Roaming Charges: When the Inevitable Becomes the Criminal

Satellite view of Huntington Beach oil slick. Image: NASA.

BY JEFFREY ST. CLAIR-OCTOBER 8, 2021

Despite a sordid history of leaks and spills, there are still 19 “oil and gas agreements” in California’s coastal waters and 1,200 active wells. Further out in federal waters, there are another 23 oil and gas production “facilities” off the state’s coast. During his abysmal tenure, Gavin Newsom has approved 138 new offshore drilling permits in California waters. As oil continues to lap up on the California coast and spread into Talbert Marsh at the height of the fall migration on the Pacific Flyway it seems imperative to ask: who’s to blame?

The Huntington Beach blowout was not merely predictable. It was inevitable. But when does the inevitable become the criminal? And where does the liability begin and end? With the pipeline company? The oil drilling company? The holding companies? Their lobbyists and PR hacks? The hedge funds? The regulators? The politicians?

The piety of California’s politicians on climate change is as insufferable as their actual record is hollow. As Dan Bacher has vividly reported for CounterPunch, Gavin Newsom, following in the oily footprints, of his predecessor Jerry Brown, has stuffed his pockets with oil and gas industry cash, while approving hundreds of new fracking and drilling permits. There’s no need to consult the Pandora Papers. It’s all out in the open. Audacious hypocrisy is how Newsom rolls. He should have been recalled for turning Southern California over to the oil companies, while parading around the Bay Area from bistro to bistro as a climate change warrior.

The damage inflicted by an oil spill like this one is irreparable. The afflicted stretch of coastline will never fully recover. The scars will be permanent. You can’t put a price tag on the damage. We won’t even know the full-scope of the ecological consequences for several decades, by which time there will almost certainly be another leak, spill, or rupture, along this fragile and serially abused stretch of coast. It’s predictable. It’s inevitable. Why? Because that’s where the pipeline runs. And pipelines leak, rupture and explode. They do this all on their own without being struck by a ship’s anchor or being toyed with by a giant squid. As long as oil courses though that 17-mile long stretch of pipeline, from the Elly drilling platform to the terminals in Long Beach, it will leak oil into the Pacific, killing and poisoning sea life and saturating sea and shorebirds in a lethal sheen. And there are no plans to shut it down, until the last drops are drained from those off-shore reserves in 2045.

It’s become a habitual response to say that nothing is learned from these blowouts, but that’s not true. The lessons, political and ecological, were learned after the first big spill in 1969, when a blowout from an oil rig off the coast of Santa Barbara ejected more than four million gallons of oil into the Pacific, fouling 35 miles of coastline, killing hundreds of seals, sea lions, and dolphins and killing tens of thousands of birds. The spill became a rallying cry at the first Earth Day and led Nixon to sign the National Environmental Policy Act a year later. But the drilling didn’t stop for long and, inevitably, the Santa Barbara coast was pelted with another major spill in 2015, when 145,000 gallons of crude oil coated Refugio Beach, smothering more than 100 sea mammals and killing at least 300 seabirds.

The past is the future. Only the future will always be worse–worse because the ecological health of the coast weakens year by year, leak by leak, spill by spill. Each year less of the coast functions as an ecosystem and what’s left is slower to recovery from each new assault.

And so it is with Huntington Beach, where an oil tanker dumped 450,000 gallons of oil into the very same waters in 1990, despoiling 15 miles of beaches, wetlands, and marshes, from Long Beach south to Newport Beach. The price? Just another write-off for big oil, as it continued to extract 135 million gallons of oil a year, from California’s dwindling reserves–some of the dirtiest oil on the planet and the most expensive to exhume, process and transport.

Polls show that 72% of Californians want an end to off-shore drilling. But their voices are smothered by the filthy loot pumped into the coffers of the governments of many of the communities most victimized by the oil industry. The city of Long Beach, for example, banked more than $1.4 billion from the offshore oil operations between 2010 and 2014 alone.

The politicians, from Newsom to Biden (who just approved Enbridge’s ghastly Line 3 pipeline and opened 82 million acres of the Gulf of Mexico to new drilling), haven’t merely turned a blind eye, they’ve been fully complicit in the ongoing mutilation of our coasts.

California alone has experienced 40 major pipeline leaks a year since 1986. That’s about 1400 oil and gas leaks, spills ruptures, blowouts, and blowups. One spill every nine days. The economic damage exceeds $1.2 billion. The human toll has been more than 230 injuries, 53 deaths and who knows how many cases of cancer and leukemia. The ecological costs are incalculable.

By coincidence, 1986 was the year the planet first exceeded the “safe levels” of atmospheric carbon, set at 350 ppm. The new peak was hit this July, when atmospheric carbon levels hit 416.9 ppm. Over the same 25-year period, the California Air Quality Board estimates that toxic air in Los Angeles County alone has caused 315,000 deaths (about 9,000 per year).

The next spill is coming, coming very soon, probably within a few days. It’s inevitable. It’s also criminal.

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