On May 13, Santa Barbara County provided an example of how to fight climate change by voting to ban new oil and gas drilling and phase out existing oil and gas operations locally.
The significance of this can’t be overstated.
Santa Barbara County is oil country. Its relationship with oil development began with onshore drilling in the 1850s followed by offshore drilling in the late 1890s, with offshore oil development expanding to 106 million barrels of oil in the 1960s, which also included the notorious 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill, which ushered in the modern environmental movement.
The county Board of Supervisors’ action, in addition to prohibiting new oil and gas development, sunsets 1,030 active onshore wells producing 2.7 million barrels of oil annually.
Legally speaking, it will also stop Sable Offshore Corp.’s attempt to reopen ExxonMobil’s three former offshore platforms producing 6,000 barrels of oil a day.
The pipeline Sable now owns has been shut down since the 2015 Refugio oil spill. Sable was fined $118 million by the California Coastal Commission for defying its order to stop illegally working on the pipeline until the necessary environmental assessments have been completed.
In defiance of the order, Sable began extracting oil from the long-shuttered offshore platforms. Its processing facility, however is in the county and is subject to the county statute prohibiting new oil development.
The reason this is so instructive has to do with the county’s 2030 Climate Action Plan that aims to reduce 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 would have become an oxymoron incapable of reaching its 50% goal by 2030.
Let’s assume the county reaches its 50% reduction goal, and the wells kept pumping and processing the oil. What would have been achieved?
The county would have reduced its carbon footprint, while unabated oil drilling and processing would be negating those reductions while adding greenhouse gases to our overheating atmosphere.
The Board of Supervisors realized this and acted accordingly, in the process setting the example of how to limit the devastating impacts of climate change.
The county’s action of sunsetting and banning new oil development was political. This is an intrinsic part of its model.
The ultimate solutions to global warming are political, ideally requiring national legislation to reduce and eliminate fossil fuel use and emissions while creating a green economy from renewable fuels.
While it was more than appropriate for Santa Barbara County, because of its history with the impacts of oil spills, to lead the way on how to effectively fight climate change, its leadership capacity could be national, even global.
Climate change, of course, is a global problem that can’t be stopped by individual actions regardless of how appropriate they are.
The county, however, having created the model for local governments to stop greenhouse gas emissions, can and should nationalize its actions by using the internet to create a national coalition of municipalities following the county’s lead in sunsetting existing oil development, and prohibiting any new oil development.
The coalition should then take the next step, as a coalition of local governments, and reach out to policy makers, at the state and national levels, to both inform them of the dangers of global warming and pressure them to enact statutes similar to Santa Barbara County’s.