Watch: "Green Guide" Editors Preview Next Week's Big Coastal Commission Pipeline Showdown in SB
Independent Editor Marianne Partridge and Vicky Riskin, Founder of Bluedot Living, discuss their latest climate-friendly collaborative publication - and the most urgent environmental danger facing SB
Amazing but true: Fifty-five years after the founding of Earth Day - 55, count ‘em, 55 - Santa Barbara is still facing the menace of an offshore oil spill.
That’s the harsh reality underpinning a California Coastal Commission hearing at the Hilton Hotel next Tuesday, focusing on efforts by Sable Offshore Corp. to restart the pipeline that failed several years ago and caused the Refugio Oil Spill.
“It’s a crisis in Santa Barbara that repeats itself all across the country,” said Vicky Riskin, founder and president of the environmental news operation Bluedot Living.
Along with Marianne Partridge, editor-in-chief of the Santa Barbara Independent, Riskin joins the genial host on this week’s edition of Newsmakers TV to discuss “The Santa Barbara Green Guide,” a just-out collaborative publication that features and celebrates local efforts to protect the environment and celebrate climate resiliency by people working in community.
In recent months, the two also worked together on journalistic projects surrounding the Sable story, helping to educate locals about the below-the-radar efforts by the low-profile corporate entity to restart transmission of offshore oil that abruptly stopped back in 2014, with the rupture of a badly corroded pipeline near Refugio State Park.
Amid a baffling tangle of local, state and federal agencies with overlapping jurisdictions, the state Coastal Commission has served the oil company with a series of cease-and-desist orders, which have been routinely ignored. Now the commission is scheduled to meet next week in Santa Barbara; their public hearing agenda on Thursday, April 10 includes an item about Sable and the disputed orders.
By coincidence, that’s less than two weeks before the 55th celebration of Earth Day, which began on April 22, 1970, in large part because of angry reaction to the massive offshore oil spill in Santa Barbara the year before.
Check out our conversation with Marianne Partridge and Vicky Riskin about the new “Green Guide” and the latest in the Sable Offshore story via YouTube below, or by clicking through this link. The podcast is available on Apple, Spotify and on Soundcloud here. TVSB, Channel 17, airs the show every weeknight at 8 p.m. and at 9 a.m. on weekends. KCSB, 91.9 FM, broadcasts the program at 5:30 p.m. on Monday.
Image: The new “Green Guide” published by the Independent and Bluedot Living (Ingrid Bostrom photo for the Santa Barbara Independent).
Further reading and viewing:
A Newsmakers interview with environmental attorney Linda Krop, who’s leading the fight against Sable Offshore.
An in-depth look at the Sable Offshore oil pipeline issue.
A Newsmakers interview with Vicky Riskin about the “Bluedot Living” publications.
Both Sable and Sentinel got approved over the counter by Erinn Briggs, assistant Planning Director for the County. That is where any investigation should start. Who in the County allowed him to do this? Or did he just do it on his own? Lisa Plowman? Mona? County Counsel?