The Lesson of Santa Barbara
In January of 1969, an oil well blew out off the coast of Santa Barbara. It dumped three million gallons of toxic crude oil into the Pacific Ocean, coated 35 miles of California beaches with oil and killed birds and fish in a disaster that President Richard Nixon said “touched the conscience of the American people.”
In the months that followed, Congress passed the National Environmental Policy Act, the Magna Carta of environmental law. It required an environmental impact statement for major projects that needed federal funding or a federal permit, and guaranteed citizens a voice in protecting our air, water, wildlife and lands.
Not a single U.S. senator voted against the bill and it passed in the House by a vote of 372–15.
“Restoring nature to its natural state is a cause beyond party and beyond factions,” Nixon said in his 1970 State of the Union Address. “It has become a common cause of all the people of the country.”
That April, some 20 million Americans turned out for teach-ins, speeches, demonstrations and other community-based events to mark the first Earth Day, in what The New York Times would later call “among the most participatory political actions in the nation’s history.”
Within months, Nixon and Congress created the Environmental Protection Agency. By year’s end, Congress passed and Nixon signed the Clean Air Act. Over the next two years, Congress added the Clean Water Act, the Coastal Zone Management Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act and other foundational legislation that embodied a national consensus for environmental protection.
The Santa Barbara blowout helped to galvanize a movement the put in place bedrock safeguards that have served us well ever since.
This week, a pipeline failure dumped 100,000 gallons of oil along the Santa Barbara shore, with roughly a fifth of it making its way into the ocean. If there’s a silver lining it’s that this disaster, too, could help trigger the action we need to protect our environment and health for generations to come.
In news footage of workers in hazmat suits crouching over oil-stained beaches to scoop up contaminated seaweed and sand by the handful, we’ve seen, once again, the near impossibility of removing toxic oil from marine habitat.
That’s one more reminder of the folly of the Obama administration allowing the Shell Oil Company to begin exploratory drilling this summer in the Arctic Ocean, a place where pack ice chokes waters eight months out of the year and gale force winds howl across 30-foot seas 1,000 miles from the nearest Coast Guard station.
Shell proved three years ago that the oil and gas industry is no match for Arctic waters. Within hours of arriving at a prospective drill site, the crew of a Shell drilling rig had to scramble their giant drill ship out of the path of an ice floe 30 miles long. And underwater containment rig Shell claimed could bottle up a spill collapsed like a soda can during testing. And, within months, Shell lost control of two drilling vessels, one of which drifted free and crashed into rocks.
This industry has no business drilling for oil and gas in the Arctic Ocean, one of the last truly wild places left on Earth. And we have no right to roll the dice on the fate of this rich and diverse habitat for the sake of oil company profits.
Five years ago last April, the BP blowout dumped more than 130 million barrels of oil into the fertile fishing grounds of the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 employees aboard the Deepwater Horizon drilling vessel and throwing tens of thousands of others out of work.
Last year in the Gulf, there were about 7 percent more injuries, spills, fires, explosions and other hazardous incidents per well than in 2009, the year before the BP blowout.
Now the Obama administration has proposed opening up the waters off the southern Atlantic to offshore drilling that would expose the Eastern Seaboard to a BP-style disaster.
That takes us in exactly the wrong direction.
What we saw in Santa Barbara in 1969, in the Gulf in 2009, and again just this past week, is that we cannot continue to put our workers, waters and wildlife at risk from the dangers of oil production and distribution.
We need to maintain the moratorium on new drilling off our Pacific and Atlantic coasts. We need to take Arctic waters off the table for oil and gas development. And we need to do a better job of protecting our people and resources in the Gulf of Mexico.
We can’t keep going to the ends of the Earth in search of every last drop of oil. We need to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels and the danger, damage and destruction they bring.
That means investing in efficiency so we can do more with less waste. It means building, in this country, the best all-electric and hybrid cars and trucks anywhere in the world. And it means powering them with more electricity produced from the wind and the sun.
That’s the lesson from the oil on the coast of Santa Barbara, as much today as in 1969.
