It's War! Earth First Protests Environmental Defense Center

Environmental activists from Earth First! took to the streets of Santa Barbara yesterday to protest Environmental Defense Center and Get Oil Out! The latter two groups, according to Earth First!, are committing the sin of cooperating with an oil company that seeks to produce oil offshore in a manner that will alleviate pollution from natural oil seeps and emit no net greenhouse gases.

Project Would Reduce Pollution
Plains Exploration and Production has proposed to recover oil reserves from the Tranquillon Ridge off the coast of Santa Barbara. Santa Barbara is home to the largest natural oil and gas seepages in the Western Hemisphere, and scientists believe tapping some of the oil will reduce pollution from natural seepage.

University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) professor Bruce Luyendyk told a 2008 town hall forum that seeps off Santa Barbara’s Coal Oil Point put an average of 4,200 gallons of oil into the ocean every day. Luyendyk observed that is the equivalent of "an Exxon Valdez oil tanker spill" every five or six years.

Oil drilling relieves pressure beneath the surface of the ocean and thus curtails natural seepage. A 1999 University of California-Santa Barbara study documented, over a 22-year period, a 50-percent reduction in seepage in the immediate vicinity of Platform Holly.

A 2002 report from the National Academies’ National Research Council documented that 62 percent of the oil that enters North American ocean waters each year come from natural seeps.
To gain the support of the Environmental Defense Center and Get Oil Out!, Plains Exploration has agreed to shut down five existing offshore oil platforms in other areas, donate thousands of acres of land to the public, donate $1.5 million to county pollution abatement programs, and mitigate all greenhouse gas emissions from the proposed project.

Cash-strapped California would also benefit from the proposed project, receiving more than $1 billion in royalty payments.

Earth First! Says No Compromise
The Earth First! protesters, however, said environmental activists should never cooperate with oil companies to produce any oil under any circumstances.

“We think that compromise is absolutely unacceptable,” one protester, who would only identify herself as Carleigh, told the local news media.

“We think they [the Environmental Defense Center] made a big mistake and need to come back to the side of the environmental movement of no compromise,” agreed Earth First! activist Darwin Bondgrahn.

Another Earth First! protester, Panagioti Tsolkas, traveled all the way from Florida to protest the cooperation in Santa Barbara between the Environmental Defense Center and Plains Exploration. Tsolkas said any efforts to assist oil production would merely encourage more fossil fuel use, which he said would flood coastal communities.