The day starts off with more on the BP/Halliburton oil spill and the hard work their PR team is doing to make you forget about the spill and blame it on somebody else. Although this spill occurred in the Gulf of Mexico, it could have occurred in California, and at one point it looked like we were going to have another future spill in the making thanks in no small part to our supposedly “Green Governor” Arnold Schwarzenegger. Despite his reputation, Arnold has long been a friend of Big Oil. He was a leader in killing 2006’s Prop 87, which would have added an oil extraction tax on California oil refineries, and accepted $4.3 million in campaign contributions from Big Oil that year. It should not surprise anyone then that he was staunch supporter of the Tranquillion project in Santa Barbara -a project that supporters argued would expand offshore oil drilling in California, but also create a time line for when drilling would finally end.
The fight over the Tranquillion Ridge project had been going back and forth for years, but for now it’s pretty much over.
The ending began in 2009. When President Obama nominated Congresswoman Ellen Tauscher to his cabinet, then-Lieutenant Governor John Garamendi found himself with a golden opportunity. At the time, Garamendi had been considering a run for governor, but polls showed him badly trailing behind Gavin Newsom and Jerry Brown. Knowing he would have to fight a ridiculously uphill battle to win, he dropped out of that race and entered the one for Tauscher’s congressional seat and eventually won. This left a controversial vacancy for the guv-lite seat.
Most political observers understood the blatant partisan aspect of it. Arnold, a Republican, in his authority as governor would be nominating a replacement for Garamendi, a Democrat, but he would have to get approval from the Democratically-controlled legislature. That’s a fine assessment, but to environmental observers, the controversy was really about the future of offshore oil drilling in California.
Despite the meme that the lieutenant governor doesn’t do anything, it clearly has some key game-changing roles; one of the most important is a seat on the State Lands Commission. As a commissioner, Garamendi repeatedly voted with Controller John Chiang to block Arnold’s attempts to advance the Tranquillion Ridge project. Garamendi had been a staunch opponent of expanding offshore oil drilling and had long been a rival to the governor. However, with Garamendi vacating the guv-lite seat for a congressional one, Arnold saw an opportunity to appoint someone who could finally help him get the second vote he needed over Chiang to move the project forward.
Enter Abel Maldonado, a termed-out, moderate Republican in a Senate seat with a leans-Democrat voter registration. Despised by both Republicans and Democrats alike, Maldonado was (and still is) the political opportunist that most Californians have never heard of. Early last year when the Senate Republicans were holding the budget hostage via the 2/3rd budget vote requirement, he extorted the Democrats by ransoming his vote for a necessary revenue increase that Republicans hated in exchange for Democratic support of an open primary ballot initiative. Republicans wanted him out of the Senate because they couldn’t trust him. Democrats wanted him out because they wanted to win his vacated seat and hopefully be that much closer to the 2/3rds legislative majority they need to pass a budget.
Meanwhile, Arnold wanted him because he would vote for expanded offshore oil drilling on the State Lands Commission. All of this made him a perfect choice for lieutenant governor.
To Arnold’s joy, it worked. After months of negotiations and two confirmation vote attempts, the legislature officially made Maldonado the lieutenant governor in April. Everything was going as Arnold had planned. But then tragedy struck.
BP and Halliburton’s massive and ongoing oil drilling leak proved once and for all that Big Oil, no matter what they claimed, could never guarantee that there was no reason to worry about another major oil spill. In an instant, Arnold had seen the writing on the wall, as any political will for expanding offshore oil drilling dissipated in a single day. All of his rhetoric about the $100 million that the state could make from oil, his claims that offshore oil drilling was safe and there would never be another spill, and his work to get the perfect Republican candidate through a Democratic legislature wasn’t going to be enough to accomplish his main goal.
To add salt to Arnold’s wounds, as of yesterday now-Congressman John Garamendi introduced a new bill to protect the West Coast from offshore oil drilling. Of course, Garamendi didn’t miss an opportunity to throw a punch at an old rival:
Exactly six months ago, I entered Congress promising to protect this great nation from threats foreign and domestic. Today I’m fulfilling that promise. A bill I introduced today would create a permanent ban on new offshore oil and natural gas drilling from platforms on the West Coast. We can’t change the past, but at least we can stop future exploration in federal waters near California, Oregon, and Washington.
…My home state is familiar with this fight. In January 2009, as California’s Lieutenant Governor, I led the fight at the California State Lands Commission to block new drilling off the coast of Santa Barbara. It would have been the first new offshore drilling lease in California in more than four decades and would have sent a dangerous signal to Washington that California’s coast was for sale.
Governor Schwarzenegger attempted to bypass the State Lands Commission’s independent authority, and I’m glad to say that after a protracted battle, we succeeded in blocking his efforts. This week, he finally backed off on his push for new drilling, citing the disaster in the Gulf Coast. Like the Governor, it’s time we learned from our past mistakes and stopped new platform drilling.
All that work, so little to show for it, and now having that waved in his face. Poor Arnold. You almost feel bad for him. Almost.
