The Trump administration is really, really into offshore oil and gas drilling, but maybe not so much where Republicans have to actually see it. Hence the plan to force California to accept oil rigs dotting its shores and doing some cool oil spills while sparing states like Florida.  Surely it’s just a coincidence that this move targets a blue state with a governor who President Donald Trump hates while giving the red state where Trump lives a pass, right? Offshore drilling in state waters has been banned in California since 1969, after a huge oil spill near Santa Barbara. But state waters only extend three miles from shore, so anything after that is apparently fair game for federal drilling. No new leases have been issued since the mid-1980s, but Trump is here to change that.  Clean up crews remove oil-laden sand on the beach at Refugio State Beach, site of an oil spill, north of Goleta, Calif., on May 20, 2015. Part of how you know what a trash deal this is, just a way to target California while rewarding some pals, is that the company the administration is backing for this, Sable Offshore, is already an environmental nightmare in the state. Sable owns a pipeline in California, having purchased it from the previous owner.  Did we mention that before Sable bought it, the thing sprang a 140,000-gallon leak and trashed beaches from Santa Barbara to Los Angeles? Sable bought it and was apparently so eager to start that it overlooked obtaining permits, for which the California Coastal Commission fined it $18 million. The California state attorney general recently sued Sable on behalf of the Central Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board, thanks to Sable’s habit of discharging waste into state waterways. And the Santa Barbara district attorney filed felony criminal charges against the company in September for the harm it has caused to wildlife and the pollution of the state’s waterways.  It will surprise literally no one that Sable’s CEO, James Flores, has ties to Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. So, since Sable is being thwarted by California for state drilling, why not get the nod from the administration for federal drilling off California’s shores instead? Sable dropped them a line to see if they couldn’t pretty please get some expedited permitting so they can drill in federal waters. Trump with Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. Somehow all of this enthusiasm for drilling is more muted when it might happen along a red state coastline. South Carolina’s governor just wrote to the administration to ask to be exempt from Trump’s plan to open both the East and West Coasts up to offshore drilling, because their coastline is pristine.  Trump had already helpfully put a moratorium on drilling off of Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina during his first term because Republicans in those states were concerned about oil spills hurting tourism and fishing. Florida’s GOP senators want a little more reassurance, though, so they’ve proposed a law banning offshore drilling for just Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina.  Environmental catastrophe for me, but not for thee.  The whole thing feels akin to the 2024 survey on the glorious return of manufacturing to American shores, in which 80% of Americans agreed with the statement that “America would be better off if more people worked in manufacturing.” Switch that to “I would be better off if I worked in a factory,” and that number plummets to 25%.  The administration’s enthusiastic embrace of fossil fuels keeps running into a big problem, which is that even fossil fuel companies are not as enamored of the whole thing as Trump is.  The L.A. Times spoke with Dan Pickering, head of a Houston-based investment firm, who said energy companies will likely be eager to pay for new drilling leases off Louisiana and Texas, where they already have infrastructure, but California gets a big meh. “California is going to have either no interest or very low interest, with a much smaller subset of players.”  Clark Williams-Derry, another energy industry analyst, told the L.A. Times that “Nobody really wants offshore oil, except for maybe Texas and Louisiana. In my mind, this is at least in part politically motivated rather than substantively motivated.” You don’t say.  Trump has the same problem with coal, which is that even coal companies don’t really want it. A recent attempt to get coal companies to bite at the opportunity to mine on public land in Montana drew a bid of a fraction of a penny per ton of coal. Companies that own coal-fired plants want to shut them down and phase them out, but instead, the administration is forcing them to stay open.  And now, perhaps, California gets forced to accept offshore rigs and all the risk of oil spills that they bring. But never the pristine shoreline of South Carolina or Georgia, and certainly never ever in Florida. Read more