the impacts of climate change, such as sea-level rise and extreme weather events.
These are all good things.
However, without phasing out all existing oil and gas development, and prohibiting any new fossil fuel development, the county’s Climate Action Plan becomes an oxymoron incapable of reaching its 50% goal by 2030.
There currently are 679 onshore wells producing 207,700 barrels of oil in the county. And the county is facing Sable Offshore Corp.’s attempt to permit its pipeline repair that would reopen ExxonMobil’s former Santa Ynez Unit, three offshore platforms pumped ashore through Sable’s pipeline to its onshore oil and natural gas processing facility west of Goleta.
As long as these wells keep pumping, and should Sable get past the California Coastal Commission, the county’s 2030 greenhouse gas reduction goal is academic.
Let’s assume the county reaches its 50% reduction goal, and the wells keep pumping and processing the oil here. What would be achieved? The county would have reduced its carbon footprint, while unabated oil drilling and processing would be negating those reductions.
The supervisors have tasked staff with options for including oil and gas in the Climate Action Plan. The only acceptable option is the phasing out of existing oil and gas production, along with a prohibition against any new fossil fuel development and/or processing in the county.
A realistic Climate Action Plan would have pointed out that, under state law (Assembly Bill 2716), cities and counties can limit or prohibit oil and gas operations within their jurisdictions.
In other words, the supervisors have the legal right to sunset and ban oil development. If they need a rationale to do this, they should remember the recent Eaton and Palisades wildfires in Los Angeles County, which destroyed more than 16,000 homes and killed more than two dozen people), along with the fact that over the last 11 years, Santa Barbara County has experienced 15 major wildfires and is on record saying, “Wildfires now pose a significant threat to residents year-round.”
Moreover, a climate study after the Eaton and Palisades fires attributed the intensified fire conditions causing the fires to climate change, with natural climate variability playing a minor role.
These intensified fire conditions (now a “new normal”) include dry fuel (grasses, brush and trees), hot air supplying the oxygen a fire needs to grow, and extreme winds like the santa ana and sundowner winds that Southern Californian and Santa Barbara County experience.
These are conditions — severe heat, drought and extreme winds — that all of the supervisors have experienced.
Indeed, all the supervisors need to do to stop oil development in the county is connect the dots: oil and gas produce greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide); greenhouse gases trap heat in the atmosphere, causing global warming; oil and gas are the primary causes of greenhouse gas emissions that are causing severe weather events like wildfires.
If they need more of an incentive to sunset and ban oil and gas development, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, one of the agencies that President Donald Trump wants to abolish, predicts that 2025 will again be the hottest year on record — as were 2024 and 2023.
The Board of Supervisors have declared May as Wildfire Preparedness Month. How can the county prepare if it continues on with its oil and gas production?
Santa Barbara County, like the rest of the world, cannot avoid the impacts of climate change: Sunset oil production and ban any new fossil fuel development.