Historic Santa Barbara County Vote to Phase Out New Oil Drilling

Supervisors Laura Capps, Joan Hartmann, and Roy Lee Voted Yes; Bob Nelson Voted No

Supervisor Joan Hartmann spoke with a sense of moral urgency on Tuesday in favor of transitioning away from climate-change-fueling oil and gas, while Supervisor Bob Nelson spoke up for the oil industry, which he charged had been egregiously “sandbagged” by county planners. | Credit: Ingrid Bostrom File Photos

“Okay,” said County Supervisor Laura Capps just before turning off the mic for the day, “that was a big one.” That might have been Santa Barbara’s political understatement of the year. Had Capps said “historic” instead, she would have been in the right zip code.

The county supervisors had just voted — by a 3-1 margin with supervisor Steve Lavagnino being absent due to family matters — to begin the process of phasing out onshore oil and gas operations in Santa Barbara County. The supervisors did not exactly vote to pull the plug on an industry that dates back into the 19th century. It was more that they signed an advanced directive and put it under the care of hospice.

If all goes as the majority vote intended, no new onshore wells will be allowed in Santa Barbara County. (Currently, there are 2,348 wells; of those, 1,030 are still active.) The existing industry will be allowed to sputter out over a yet-to-be-determined period of time and then die a quiet, controlled death.

Figuring out the details will take at least a couple of years, maybe more. Massive planning documents will have to be written and county codes changed; all of this will entail radical redirection of county planning efforts, intense lobbying, courthouse battles, and nonstop political efforts by both sides. But for now, the direction has been set.

The prevailing supervisors — Joan Hartmann, Laura Capps, and Roy Lee — spoke with a sense of moral urgency bordering on desperation regarding the damage wrought by climate change. The time had come, they insisted, to begin transitioning away from oil and gas and toward greener and cleaner energy sources. Besides, they argued, the sun had set on the county’s once economically robust petrochemical industry, which they noted generated only $1 million a year in county property taxes and provided 200 — albeit well-paying — jobs.

By shutting down oil and gas drilling, they claimed county residents will experience a savings of $54 million to $81 million in associated mortality costs caused by exposure to airborne particulates generated by the industry. The lost jobs will be replaced by many more in the wind and solar industries, though typically they do not pay as well. Because so many of the county wells are old, they require significantly more energy to extract the underground crude, and that technology accounts for the bump in greenhouse gases — 98,868 metric tons a year in 2018 to 132,356 in 2023 — generated by county oil operators.

Given the supervisors met in Santa Maria, one might have expected a vigorous show of force by the oil industry. Not so. Of the 23 people who signed up to speak, only two represented the industry. One was a small operator with nine employees. The other man, representing landowners who leased properties to oil operators, insisted the state law, passed last year giving local governments authority to phase out oil operations, was unconstitutional and his organization would prove it in court.

It fell to Supervisor Bob Nelson, who represents the 4th District with 80 percent of the county’s oil wells, to speak up for an industry he charged had been egregiously “sandbagged” by county planners who kept them in the dark while meeting extensively with environmental activists hellbent on their economic destruction.

“I have not had any direct interaction with representatives of the industry,” conceded county sustainability planner Garrett Wong. Nelson struggled to contain his outrage. “I think this is a snow job,” he charged. “It’s highly inappropriate, some of the worst governance I’ve seen in my time in government.” He took exception with the statistics generated by the UCSB researchers, arguing they had not been vetted. He charged that greenhouse gases generated by the tankers needed to deliver imported oil would offset any reduction in greenhouse gases obtained by phasing out existing operators. He insisted local operators had followed the law and, if approached in a good-faith manner, would collaborate to find solutions for such problems as abandoned wells — of which the county has more than 1,000 — but not if the supervisors tried to run them out of business.

No one argued the county couldn’t have — or shouldn’t have — reached out to the industry. “I see your point,” Wong conceded. Supervisor Capps noted only that the oil industry “has more lobbyists than God.”

County Executive Mona Miyasato explained the supervisors were initially scheduled only to discuss whether oil industry greenhouse gases should be counted in the total inventory of the county’s greenhouse gases for purposes of its Climate Action Plan — currently, for reasons too procedurally complicated to explain here, they are not — which was adopted just last year. The scope of discussion was expanded only after two supervisors approached her, Miyasato said, with a letter requesting that the phase-out option be explored too.

Supervisor Joan Hartmann said that “morally, as a human being,” she needed to act. She cited sea-level rise, heat waves, wildfires, catastrophes yet to be experienced, and those already experienced, such as the Thomas Fire and the debris flow that followed, claiming 23 lives and costing nearly $500 million in insurance claims.

Homeowners in Buellton, where Hartmann lives, struggle now to even get home insurance, and without insurance, people can’t sell their homes. What kind of economic catastrophe would that be? She described in measured detail riding a horse on the beach by Montaña de Oro State Park and coming across the carcass of a dead sea lion every 355 feet, done in by the outbreak of domoic acid triggered by changing seawater temperatures.

Clearly animating the urgency of the vote has been the take-no-prisoners approach handed down by the Trump administration which has decreed the phrase climate change and climate science be expunged from all federal documents.

Hartmann expressed outrage and astonishment that the federal agency in charge of tracking weather patterns has been ordered to cease including the cost of weather disasters in its reports. “This isn’t remotely business as usual,” she stated. The shift in county policy won’t change all that much, she acknowledged, “But I couldn’t stand by and not do the very best that I can.”