SHUT YOUR PIE HOLE: By any reckoning, members of California’s Coastal Commission crossed pretty much all defensible lines back in October 2024, when they talked serious smack about how Elon Musk was “spewing” all kinds of crazy political falsehoods, jumping up and down, showing off his belly button while spending $300 million to get then-candidate Donald Trump elected president. The issue before the commission was whether Musk’s plans to launch even more SpaceX rocket ships into outer space from Vandenberg Space Force Base was “consistent” with California’s plans to protect its coast. The commissioners voted it was not.
In hindsight, the commissioners should really be faulted for not going nearly far enough. Recent epidemiological studies indicate that Musk — whom Trump appointed his personal Vlad the Impaler in charge of government efficiency — has the blood of 750,000 people worldwide on his hands because of his role in cutting all funding for the United States Agency for International Development. If accurate, that would make Musk a white-collar war criminal.
This coming Monday in a hotel in Los Angeles, Trump’s Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick will be hosting a public hearing on whether the Coastal Commission is, in reality, an agent of “environmental extremism” and whether the federal law requiring the federal government to subject projects proposed on federal property along the state’s coast to “consistency hearings” — like Musk’s ever-expanding boom-boom fantasy at Vandenberg — has been abused.
Exhibit A at that hearing will be commissioners’ personal and political remarks about Musk from that October hearing.
But also happening next week — up in Santa Cruz on Thursday — is a Coastal Commission “consistency hearing” about an offshore oil fracking proposal by DCOR — the biggest oil company nobody’s ever heard of — slated for Platform Gilda located in the Santa Barbara Channel 8.8 miles off the coast of Oxnard. If ever there an “Exhibit A” for why the federal law mandating these consistency hearings is absolutely necessary, this is it. Without this hearing, we would never have heard about this proposal — which is to inject a bitch’s brew of highly toxic chemicals mixed with sea water at pressures of 10,000 pounds per square inch into oil-rich seams located 5,000 feet beneath the ocean floor. The federal agencies wielding regulatory oversight here have ecstatically endorsed the proposal. But for this hearing, we might never have learned that these two federal oversight agencies have already issued no less than 51 fracking permits for offshore oil operations along our coast and in the channel without ever notifying the public and without ever conducting a shred of the environmental analysis that state and federal law require.
Kind of a major oversight.
The extent of all this offshore fracking first came to light only because, on little more than a hunch, the Environmental Defense Center (EDC) in 2012 filed a Freedom of Information Act request and found it out. EDC would sue the feds twice — and win twice — over the total lack of environmental analysis. To the extent there’s been any environmental review since Platform Gilda’s fracking proposal, the feds concluded “no problem” after an accelerated analysis of just 28-days.
Were it not for next week’s consistency hearing, how many of us would have learned that DCOR’s platform off the coast of Carpinteria had a natural gas fire just this May, requiring the evacuation of all 26 crewmembers on board and that a flotilla of firefighters with the city and county departments, along with the Coast Guard, be deployed to the scene.
I get it, mistakes happen
But in 2021, another mistake happened with DCOR — this time in Huntington Beach — when the company’s oil pipeline there sprang a leak because of internal corrosion. Yes, the company diligently pursued all the industry-standard maintenance and inspection protocol. But yes, all this protocol failed to reveal the corrosion until it was too late.
It will come as a surprise to absolutely nobody that Coastal Commission staff is strongly objecting to DCOR’s fracking proposal. Platform Gilda is already twice as old as its anticipated life expectancy when first approved in 1981. The fracking plan would give Gilda an additional 20 years of viable production. When Gilda was first approved, no one contemplated bombarding the oil seams beneath the ocean floor with high-pressure streams of highly toxic chemicals to “stimulate well production.” If a spill happens, Coastal Commission staff questions whether DCOR can get the genie back in the bottle before it spreads out over an 855-square-mile surface and gently licks 134 miles of California’s coast.
I’m betting this year’s salary the Coastal Commission will find the proposed fracking plan is not consistent with the state’s coastal management plan. I am also betting next year’s salary that DCOR will appeal to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick — the same guy on the prowl for “environmental extremists” — to override the Coastal Commission’s vote. He can do so if he finds it’s necessary on “National Security” grounds.
Given the Trump administration’s loudly professed policy of petrochemical dominance, Lutnick will clearly do just that. After all, Platform Gilda — he all but certainly will point out — is expected to yield 14 million barrels over the lifetime of its fracking-enhanced production. That’s a big number until you squint. Fourteen million barrels, it turns out, is just big enough to keep the United State supplied for one day, California for 10. But if you divide that production by its 20 years, it breaks down to 49 minutes’ worth for the United States. And half a day for California.
Yes, Coastal Commissioners should absolutely have shut their pie holes back in 2024. But we’d be in the same hole even if they had.
Half a day? Forty-nine minutes?
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