“Drill, Baby, Drill!”
California can help solve its budget crisis by selling oil leases, proposes Assemblyman Chuck DeVore. His proposal would create a state board to consider leases off the California coast. DeVore estimates that his plan would help create thousands of good-paying jobs, and help plug $16 billion of the state’s $21 billion deficit through tax prepayments.
“Allowing new offshore leases under this plan prevents cuts to education, public safety and other government services,” says DeVore. He hopes his plan will help repair the state’s budget and economy, and lessen dependence on foreign oil. His plan would use slant drilling techniques to reach the estimated 1 billion barrels of oil off California’s coast. Use of slant drilling would mean that no new offshore platforms would need to be constructed.
DeVore’s plan comes even as environmentalist lawsuits threaten California’s renewable energy plans. Companies seeking to develop alternative energy sources (solar, wind and geothermal) are facing legal challenges from environmentalists. These lawsuits will likely cause years of delay, expense, and soaring California energy prices as providers seek to comply with the state’s renewable energy mandates.
DeVore’s plan may offer a stopgap measure that can help ease the state budget deficit and provide needed jobs. Unfortunately, if the past is any indicator, the state’s environmentalist puritans will choose to wallow in high unemployment, high taxes, and massive deficits.
How about drilling AND cuts in government? And by cuts I don’t mean only increasing something five percent instead of a planned ten percent hike. I mean actual cuts, starting with all the frivoulous commissions that overpay for hardly ever meeting. At least, if you can’t cut, don’t grow government.
OH here is the other 16 billion, Republican revenue enhanscements.
Actually I have no problem with Drilling as log as there is strict attention to safety and eviromental conserns.
But we do need to ask how fast we get this and from whom?
This plan puts at great jeapardy our coast’s tourist and fishing industries and does nothing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in California. Economy’s well-being is directly tied to our getting off fossil fuels and onto renewable energy soon.
Chuck DeVore is a menace to the environment and an embarrassment to the County of Orange.
The state Lands Commission has overseen issues of oil and gas drilling for California since the 1930s. Because Assemblyman Devore and the Guv don’t like recent decisions against drilling into the State Coastal Sanctuary at Tranquillon Ridge-Santa Barbara Co, they are looking for a cynical way to overthrow it.
It is incorrect to assert that because a few renewable proposals are under litigation, our wholesale transformation to new technologies is untenable. We need to stop investing in yesterday’s technology that is acidifying the ocean and causing climate havoc. As well, the potential impacts from new drilling within three miles of beaches, surfers, sunbathers, hotels, condominiums, and restaurants, not to mention the fisheries and sensitive aquatic habitats, is completely irresponsible.
To hope that technology will save us has proven unlikely, as witnessed in an almost three-month blowout spill off the Kimberley Coast of West Australia this past August. Had that happened within three miles of Huntington Beach, imagine the tragedy.
For those of us who advocate oil revenue-positive solutions to our budget problems, consider Assemblyman Nava’s Oil Severance Tax…I know, I can hear the OC anti-taxers crying socialism. Well, consider that the socialist states of Texas, Alaska, and Florida already have that deal in place, and the oil companies and state governments seem to be operating there just fine. Obstruct revenue solutions and fiscal and political havoc will only continue to fester.
But balancing the budget on the backs of our coasts to power your Hummers is a road to nowhere, and wastes all of our time…speaking of waste…Devore running for US Senate… With proposals like these, we would all be better off if he stayed home and learned to garden organically with his family…
Jack Eidt
Wild Heritage Planners
More Tea anyone?
I support as fast as possible transistion to renewable energy.
I understand that Oil production and transportation are inherently dangerious to the enviroment. I am not convinced that transporting oil is any safer than drilling for it and piping it to shore.
But reality is that right now we are dependant on oil either from tankers on the ocean or drilling in the ocean
This must change as soon as possible.
What is also equally important or possibly more important is we must do everything possible to reduce both our trade and spending deficits if we are to have the needed resources to provide for our people good jobs, government services and all the other things we have come to expect.
Using all options to reduce our dependace on imported oil, including drilling under strict safety standards must be immeadatelly enacted.
We need to lead the way to clean renewable energy, but if we do not get our people back to work and reduce our twin deficits. The result will be that the recourses needed to make the transistion will be limited and will lenghten the time that we are dependant on oil.