Offshore Drilling Would Hurt Virginia
Even if it happens in the Arctic, offshore drilling will worsen sea-level rise everywhere
Reprint of op-ed in Virginian-Pilot.
A NEIGHBOR recently asked me if I thought offshore oil drilling would happen here in Virginia. Honestly, I said no — not with the huge risk it poses to tourism and the military. But it’s hard to have much confidence in such logic when the Trump administration has recklessly proposed to lease every ocean in the country to the oil industry.
Virginians voiced strong opposition to that plan during the administration’s recent public hearing in Richmond. But here’s the reality for Virginia: Even if we can persuade President Donald Trump to spare us from the direct threat of oil spills along our beautiful coastline, we’ll still suffer the effects of this drastic plan to turn the nation’s oceans into oilfields.
Most obviously, opening the Arctic to drilling means more carbon pollution spewed into our atmosphere, which will increase global warming and sea-level rise. Melting ice is bad for us as well as polar bears.
In my lifetime, the sea level in Norfolk has risen eight inches. That means the live oaks along the water in my neighborhood are dying, and neighbors tired of flooding are moving out. More drilling gives Norfolk less time to figure out how to deal with these changes.
Military training may not be affected directly, with any luck, because there won’t be an oil rig off Virginia Beach. But for our neighbors and friends who are in the military, drilling in the Arctic is going to result in climate change around the world, which affects their missions by destabilizing nations.
Climate change causes environmental chaos, leading to droughts, more severe storms, displaced people, and as a result, social conflict. Our military’s deployment to those areas affects us all.
Fishermen and shellfish growers here might avoid the risk of actual oil on their seafood product, if we’re lucky, but climate change affects them, too. Fish populations are already moving to new latitudes to cope with warming; oysters already are at risk of ocean acidification that weakens shells.
Drilling in the Arctic — where a carbon bomb of monstrous proportions lies under those treacherous waters — worsens all of these problems.
My organization, the Center for Biological Diversity, calculated that Trump’s plan could lead to the release of 30 to 50 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, ranging from “economically recoverable” to “technically recoverable” oil and gas deposits.
Even the low end of that range would make it almost impossible to keep global warming under the ceiling agreed to in the Paris climate talks. We in Virginia need the world to meet these climate goals.
Offshore drilling is a dirty, dangerous business that routinely causes oil spills, big and small. The center also calculated that Trump’s plan would cause more than 5,500 oil spills based on historical trends, about 10 times what’s expected under the Obama administration plan that Trump is trying to replace. Spills off Virginia could erase the hard work done to restore the Chesapeake Bay’s eelgrass and bring back oyster reefs.
Allowing drilling off Virginia’s scenic shores would be a tragedy. We all must raise our voices now to oppose that fate. But we should also make clear that expanding offshore drilling and issuing decades-long leases anywhere in this country — particularly in the Arctic — is not what Virginia or the rest of this country wants, needs or deserves.
Norfolk resident Catherine Kilduff is an attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity.
