Tide May Be Turning for Offshore Oil Rigs

Think of California and beaches come rushing to mind. Oil drilling platforms don’t.

To most Californians and the rest of the civilized world it is the unsullied tableau of sea and sand and sculpted beach denizens that constitutes the state’s most alluring essence.

OK, it’s already a little sullied. There’s Long Beach with its garish oil islands and about 35 other drilling platforms in state and federal waters sprinkled along the California coast.

But imagine oil rigs looming off Will Rogers State Beach. Environmentalists warn that it could be in California’s future.

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For 14 years, California’s coastline has been protected from oil drilling in federal waters by some fine print inserted every year by the House of Representatives in the Interior Department appropriations bill. It forbids the Interior Department to lease certain areas--including federal waters off the California coast--for oil and gas exploration.

But with Republicans now in command of Congress, this oil drilling moratorium may be in jeopardy.

Rep. Ralph Regula (R-Ohio), who now chairs the Interior appropriations subcommittee, is a longtime foe of moratoriums and will not recommend that the language be inserted in his spending bill, due for consideration in the next few weeks when Congress returns from its Memorial Day break.

The oil drilling ban does not fit in comfortably with the GOP’s deregulatory, let-business-be-business mind-set. Not to extract the untapped offshore oil is folly, the thinking goes, given the country’s dependence on foreign petroleum. Better to develop it responsibly, in relatively flush oil times, rather than be stampeded by another outbreak of shortages and panic at the gas pumps.

Also, legislative purists, pro and con, object to the moratorium being attached to an appropriations bill, rather than being part of a broad-based federal policy.

Although this may be a boon to proponents of coastal oil exploration, it gives oil rig foes the willies.

The Center for Marine Conservation, a San Francisco-based environmental group, sent up a warning flare last month, and coalitions of worried House members from coastal states have for weeks been beseeching Regula to keep an open mind.

Savvy vote-counters say the moratorium’s chances in the subcommittee are 50-50.

The ban has traditionally had bipartisan support from coastal delegations. But the new mood in Congress has put some Republicans in ticklish positions.

The fractured response from the California delegation is a case in point. When Rep. Frank Riggs, a Republican who represents the sprawling northern coastal counties of Mendocino, Humboldt and Del Norte, recently circulated a letter urging Regula not to reverse the federal policy, only 27 of the state’s 52 House members signed on. And 23 of them were minority Democrats.

“We on [the] North Coast are vehemently opposed to any exploration or development of offshore oil facilities as detrimental to our tourism and fishing industry,” Riggs said last week. But his concern encompasses only the coastline north of Santa Barbara, leaving, let’s see, the Southland territory mythologized by the Beach Boys.

Riggs’ two California Republican colleagues on the Appropriations Committee, Reps. Ron Packard of Oceanside and Jerry Lewis of Redlands, are taking the sort of cautious approach that causes jitters--if you’re an oil rig enemy.

Packard, who represents a coastal district, says he supports the concept of a moratorium but not via the appropriations process. Lewis was noncommittal. Environmentalists see this hands-off approach as a great missed opportunity to lobby Regula from within the cozy confines of the Appropriations Committee.

Over at the House energy and mineral resources subcommittee, its new chairman, Ken Calvert of Riverside, plans to hold hearings on the issue and also avows neutrality.

And then there’s Rep. Dana Rohrabacher of Huntington Beach--in his own words, “about the only coastal Republican that supports offshore oil drilling.”

“Lifting the moratorium makes a lot of sense,” Rohrabacher said. “The Democratic Congress was listening to irrational and irresponsible environmental extremists rather than reasoned arguments. Every drop of oil that we don’t get from an offshore well means we have to import it from tankers. It makes no sense environmentally or economically.”

If the congressional prohibition evaporates, rig foes say, oil companies will be emboldened to press for more leasing. And once the moratorium goes, environmentalists argue, it will be difficult to resurrect.

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Despite the ominous rumbling on Capitol Hill, the drilling ban won the support of the last Republican President.

In 1990, George Bush announced his support for a moratorium along the California coast until after the year 2000. (It came to be interpreted as an executive order--but was not.) President Clinton also favors the ban but has not signaled whether he will issue his own executive order.

With Congress preoccupied by the mega-issues of deficit reduction and retooling the scope of federal government, the moratorium issue has so far generated smoke but not much fire, despite the environmental groups’ call to arms.

“I don’t think the Republicans will be moving very quickly” on this issue, said Rohrabacher. Pause.

“But I could be surprised.”