Talking Points on the California Oil Spill

Oct 9, 2021

The oil spill in Southern California, very near where I live, is being used (abused) to call for anti-oil policies, including a ban on California offshore drilling. Here are my talking points on what actually happened and what the proper response is.

Summary: As a SoCal resident and beach-goer, I wanted to see my government respond to the oil spill by assessing the damage, investigating the cause, and proposing real solutions. Instead it is wildly distorting the facts and pursuing anti-oil "solutions" that will make life in CA far worse.

Last weekend, a pipeline 5 miles from the Southern CA coastline leaked over 100,000 gallons of oil, some of which reached Huntington Beach, Newport Beach, and Laguna Beach (where I live). As bad as this incident has been, our elected officials' response has been far worse.
1
The main damage of the spill has been 1) making some waters temporarily unswimmable/unfishable and 2) harming some wildlife, especially birds. It's not a catastrophe: Newport Beach is already back open for swimming, and bird deaths are tiny compared to those via wind turbine.
2
We know that long-term effects of oil spills are very limited. Oil is an organic substance that naturally leaks a lot without enduring problems. E.g., natural oil seepages in SoCal add dozens of times the oil to the ocean that the recent spill added.
3
https://incidentnews.noaa.gov/incident/8934/22546/26338
Instead of recognizing that this spill has done significant temporary damage, CA elected officials are treating it as a crisis that must be prevented at all costs. Local beaches are also overreacting. Laguna Beach is banning us from even going on the sand--total pseudoscience.
CA elected officials should recognize that the cause of the spill is still not understood--with one likely explanation being a pipeline rupture by an unidentified ship's anchor. But instead of calling for careful investigation, officials are attacking the whole CA oil industry.
Instead of proposing real solutions that would cost-effectively reduce the likelihood of oil spills in the future, CA elected officials are jumping to a disastrous non-solution: banning all offshore drilling from CA--something that would cause Californians terrible damage.
Cottie Petrie-Norris, a CA assembly member, called the spill a "call to action that we need to stop drilling off our precious California coast.” So-Cal-based Representative Ted Lieu said "we need to shut down all offshore drilling because it’s too dangerous." Exactly wrong.
4
CA is already suffering greatly from anti-oil policies. For example, by conservative estimates the excessive motor fuel prices we pay cost us at least $20B a year. Compare this to the $20M cleanup from the last significant CA oil spill (Refugio Beach). https://darrp.noaa.gov/oil-spills/refugio-beach-oil-spill
Given that Californians' lives, like all lives in the modern world, depend on oil, we need to expand our ability to produce and transport oil--not make our current costly restrictions even worse by shutting down even more oil production and by opposing pipelines.
Pipelines are an incredibly safe mode of transportation for oil, natural gas, ethanol, and many other important liquids and gases. Despite millions of miles of pipelines, there are fewer fatalities from pipelines than from lightning strikes.
5
https://www.phmsa.dot.gov/data-and-statistics/pipeline/pipeline-incident-20-year-trends
Despite increasing oil+gas production and transport in the US, the number of incidents, including those impacting people or the environment (IPE), has decreased during the shale boom--a fact glaringly missing from the media portrayal of spills.
6
https://www.aopl.org/page/safety-record

Let's take the occasion of the pipeline leak to have a real conversation about how to improve the safe production and transport of life-sustaining oil in California. And let's reject the charlatans who would make life far worse for Californians by restricting oil even more.

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