So many disasters in the Trump Era, so little time to keep up with them all. On today’s BradCast, we cover one that happened this week that you may or may not have even heard of. But, if Trump has his way, this week’s disaster may be only the beginning. [Audio to full story follows this summary.]
FIRST UP… The news over the past two weeks regarding Republicans rigging this year’s critical midterm elections has been grim, for sure. The corrupt rightwing activists on the U.S. Supreme Court gutting the Voting Rights Act; GOP-controlled Southern states racing to suspend elections with votes already cast in order to draw new maps to erase majority-minority U.S. House Districts; the Virginia Supreme Court undermining the will of the electorate to void last month’s ballot referendum where voters chose to redraw U.S. House Map to flip four seats from “red” to “blue”. But there is reason, as Jesse would say, to keep hope alive.
For one, Donald Trump is growing more unpopular by the day, as he clearly has no clue how to get out of the war he started in Iran nor the economic catastrophe it has touched off. The Bureau of Labor Statistics released its latest data today finding inflation in April surged to 3.8%, its highest level in three years, outpacing wage growth for the first time since 2023. Americans are unlikely to appreciate that any more than the continuously rising gas prices thanks to Trump’s War.
At the same time, political analysts still favor Democrats to win the majority in the U.S. House, despite the Republican attempts to rig the election. Perhaps not by 40 seats, as was the case in the last midterm election Trump presided over in 2018. But enough to take back the slim majority now held by Republicans. We’ll see if those experts are right. But this is no time for despair. We all just have to work a bit harder. Nobody said defeating autocracy would be easy.
NEXT… The great state of California, once the third largest oil producing state in the union, has been slowly moving away from oil and gas production since the infamous 1969 well blowout at an offshore oil platform near Santa Barbara. The massive ecological disaster killed wildlife, coated beaches for miles, and helped catalyze political momentum toward the passage that year of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA); the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1970; and the Clean Water Act in 1972. All during a Republican Presidential administration, by the way.
Strict regulations were enacted in the state after the 1969 disaster, though several more large scale ecological disasters have occurred since then along the same stretch of coastline. Still the 7th largest oil producing state in the union, California has been slowly shutting down offshore oil facilities for decades. The state has not allowed new oil leases since 1984. But, last November, the Trump Administration announced a new, five-year plan to allow as many as 34 new offshore lease sales across 1.27 billion acres of federal waters, including six areas along the Pacific Coast, including in oil-rich Southern California.
The plan was titled “Unleashing American Offshore Energy”. Of course, the title is wildly misleading. The Administration has been working hard — and spending billions of taxpayer dollars — to shut down clean, renewable offshore wind energy projects that would (and, in a number of cases, still will, since Trump has lost in court challenge after court challenge) power millions of American homes with clean, safe, renewable energy. What the Administration should have called their plan was something more akin to: “Deregulating the American Offshore Fossil Fuel Industry.”
CA state officials vowed to challenge Trump every step of the way. But, this week, we got another reminder of how important it is to fight off Trump’s fossil fueled threats to the state, its people, its economy, wildlife and the entire newly-endangered Pacific coastline from SoCal to Alaska.
On Monday, a fire broke out on an inactive oil platform in federal waters about 8 miles from Capinteria, which is about 12 miles east of Santa Barbara. The rig, named Platform Habitat, was decommissioned in 2016. Its 20 wells were to be shut-in beginning in 2025. More than two dozen workers were safely rescued from the rig yesterday before a safety valve was shut to halt the gas leak which had caught fire.
“This explosion is another stark reminder that offshore drilling platforms are inherently dangerous and potentially deadly, even after extraction has ended,” said our guest today, BRADY BRADSHAW, marine biologist and Senior Oceans Campaigner at the Center for Biological Diversity, in a statement on Monday night.
“A lot of the offshore platforms off of California have been sitting around for many years past their expected lifespans,” Bradshaw tells me today. “What we know is that the longer these platforms and this infrastructure sit around, the more dangers arise. The bottom line is that offshore drilling operations are inherently dangerous, and often involve the potential for minor accidents or sometimes massive accidents that could harm both human and wild life.”
This is a problem, he says, “not only in the Pacific, but in the Gulf specifically. There is a lot of oil and gas platforms and wells that have either been left partially abandoned or just open, leaking methane.”
But the problem, if Trump has his way, is about to get far worse. Bradshaw explains how the Administration’s five-year plan — now supercharged with claims of emergency “war time” proclamations — has become “a major threat”.
“This is the first time that there has been a serious effort to expand offshore drilling off the California coast that has been coupled with a President who is actively using national emergency orders and abusing the powers of the Defense Production Act in order to pre-empt state regulations.”
Bradshaw, who witness the BP oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico firsthand in 2010, warns that residents of California and elsewhere need to be prepared for what is coming and the need to fight against it. “The oil industry spills oil every time they drill offshore,” he charges. “These are our public waters that are being given to the oil industry.”
“The Trump administration is showing us how willing they are to abuse their powers, and also to overwhelm and try to fast-track all of these processes by the public before we know what’s hit us.”
We also discuss Trump’s twisted personal campaign against wind projects now both offshore and onshore. And since he is a marine biologist, I ask Bradshaw if there is ANY science to support one of Trump’s favorite lies about offshore wind production: that it “kills whales”. Tune in for his answers on that and much more.
FINALLY… In a not dissimilar vein, Desi Doyen joins us for our latest Green News Report, with new details on Trump’s Wars — against Iran and the Wind — as his assault on land-based wind projects is revealed as being even broader than previously known. At the same time, the EV transition is booming in Africa and elsewhere amid the war on Iran, and China, naturally, is the biggest beneficiary…
