Newsom signs law to block Trump offshore oil expansion
The new law targets a loophole letting oil companies use aging state-waters pipelines to support new drilling further offshore in federal waters.
By Hans Laetz
California Governor Gavin Newsom's battle with President Donald Trump over oil drilling has escalated. Newsom on Monday signed a new law that makes it more difficult for the president to open up the California coast to new offshore oil drilling.
In 1994, after the Exxon Valdez disaster, Republican Governor Pete Wilson signed into law a ban on new offshore oil drilling in the state's waters out to three miles offshore. But the existing wells and pipelines in that area are still legal.
The oil companies have been using that as a loophole to drill more wells out in federal waters further offshore than the three-mile state limit. They're using the existing 60-year-old pipelines across state waters to support this additional offshore oil drilling out in federal waters.
That's now illegal under this California law.
There are 27 offshore oil platforms and artificial islands still producing oil off California's coast, some of them quite close to Malibu. There have been major leaks from the rusting old pipelines as recently as 10 years ago, when one broke 65 miles up the coast from Malibu.
Trump announced last year that his administration was beginning efforts to open broad stretches of federal waters off the California coastline to new oil and gas drilling. There are no specific maps for this yet, but no part of California is off limits.
Florida is off limits, but not the coast of California.
If Democrats win control of Congress in November, they're virtually certain to try to block any new drilling, according to the San Jose Mercury newspaper.
Comments (2)
Federal law implicitly overrides state law. Good luck gov.
Ed, suggest you look up federal law, the Coastal Zone Management Act of 1972. It transferred regulation of the California coastal shelf to the state government. Congress and President Richard Nixon assigned environmental regulation from the federal government to the state government, ending federal preemption in the California waters.