Capitol Journal: California is right to close its door to offshore drilling — Trump can’t be trusted with our beaches

Reporting from Sacramento —  President Trump was the clincher: He wants more offshore oil drilling, so forget it. California is right to put up the barricades.

This guy just can’t be trusted. He shows no respect for history or the truth. No way should California place its beautiful beaches in his soiled hands.

One of this president’s latest head-shakers, after all, was to claim in a newspaper interview that Andrew Jackson “was really angry” about the Civil War. “He said, ‘There’s no reason for this.’ ”

But Jackson had been dead 16 years before the first shot was fired.

Further wounding himself, Trump added: “Why was there the Civil War? Why could that one not have been worked out?”

As any middle-school kid could tell him, the Civil War was about slavery. What would have been the compromise? Free the women and children, but keep the men in chains? Phase it out over a few generations?

This is not about Trump’s ideology and beliefs. It’s about his not seeming to have any beliefs and therefore being unpredictable.

Trump should not be the judge of how much oil spill risk is acceptable to California. The answer is none.

And the oil companies can’t be trusted either, despite their repeated insistence that modern drilling has become much safer because of new technologies.

Full confession: I used to buy into that. Nine years ago I wrote a column advocating the renewal of drilling off the California coast. The country needed to reduce its oil imports and produce more of its own, I wrote. Oil exploration provided good paying jobs. California could use the tax revenue.

And drilling had become a lot safer than nearly 40 years earlier when a Union Oil platform six miles off Santa Barbara spilled crud all over the coast from Goleta to Ventura while also fouling the Channel Islands. An estimated 3,500 sea birds were killed, plus dolphins, elephant seals and sea lions.

At the time, in 1969, it was the largest oil spill ever in U.S. waters.

Four decades later, it seemed like the oil industry had become a bit more enlightened. So I plugged more offshore drilling.

Admittedly, I was biased. My dad worked on oil rigs in Santa Barbara and Ventura counties most of his adult life. My first summer job out of high school was in an oil field. While many considered oil derricks unsightly, I found them fascinating.

But I loved the surf and the beaches a lot more. Oil-tinted breakers depicted the devil.

What started turning me around was the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico that killed 11 people and injured 17. An estimated 4.9 million barrels of oil were unleashed in the world’s biggest marine spill. So much for safety. Where there’s offshore drilling, no beaches are safe. Period.

Now Trump has asked the Interior Department to “reconsider” several safety regulations imposed after the Horizon spill. That could make offshore drilling even more dangerous.

And he has signed an executive order that could open the Pacific, Arctic and Atlantic oceans to new drilling in federal waters.

“California will fight this every step of the way,” U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) pledged.

In Sacramento, state Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson (D-Santa Barbara) said she’ll push legislation that would block any oil pumped in federal waters from reaching California’s shore. It would forbid the state Lands Commission from allowing any new pipeline or other facility to handle expanded oil flow.

“If they want to go out and sell leases and try to develop new production in federal waters, we’re not going to provide them with the infrastructure to transport the oil on shore,” Jackson said. “We’re going to make the three miles we control a no-oil zone.”

Updates from Sacramento »

Federal waters are those between three and 12 miles off the coast.

Gov. Jerry Brown undoubtedly would sign the bill. He and the Democratic governors of Oregon and Washington released a statement calling Trump’s action “short-sighted,” adding: “We cannot return to the days where the federal government put the interests of big oil above our communities and treasured coastline.”

The Lands Commission needs no convincing. It’s already dead-set against allowing more offshore oil to reach land.

“California’s door is closed to President Trump’s Pacific oil and gas drilling,” announced Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, the commission chairman.

The three Democratic commissioners, Newsom said, will “ensure that any oil and gas product from new drilling never makes landfall in California.”

Anyway, all these Democrats emphasize, California is leading an effort to save the planet from global warming by dramatically reducing the burning of fossil fuel and increasing reliance on renewable energy. Force the oil companies to develop clean energy sources, they say.

There are 27 oil platforms off the California coast. But there haven’t been any new leases in state waters since the Santa Barbara spill, and none in federal waters since 1984.

You’re not likely to see any new ones either. The California coast, fortunately, is a dry hole for Trump.

george.skelton@latimes.com

Follow @LATimesSkelton on Twitter

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