Update: "Corruption, Abuse of Power" - SB County Faces Threat of Offshore Spill for First Time in a Decade

Aiding the rogue Texas company that for years defied state law, Trump's phony national security order triggered the flow of offshore oil over the weekend for the first time since the 2015 disaster.

On Sunday, Nick Welsh checked in to Newsmakers TV to dissect Donald Trump’s deceitful ploy to defile Santa Barbara County and California’s long-settled opposition to offshore oil by using his capricious war on Iran as a ruse.

As it happens, even as Nick described the 11th hour bid by state officials to block Trump’s wheeze, the oil was already flowing.

On Monday, shortly before noon, he batted out this lede in the Indy:

Three-thousand-nine-hundred-and-fifty-two-days after a major oil spill brought all oil production off the Gaviota Coast to a screeching halt, Sable Offshore Oil flicked the switch this past Saturday and brought oil production along the South Coast back from the dead.

What it means. At a time when California stands as a bulwark against the excesses of the Trump regime, the White House order to reopen an aged offshore pipeline, which catastrophically failed in 2015 and caused a disastrous spill, now stands as an historic constitutional and political marker of raw federal power crushing legal and principled opposition of a sovereign state government and the aspirations of a local community.

Giana Magnoli scooped the oil-is-flowing story at 9:25 a.m. over at Noozhawk, by citing Securities and Exchange Commission documents filed by Sable, the rogue Texas oil company which has been defying state and local law for years, in which they first informed shareholders that they have resumed pumping.

As the far-reaching, political, economic and legal downstream consequences of the Trump-Sable scheme begin to form, perhaps the clearest statement of the urgency and high-stakes of the situation came from Alex Katz of the Environmental Defense Center, which has battled Sable for the past two years. From Nick’s report:

“A defective pipeline operating at high pressure with no legal guardrails is a threat to public safety, to our economy, and to the entire coast,” (Katz) said. “This has nothing to do with gas prices or the military.

“What we’re seeing is the abuse of power and a corruption of federal law for the benefit of the president’s friends with potentially disastrous consequences for everyone else.” Trump’s action, he said, undermines the right of California and every state to protect its own environment, adding that the resumption of production restores the single largest source of greenhouse gases in Santa Barbara County.

Caeli, adjuvate nos.

Images: Salon, Resistbot.com.