By Andrew Christie, Director, Santa Lucia Chapter
I couldn’t agree more with Tom Hafer and Butch Powers, the presidents of the Morro Bay and Port San Luis Commercial fishing organizations, when they write in their July 21 Tribune Viewpoint that due to “the many conflicting statements about a potential Central Coast marine sanctuary…it is imperative that our community understands how a National Marine Sanctuary (NMS) operates.”
But since the authors’ organizations have been a primary source of those “conflicting statements” – not to mention distorted, deceptive and misleading statements -- they are probably the last people on earth who should presume to set themselves up as a community information source on “how a National Marine Sanctuary operates.”
I recall when Mr. Powers stepped up to the microphone at the June 23 Port San Luis Harbor Commission meeting and announced that the Refugio oil spill – which was still closing down beaches and fisheries from Santa Barbara to Manhattan Beach – was purely a land-based spill and had nothing to do with offshore oil, so it was irrelevant to say, as I had just said, that if a national marine sanctuary had existed off Goleta before the offshore rigs went in, the spill would have never happened. The Harbor Commission eagerly echoed this sentiment, despite that fact that the speaker following Mr. Powers corrected him. These statements were uttered after more than a month of news coverage of the spill. They were uttered at a meeting held on the evening of the day that the media reported ExxonMobil was going to suspend production at the offshore rig that had pumped the oil in question because Santa Barbara wouldn’t let Exxon use trucks to convey the oil from its offshore rig to the refineries, now that they could no longer use the ruptured Plains All American Pipeline for that purpose.
In the midst of the worst oil spill to hit the Central Coast in more than 40 years, Mr. Powers – and the Port San Luis Harbor Commission – didn’t know where that oil came from.
Now comes the latest oilvasion from Hafer & Powers:
“While the existing West Coast NMS areas have designation documents that include a ban on oil and gas exploration or development, this ban is not permanent, as Congress and the president can overrule it.”
Here’s what it would take for the President and Congress to overrule the ban on offshore drilling in National Marine Sanctuaries:
- Congress would need to pass legislation and the President would have to sign, or his veto be overridden, to rescind the statutory prohibitions on oil and gas activities in California’s national marine sanctuaries.
- The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) would have to amend its regulations to allow oil and gas activities within the sanctuaries where they are prohibited, a process that would include full public notice and comment.
- California’s governor, assembly and senate, our congressional delegation, every state and national environmental organization, and the citizens of California all sit back, yawn, and say “Whatever. Go ahead.”
In other words, politically speaking, the ban on oil drilling in a national marine sanctuary off the coast of California is “not permanent” in the sense that the Earth is not permanent because it will fall into the sun in about five billion years.
Hafer and Powers announce they are members of the Our Protected Coast Coalition. Since I last wrote about the sudden appearance of the Our Protected Coast Coalition, they have managed to get themselves a website, but still haven’t quite managed to say who they are. With their July 21 Viewpoint, we can add the presidents of the Morro Bay and Port San Luis Commercial fishing organizations to a list that otherwise can only be confirmed as including – and apparently originating with – conservative political operative and oil industry p.r. consultant Amber Johnson. Ms. Johnson now qualifies as the quietest member of the OPCC.
The one thing OPCC hates even more than the fact that a Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary would indeed ban oil and gas exploration and development is the study “The Potential Economic Impacts of the Proposed Central Coast National Marine Sanctuary.” Commissioned by the Sierra Club, the study was co-authored by the director of the Center for the Blue Economy at the Monterey Institute of International Studies and the director of the center’s National Ocean Economics Program. They concluded that a marine sanctuary on the Central Coast would be likely to result in nearly 600 new jobs locally and economic growth of at least $23 million annually. Those estimates are conservative.
Naturally, sanctuary opponents really want to discredit that study. In a step up from the OPCC “fact” sheet circulated at the April meeting of the Port San Luis Harbor Commission (the source of the immortal sentence: “After a peer review of the report, many if not most of the claims are not able to be substantiated with facts. See (put the www. here.”), they have now managed to post an actual document to an actual website.
But a strange non-specificity has set in. The authors of the Tribune viewpoint make oddly vague gestures toward that document, not naming it but referring to the “research and peer review” and “peer review detail” somewhere on their website that is supposed to show up the conclusions of the economic impact study as “extremely exaggerated.”
As it turns out, the document they are staking that claim on was written by a longtime advisor to the fishing industry who chose to disclose neither her industry affiliations nor who had asked her to write a review of the economic impact study. It was printed as a commentary on the Paso Robles Daily News website – a commentary that tripped over its own footnotes at the git-go when the author conflated National Marine Sanctuaries and California Marine Protected Areas as though they’re the same thing. They are two completely different regulatory animals, with completely different impacts – one of many major problems with the article.
Nor is the Paso Robles Daily News the Journal of Environmental Economics, and publication of a commentary on a local website is not something the author will be including in her resume’ of peer-reviewed publications.
Hafer and Powers proudly note that the same false arguments against marine sanctuaries that have been heard ad nauseum on the Central Coast were successful when they were recently peddled verbatim in Oregon and Alaska, as though photocopied from a playbook. More relevant than examples of communities that didn’t know better and were effectively misled and suckered out of a marine sanctuary would be an example of who wasn't -- i.e. communities that already have sanctuaries, have lived with them for years, and have succeeded in efforts to expand them and the benefits they confer. These are communities that actually know what national marine sanctuaries are and how they work and therefore can't be persuaded by paranoid fantasies and p.r. playbooks.
Here’s a good place to get actual facts on national marine sanctuaries.
And to fully appreciate just how fact-challenged is the contention that marine sanctuaries don’t confer significant economic benefits – or the even more absurd contention that they somehow harm the fishing economy -- you can’t beat this. Both sites are good places to go if you ever find yourself confused by “the many conflicting statements about a potential Central Coast marine sanctuary” put out by economic special interests who want to pretend to explain to our community “how a National Marine Sanctuary operates.”
To sum up: You gotta fight for your right to protect our proposed national marine sanctuary from people who don’t know – and don’t want to know -- that the oil in the Refugio oil spill came from offshore rigs.
That's a good reason to call or write your County Supervisor and ask him or her to support the nomination for the Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary.