Trump recently announced his disastrous plan to hand over all of America’s oceans—including the Pacific—to rapacious oil companies. This means they will be able to expand offshore drilling off the California coast for the first time in over 30 years. On February 8th, join the Center for Biological Diversity and its allies to tell the administration that offshore drilling—and the oil spills, pipelines and climate chaos that come with it—are unwelcome off our beautiful coast.
Offshore drilling is a nightmare for people and the planet: it poisons our oceans, covers our beaches in oil, and directly threatens California’s booming coastal economy. It also deepens our dependence on fossil fuels, driving climate change that accelerates sea level rise and fuels wildfires.
But the fight to protect the California coast from new offshore drilling isn’t over yet. Let’s show Trump and his oil cronies what resistance looks like to their unending quest to wreck the planet.
Please attend this rally, press conference and march! And also be sure to submit comments in opposition before the early March deadline.
SACRAMENTO RALLY AND MARCH
At 2:30 pm we’ll march to the Tsakopoulos Library Galleria (828 I Street, Sacramento, CA 95814) for the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) meeting.
At 3:00 pm we’ll enter the meeting and let BOEM know that we absolutely oppose new drilling off our coast or in any of our oceans.
Center for Biological Diversity is organizing buses from the Bay Area:
SAN FRANCISCO BUS TICKET PAGE
Here are some talking points you can use for your comments:
I am writing to urge you to protect our oceans and climate from expanded offshore drilling, and specifically to remove all planning areas from the United States’ five-year leasing proposal. Burning the fossil fuels in the areas currently proposed would contribute 49.5 gigatons of carbon dioxide pollution, the equivalent of the emissions from 10.6 billion cars driven for a year. Expanding offshore drilling will deepen the climate crisis, fueling extreme weather events and driving sea-level rise. This is a road we cannot afford to go down. The best science shows that the United States should end offshore oil and gas leasing in all regions, including the Arctic.
Catastrophic oil spills—an inevitable consequence of offshore drilling—destroy coastal communities and devastate marine life. And the federal government has already concluded that there would be a 75 percent chance of a major oil spill if development and production in the Chukchi Sea moved forward under even a single large lease sale. A major oil spill in the Arctic would be impossible to clean up.
That’s why I’m adamantly opposed to more offshore drilling, and so is the American public. More than 150 municipalities on the West and East coasts have formally voiced opposition to offshore drilling. And polls show that the majority of Americans support permanently protecting the Arctic Ocean from new oil and gas drilling. What’s more, defense experts warn that Arctic drilling threatens national security, and keeping the eastern Gulf of Mexico off-limits to new drilling is critical to U.S. military readiness.
We fight against “pre-crime” and “thought-crime,” spy drones, facial recognition, police body cameras and requirements for “backdoors” to cellphones, to list just a few invasions of our privacy by all levels of Government.
What exactly can be done about the Levin-Richmond coal terminal on the Richmond waterfront? Join the ongoing community discussion about how to remove this blight from our midst. Why do we have huge, uncovered piles of dirty, dusty coal sitting right next to our Bay—and contaminating several of our neighborhoods? Why is the Richmond terminal one of the last three ports left in the state to export this dirty fossil fuel when California doesn’t even use coal power? Why does the Bay Area, a region renowned for its environmental leadership, still allow coal trains to travel through our communities? Thanks to the falling price of clean energy and the commitment of activists all across the country, the coal industry is in retreat. We’ve retired 259 coal plants in seven years—that’s one plant retired every eleven days! And more than three million people work in the clean energy economy, which now employs more people than the fossil fuel industry in almost every state in the country. So let’s finish the job here!
Please join us for our regular biweekly meeting of the Sunflower Alliance. We’ll discuss ongoing campaigns and plans for the future.