Democrats have seized on the current oil spill in California as a chance to renew calls for overseas oil drilling to be prohibited completely, despite the fact that the oil-rich state currently imports oil from in other places and the spill is smaller sized than previous ones.
On Friday, oil began leaking from an undersea pipeline near an offshore oil platform south of Orange County– possibly after contact with a ship’s anchor. Beaches were closed, and oil started washing up on the Huntington Beach coastline on Sunday. One expert recommended that the ship might have anchored there due to the ongoing backup at close-by freight port centers. The spill, at 126,000 gallons, threatens regional wildlife and maritime activities, and an enormous clean-up effort is under method. But the Los Angeles Times notes that”the size is still far less than a number of other disastrous spills in the state and somewhere else.” Teams deploy skimmers and floating barriers called booms to attempt to stop additional incursion into the Wetlands Talbert Marsh in Huntington Beach, Calif., Sunday., Oct. 3, 2021. Among the largest oil spills in current Southern California history fouled popular beaches and killed wildlife while teams rushed Sunday to include the crude before it spread further into protected wetlands. (AP Photo/Ringo H.W. Chiu)
Nonetheless, Democrats are requiring all overseas drilling to be ended. Local State Sen. Dave Min (D) said in a statement:
The Orange County Oil Spill shows when again that overseas oil drilling is a bad offer for Californians. The profits and jobs produced by offshore drilling are small in size compared to the negative financial effects this creates. We need to end all offshore oil drilling along California’s coast, consisting of drilling performed under existing leases. I mean to introduce legislation doing simply that.
Rep. Mike Levin (D-CA) declared, “”There is no overseas drilling that is really safe,” and noted that he had currently presented legislation in Congress to ban all overseas drilling, which would end a substantial part of U.S. production.
Gov. Gavin Newsom included at a press conference on Tuesday in Orange County:” [I] t’s time once and for all to disabuse ourselves that this has to be part of our future. This belongs to our past.”
As the state has made oil production in California more difficult, including overseas production, California has actually imported a lot more of its oil. Oil imports to California have tripled in the last 20 years, in spite of the expansion of state-imposed “green” policies. Almost 60% of the state’s oil comes from foreign sources, which a Forbes analyst recently called a national security danger to the U.S. as a whole.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday nights from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the current e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His current book, RED NOVEMBER, informs the story of the 2020 Democratic governmental primary from a conservative viewpoint. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.