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Since last fall, residents of Santa Barbara, California have patrolled the night, armed with binoculars. Their purpose? Catching unauthorized work to restart a corroded pipeline that spilled over 100,000 gallons of crude oil onto the Pacific coastline in 2015, poisoning ecosystems and killing wildlife.
Their worst fears were soon realized. On May 19th, the ten-year anniversary of the Refugio Beach spill, Texas-based company Sable Offshore announced it had restarted, without full regulatory approval, oil production and transport in the damaged pipeline — a slap in the face to residents and local environmentalists for whom oil spills are a recurring nightmare.
In 1969, Santa Barbara was the site of the first high-profile oil spill in United States history — a 4.2 million-gallon disaster which shook the nation and inspired the first Earth Day in 1970. Santa Barbara became one of the birthplaces of the country’s environmental conscience, leading to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and hallmark legislation that protected the nation’s air, waterways, wildlife, and people for over 50 years.
Santa Barbara also heralded California’s legacy of environmental leadership. The state has long been the nation’s pioneer in establishing protections for public health and against climate change — from the first vehicle exhaust regulations, to the prototype for the federal Clean Water Act, to ambitious carbon neutrality goals.
Following the 1969 spill, California formed the Coastal Commission as a new regulating body and issued a ban on any new offshore drilling development — a ban which holds to this day.
But in the case of Sable Offshore and its pipeline, federal oversight agencies have approved and applauded the company’s plan to restart oil production in Santa Barbara. Residents anticipated that California — with its stringent environmental review processes and numerous regulatory agencies — would stand strong in the face of this challenge to sane coastal zone management.
Alas; that bulwark is not as secure as it seems. Sable managed to slip through much of the state’s complex permitting system via the petroleum industry’s prolific lobbying in Sacramento. Regulatory agencies find themselves divided between outcry and acquittal; the Coastal Commission is fighting Sable in court as environmental groups sue the Office of the State Fire Marshal over its waiver of pipeline safety requirements. Other state agencies have quietly signed off on the controversial project, as silence echoes from the governor’s office.
Sable’s project to restart oil production and transport comes at a time when oil refineries are closing in California due to low demand and declining production. But state officials want to have their cake and eat it too — in June, the California Energy Commission provided a letter of recommendations to Governor Gavin Newsom, suggesting the state throw a lifeboat to Big Oil in the form of looser regulations.
While the letter claims bolstering in-state oil will help ease the transition away from fossil fuels, senior attorney Hollin Kretzmann from the Center for Biological Diversity labels it as “extremely misguided.” Among other deregulatory actions, the letter suggests weakening the California Environmental Quality Act, the state’s foundational environmental legislation, in order to encourage crude oil extraction and refinement.
“The letter operates under the presumption that environmental protections and reviews are responsible for declining in-state production,” Kretzmann explains to Circle of Blue. “When we know that’s not true. Oil production in California has been declining since the 1980s regardless.”
The Energy Commission redirected inquiries to the California Natural Resources Agency, which stated that in the Sable case, it is “considering all actions that could support the strategies identified in the CEC’s response letter to the Governor.” Both agencies declined to comment further.
Kretzmann describes this surrender to woe-is-me complaints from Big Oil as “baffling.” In recent years California has made major progress towards regulating fossil fuels, from banning oil wells near homes and community spaces to suing the Trump administration over the national energy emergency declaration. Newsom himself spearheaded a 2023 lawsuit against several oil and gas companies, seeking to hold them accountable for environmental damages and misinformation.
But the state’s failure to regulate Sable is setting the stage for a repeat of the 2015 and 1969 catastrophes. With federal agencies green-lighting Sable’s risky enterprise in Santa Barbara, the great backwards slide of environmental regulation under the Trump administration has collided with California, the staunchest state environmental regulator. When the dust settles, California’s choices may cement the country’s shift away from hard-won environmental principles and values.
Kretzmann’s colleague Kristen Monsell emphasizes that if the vanguard of California crumbles under pressure from Big Oil and the White House, it would jeopardize the health of coastlines and communities across the United States.
“I think this administration in particular provides California with the opportunity to be a real climate leader in the transition off of these horribly polluting energy sources. Except we’re not seeing that. And in fact, it seems like we’re going slightly in the opposite direction.”
Federal Deregulation Meets Big Oil Desperation
Sable Offshore appears to be taking full advantage of the Trump administration’s January declaration of a national energy emergency to increase oil and gas operations, despite domestic production being at an all-time high. Across the country, decades of safeguards surrounding pipelines and offshore drilling are being unraveled.
The Army Corps of Engineers is fast tracking modifications to Line 5, a 70-year-old pipeline that threatens to contaminate the Great Lakes. A January executive order surrenders previously protected coastlines to drilling, and directs federal agencies to reconsider as many regulations as possible. President Trump’s recently passed policy bill includes slashing subsidies and federal support for renewable energy, and instead promises to “unleash American energy” in the form of domestic fossil fuels.
This mass deregulation could not have come at a better time for Sable Offshore and its major financier ExxonMobil, the former owner of the Santa Barbara offshore production fields. Since the 2015 rupture, the pipeline network and its connected oil platforms were lying dormant. After years of fruitless effort to restart operations, Exxon transferred ownership of the entire system to Sable in early 2024 while maintaining its investment in the profit.
Instead of replacing the ruptured pipeline entirely, Sable is attempting to create a permitting loophole by simply repairing and restarting the damaged infrastructure, thus evading California’s moratorium on new offshore drilling development (which includes new pipelines). However, the tape and tar used to repair the pipeline interfere with the electrical current of the cathodic protection technology that prevents pipeline corrosion — the culprit of the 2015 spill.
The consequences of the shortcut would be devastating. According to a draft environmental impact report prepared for Santa Barbara County, the resurrected pipeline can be expected to spill once a year, and rupture once every four years. The report also highlights a high risk of wildfires and large spill volumes due to increased pipeline diameter and age.
Santa Barbara County Supervisor Roy Lee expresses constituents’ fears about yet another spill.
“To a lot of people, it feels like the 2015 spill just happened yesterday,” he said in an interview with Circle of Blue. “And they never forgot what it did to our environment, our economy. It destroyed us.”
But under Trump, federal agencies are brushing these concerns aside. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement issued a “Finding of No Significant Impact” for the project in May, for which the Center for Biological Diversity and the Wishtoyo Chumash Foundation filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration. The suit accuses the bureaus of ignoring the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, which requires updated development and production plans to be submitted by Sable for review.
State Agencies Scramble In Santa Barbara
Having been given the federal thumbs-up, Sable has rushed into restarting oil production — the state of California is the only formidable obstacle left in its path.
Or so it seemed at first. Lee is frustrated with the state agencies’ lack of spine when confronted with Sable’s “just sue me then” attitude. His own hands are tied by a deadlock 2-2 vote between his fellow supervisors over the validity of Sable’s permits; the county is split between public health concerns in the urban south and job generation in the rural north.
“The county, this is kind of above our pay grade. We need government agencies to get involved.”
But most of California’s regulatory bodies are reluctantly falling in line with Big Oil. The Department of Parks and Recreation allowed Sable to dig up Gaviota State Park, while the State Lands Commission has declared all safety inspections satisfied despite corrosion concerns (although they later scolded Sable for announcing a restart before obtaining all permissions).
The heavyweight agency in the Sable case is the Office of the State Fire Marshal — and it seems to have rolled over and played dead. Just before offices closed in December 2024, it issued a waiver that allowed Sable to operate the pipeline without standard corrosion protection.
A coalition of environmental groups have taken the State Fire Marshal to court, including the Santa Barbara Sierra Club. Their chair Maureen Ellenberger critiques the lack of transparency from the agency, despite appeals from State Senator Monique Limón and Assemblymember Gregg Hart.
“The Fire Marshal was the office that held the keys to the pipeline restarting. So Monique and Gregg were working to try to get answers from the Fire Marshal’s office.” But the agency never responded; the promised and customary public hearing never occurred.
A glimmer of hope for the pipeline’s opponents came in the form of the California Coastal Commission — the very agency that was established after the 1969 spill. After issuing several stop-work orders that went unheeded by Sable, the Commission fined the company $18 million in April. They also supported environmental groups in winning a preliminary injunction from the courts on July 18th, which prevents Sable from restarting the pipeline without demonstrating it has received all regulatory approvals.
But the Coastal Commission may be bulldozed by both Trump and California Governor Gavin Newsom, who demonize the agency for its fierce protection of the coastline against development.
California Swings In The Balance
Indeed, California’s state leadership has given the cold shoulder to environmentalists fighting against Sable. In March, Newsom received a letter from over 20 congress people imploring him to ensure his floundering agencies conduct proper review; a December letter from over 100 organizations along similar lines received no response, according to Ellenberger.
“Newsom’s the person who could change all of this with one phone call,” she said in an interview. In her eyes, the governor is walking a tightrope — balancing California’s environmental values on one hand, and Big Oil lobbyists on the other.
“The oil industry lobbyists still have a fair amount of power in the halls of Sacramento,” agrees Kretzmann. “Newsom has not been consistent in his commitment to public health and the climate. So we’re getting very mixed messages, and a lot of potential for backsliding.”
The consequences of the environmental movement losing one of its strongest allies in California cannot be understated, as companies like Sable race to monetize untapped reserves before the country moves on from fossil fuels.
“The industry is on its way out,” affirms Kretzmann. “And the only question is, are they going to go kicking and screaming and do as much damage on their way out the door as possible?”
He stresses that with the Trump administration going all-out on wrecking the environment in favor of corporate greed, it’s “all the more important for California as a state to stand up.”
“We need to fight back now more than ever.”
Featured image: Photo by Glenn Beltz