Who Decides Offshore Drilling, And Why Coastal Communities Pay the Price

1:00:00 Along the coast, change rarely announces itself. Decisions that shape ocean ecosystems, local economies, and community safety happen quietly, far from the people who will live with the consequences. This episode is about distance. Distance between decision makers and coastlines. Distance between policy and place. And what that distance makes possible. This plan is about leasing. So it's about auctioning off our coasts, our public coasts for drilling. Right. And so it's not about this year. It's not about gas prices. This is about generations ahead.

1:00:40 What do we want the world to be? And this country and this world are at a crossroads. Do we want to lock ourselves into decades more of fossil fuels? Do we want to drill further, deeper, more risky, every inch, or do we want to make the transition to clean renewable energy? This is, this plan is sort of at that crux of the decision because if we decide that we're going to drill Florida and then think about the long-term economic impacts of an oil spill of Florida in the summer or California in the summer, is that the future we want? No. Leasing is the moment where public waters are opened up. It happens before drilling, before the infrastructure, and often before public awareness.

1:01:23 Once the leasing decisions are made, everything that falls become much harder to stop. It was actually earlier this year. On January 6th, President Biden protected 625 million acres, the entire East Coast, West Coast, Florida's Gulf Coast, and areas off Alaska. And that was a big historic moment. Yeah, I remember that. On his first day in office, President Trump did an executive order attempting to reverse that. And he's put forward a plan that in the initial stage opened everything to offshore drilling for consideration. But then the recent plan that just came out, the Atlantic and Pacific Northwest are taken out.

1:02:04 And so we're now talking about areas off Florida, California, and Alaska. Are on the table right now. Okay. So nothing else, just Florida, California, and Alaska. And the Western and Central Gulf. But those are coming through the Congress passed in the big, you know, HR1, the big bill that they passed at the beginning of the year. They included a massive expansion in Cook Inlet in Alaska, and then in the Western and Central Gulf. So there is a phenomenal, like the first lease sale is about to come up. 80 million acres is in, and that's the first of 30 in the Western and Central Gulf.

1:02:46 And so area is off Louisiana and Texas. Some of these areas are definitely facing huge pressure for expanded drilling. So that's a part of this plan too. Yeah. But we're going to try and stop what we can. Those numbers aren't abstract. They represent how much ocean is put on the table in one single decision. What the leasing is about is because there's stages, then they have to put out leases. Someone has to buy the leases. The world is flooded with oil right now. At one point, there was a belief that we were going to run out. They're finding deep water oil and Guyana, North Sea, South China Sea, Nigeria, all around the world.

1:03:26 They're finding massive, like deep water, more risky or near shore deposits in places there weren't before. So we really have to make a decision that we want to move on. We have to make a decision to stop expanding offshore drilling and change. So if we continue on the path we're on, there's really, I mean, history is so clear. Everywhere there's a massive expansion of offshore drilling. There are catastrophic oil spills. The language is technical, transactional even. There's no coastline in that description. No community and no ecosystem. It was so amazing last week to see the continued bipartisan overwhelming opposition.

1:04:08 There was a letter from every single member of Congress from Florida, every Republican, Democrat, every senator, every representative. The governor wrote a statement and the military base, Eglin, that covers nearly all of the Eastern Gulf of Mexico. It's the national testing and training range for the military, which does not want structure or flammable materials or oil spills happening. All of those in strong statements right out of the gates after this plan was introduced. So we certainly hope that the president, like last time, will hear those voices and pull it out and withdraw Florida. There is such strong opposition and those are the elected officials, but also the people, the public.

1:04:52 And it wants to show on the coastline. Yeah, and they all lived through, almost all lived through Deepwater Horizon. Yes. So they remember. Yeah. So when something gets proposed, like, well, there'll be a hundred mile buffer. Buffers don't matter when there's an oil spill. Being allowed to comment is not the same as having power. For communities closest to these waters, the gap becomes real very quickly. Especially with elected officials, we love to invite them to our beach cleanups, the water testing events, you know, to show them that the place is not just the environment and the wildlife, but show them, you know, how business is and their constituents, you know, really depend on a clean coastal environment.

1:05:35 So, and we're nonpartisan. We believe that, you know, it shouldn't be some sort of political stance one way or the other to want to protect our public resources. The decisions land somewhere. Risk isn't hypothetical. It's familiar. And it doesn't fall evenly. Oil spills happen all the time. The smaller ones tend to be underreported by the industry and not covered by the media. The larger ones can be catastrophic, not just for the environment, but for communities, for businesses. Yeah, maybe there's a recency bias that people have.

1:06:16 But I can tell you as someone that lives in Orange County that people remember the spill. We just had a big people's hearing event in Costa Mesa and we had over 100 people turn up, including local officials who remember the challenges of dealing with amplify energy and, you know, their lack of forthrightness, their failure to turn off the spigot, if you will, while oil, you know, continue to flow into the marine environment. We had a woman who owns a charter fishing business and whale watching company out of Dana Point. She came and spoke out about it and then emailed me the next day to let me know that she submitted her own official letter to the federal government.

1:07:04 So, yeah, when you see this stuff happen, it's hard to forget. Leasing doesn't just shape the present, it shapes the future. A lease today is almost a plan to drill 10, even 20 years from now. They sit on that lease. First, there's a lot of, it's the ocean. It's not easy to get there. So, sometimes they lease it out before they have the capital and get a loan to do the survey work. They might drill a survey well, because these oil deposits are two, three miles underneath the mud. And that's all if you're drilling through a mile of ocean on top of that.

1:07:45 So, these are incredibly complex operations and they're incredibly expensive. And since 2014 and fracking, it's just been so much easier for the oil companies to hire trucks rather than boats, right? So, it's still to this day, it's much a bigger return on investment for them to hire trucks and frack in West Texas or North Dakota than it is to make a long term plan to drill for oil deposits in the ocean. So, what that means is a lot of your smaller operators won't even be bidding.

1:08:31 That means communities inherit decisions they didn't make. Lease sale is every speck of ocean we got. And that's kind of offensive because we have great coral reefs in places, in some places of Gulf. In other places, we have sand resources that we would like to utilize for coastal and ecosystem restoration. We have fairways. We have places that will be good for wind power. So, when you see these plans drop and they consider no one and nobody and they just let oil industry take whatever they want, that's not a plan. Leasing is expansive. Once it happens, it reshapes what the ocean is allowed to become.

1:09:15 Cook Inlet Keeper got it start after the Exxon Valdez disaster. So, you know, most expensive oil spill in human history. And it happened in Prince William Sound, which was, I mean, on the map, it looks next door to us. We were we were getting oil up here in Cook Inlet. We're hundreds of miles away for reference. And this was it was absolutely massive. And there have been bigger ones, but this one was huge. From afar, places can look close together. On the ground, they are. Each of these lease sales that that happened, like the most recent one, Lease Sale 258, there was a they did a model on it on sort of the risk of a major spill that was associated with this particular lease sale.

1:10:09 And they estimated that there was about a 19 percent chance of a major spill happening. So this is the kind of thing that would be, you know, destructive across the board and could, you know, choke out our fish and also be just immensely destructive to wildlife, both in the in the ocean and also on land. And that's just one Lease Sale. When you start adding up the fact that we already have a bunch of when we have a bunch of sort of extractive industries further up the inlets. Plus, each newly sale coming in, having its own risk associated that risk becomes additive. So Lease Sale 258 is 20 percent. When you add on the Lease Sale before that, it becomes 40 percent.

1:10:57 And when you account for all of the current leases that are already happening in Cook Inlet, we're already hovering well over 50 percent of it, well over 50 percent chance of a risk of a major oil spill in the area. These risks are modeled. They're known. And still the people closest to them rarely shape the decision itself. So we've made we have a bunch of resources that we're making available for people to go to to kind of help guide them through this process. So on our website, we have a page that is actually dedicated to to oil and gas lease sales.

1:11:39 And on that page, we've got like talking points that people can use. We've got the link to the actual place where they're supposed to where they can go to submit the comments. And in a couple of hours and at 5 30 today, we're going to be doing a online like video training session where we can kind of walk people through the issue and how to go about commenting on it. And we're going to record that and put that up online as well. So we're just trying to get as much as we can out there for people to both be aware that this is happening and that, you know, this thing that's happening over the holidays that is trying to be stuck under their nose is happening right now.

1:12:20 And they've got to they've got to get a comment in by January 23rd, especially because, you know, we've got like Lauren said, we've got 12 lease sales either that have either happened or about to happen in Cook Inlet alone. And this is because of, you know, the various loopholes that the federal government has been using to get rid of to constrain public comment. This is potentially like the only opportunity that people are going to get to actually make a public comment. When participation requires guidance, translation and navigation, it stops being equal. The system may be open, but it isn't equally accessible. The people closest to the ocean are usually the first to notice change the first to respond and the last to be heard.

1:13:11 And that distance is not accidental.