In the next five years, Save Our Shores’ organizing brought 30 local governments up and down the California coast into agreement with Santa Cruz that a zoning change to provide for onshore support facilities should require a vote of the people. Many of those governments beat the oil industry in federal court to allow these ordinances to stand.

For the last quarter century, this issue has largely been off the political radar screen. Many things have changed—both good and bad. The impacts of global climate change have advanced significantly. American greenhouse gas emissions have increased by big numbers. American oil consumption has increased. American imports of oil have also dramatically increased. The fuel efficiency of American vehicles has only started to change with the introduction of hybrids into the market place. The country’s attention has turned to energy alternatives, but not in a way that has begun to dent the need for imported oil.

Yet President George W. Bush, supported by Senator John McCain, has reintroduced coastal oil drilling to the political debate. A basic understanding of the issue shows that this is but a symbolic action. Opening up additional coastal areas for drilling would not produce any oil for decades. It is juxtaposed against Al Gore’s call for abandonment of all carbon-based electricity generation within the next 10 years.

But offshore oil has garnered some surprising support in state and national polls—though still not a majority in many California polls—due, in part, to the fact that a generation has grown up without the benefit of a strong debate on this issue.

We need only to revisit the Union Oil Co. spill in January 1969 to understand why opposition to offshore oil drilling became a core value for communities like ours along the California Coast. After the company’s well, six miles off California’s coast, blew out, an estimated 80,000 barrels of crude spewed into the Santa Barbara Channel, fouling beaches for several miles and killing thousands of dolphins, seals, birds and other wildlife.

Since 1964, offshore operators have had 40 spills greater than 1,000 barrels, 13 of which happened in the last 10 years, according to data from the U.S. Minerals Management Service. While technology on drilling and in spill cleanup has improved, it only takes a look at the spill in San Francisco Bay last fall to understand the potential.

It is also forgotten that we must factor in air emissions from oil rigs and sea sludge from drilling, and also that tens of millions of acres are open to exploration without the lifting of the drilling moratorium. And those acres would be the subject of extensive exploration and drilling if there was a substantial amount of oil to be had.

But the major underlying issue is the country’s energy future. In the 1980s, we used to say that a gain of a mile per gallon in fuel efficiency would more than equal the possible gain from drilling off the California coast. In the Bush Administration, and its cleaving to the oil companies rather than energy efficiency, this has been a missed opportunity all the way along.  

It is hard to even consider support for offshore oil drilling when we as a nation have yet to limit greenhouse gas emissions, seriously pursue alternatives to oil, or cut back on our own large consumption of oil. We have tremendous energy challenges, but more of the same is not the answer. It’s time for real leadership on this issue, not false solutions that would pass for leadership.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called Bush’s lifting of the federal offshore oil drilling moratorium a “hoax.” And she’s exactly right.

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