California Offshore Oil Drilling More Risk than Reward

Eric Hodge grew up in Santa Barbara, playing among the mossy beach rocks and hook and line fishing in the Pacific. Flash-forward a couple of decades and he now makes his living as a commercial fisherman. His love for the ocean is perhaps stronger than ever. “Making a living on the ocean, you have a connection with ‘your place.’ You want to protect it,” Hodge said. That’s why he opposes the Trump administration’s radical proposals to open nearly all U.S. waters to offshore oil drilling.

Hodge’s parents were in the generation directly impacted by the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill. Though Hodge enjoyed relatively clean beaches as a child, he said he remembers older folks discussing the long-term effects of the devastating spill and the stories of heartbreak as people watched their beloved coastlines become coated with oil.

In 2015, those stories from Hodge’s childhood became his own sobering reality. The Refugio oil spill coated Southern California with more than 142,000 gallons of crude oil. The ecologically diverse fisheries that Hodge enjoyed off of the Port of Santa Barbara were blackened and unfishable. Hodge was out of business for a month – more than three years later, he still has a claim out for lost income.

Beyond the direct hit to Hodge’s livelihood, he pointed out that any spill has a negative impact on local food supply. “Every day I fish, I feed probably 1,000 people. When a spill happens that shuts down local fishermen, you start sourcing from who knows where. It could be unregulated or illegal,” he said.

Oceana’s Clean Coast Economy analysis found that offshore drilling threatens nearly 600,000 jobs and roughly $42.3 billion in GDP in California — jobs and revenue that are dependent upon clean beaches and a healthy and abundant marine ecosystem. Hodge points to the serious risks that offshore drilling places on people who make their livelihoods along the California coast. “People like me who make a living on the water, people who appreciate how we have a pretty clean ocean here in California—you are putting a lot of us out of jobs,” he said.

Eric Hodge’s career was put on hold because of an oil spill that wreaked havoc on one of California’s most diverse and abundant marine areas. It’s time for California’s elected officials to take a stand against the Trump administration’s radical offshore drilling proposal. Expanded offshore drilling puts the livelihoods of Californians at risk – we can’t let that happen.