Dear [Mayor] and [city / town / county] members.
My name is [________], I’m a volunteer with the Center for Biological Diversity and a resident of [city / town / county].
I’m here in support of Resolution [________], which calls for:
- A ban on new offshore oil and gas drilling, fracking, and other well stimulation in federal and state waters off the California coast, and
- No new federal oil and gas leasing in all U.S. waters, including off the coast of California.
President Trump recently announced his plan to expand offshore oil and gas drilling in all of America’s Oceans, including off the California coast for the first time in over 30 years. The plan also attempts to illegally open up areas permanently protected from new drilling by President Obama, including the Arctic Ocean and large swaths of the Atlantic.
New leasing in the Pacific could mean expanded offshore oil and gas drilling from San Diego to Mendocino and beyond, including off [your city / town / county]’s coast.
And we know that where we drill we spill. There is simply no way to drill safely in our oceans.
- From the catastrophic 1969 spill in Santa Barbara that launched the modern environmental movement,
- to the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill that ripped apart the very fabric a small Alaskan fishing community,
- to the largest environmental catastrophe in American history, the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill,
- to the recent Plains All American spill in Refugio that covered miles of beaches near Santa Barbara in oil and killed hundreds of marine mammals and birds.
- to the 40,000 oil spills that the Coast Guard documented in the Gulf of Mexico over the last 4 decades.
Oil spills are not only an inevitable consequence of offshore drilling, they are routine.
Oil spills obliterate marine life, smother our beaches in oil, ruin fisheries, and devastate coastal communities with impunity.
Federal agencies also recently lifted a moratorium on offshore fracking in federal waters, and oil companies have begun submitting permits to start fracking again in the Santa Barbara Channel.
The Environmental Protection Agency permits oil companies to dump up to 9 billion gallons of drilling wastewater, including toxic fracking chemicals, straight into the Pacific Ocean every year.
Scientific studies indicate that at least 10 of the chemicals routinely used to frack offshore could kill or harm a broad variety of marine species, including sea otters and fish.
Numerous fracking chemicals are also hazardous to human health.
And because fracking uses high pressure to fracture rocks, each frack increases the chances of another devastating oil spill.
Drilling, fracking and the spilling that accompanies them directly threatens the booming California coastal economy which relies on healthy marine ecosystems and clean beaches to contribute 410,000 jobs and $20 billion in annual GDP to the state’s economy through fishing, recreation, and tourism alone.
It’s also worth noting that clean energy jobs outnumber all fossil fuel jobs in the state by a ratio of 6:1, the highest ratio in the country.
It’s not just oil spills and toxic pollution that endanger CA coastal communities; sea level rise as a result of climate change threatens 1 million coastal residents and $100billion in infrastructure in CA.
Because drilling anywhere is a threat to climate everywhere, this resolution also calls for no new drilling in all US waters currently off limits to new leasing.
Our voices matter! President Obama included a massive chunk of the Atlantic Ocean to the 1st iteration of the 5 year offshore oil and gas leasing plan that I mentioned earlier.
The East Coast responded with a massive, coordinated opposition, and over 100 municipalities passed resolutions similar to the one you’re considering here this evening.
And it worked. The administration removed the entirety of the Atlantic from the next version of the plan and cited local opposition as one of the primary reasons for excluding it.
That’s why we’re working to pass resolutions up and down the coast from San Diego to the Oregon border. So far X communities have done so, and I hope that this afternoon, [your city / town / county] will become the _ community to protect our coast by saying NO! to offshore drilling and fracking.
Thank you.