Ten miles south of Rancho del Cielo where Ronald Reagan signed his landmark tax relief bill something refreshingly un-Santa Barbara happened this last Friday at Sable Offshore Corp’s Santa Ynez oil facility.
No ribbon-cutting platitudes. No performative protests. Just Sable’s Jim Flores, U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright, and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum standing with oil workers and subcontractors — the folks who keep this county’s lights on and cars moving —speaking blunt truths while the national press corps fished unsuccessfully for their next “Big Oil Bad” headline.
You know the tired local script all too well. The same NGO-government chorus that shrieks in horror at every barrel of domestic crude somehow never notices the tankers hauling Iraqi oil halfway around the world to California’s shores – or the local natural seeps that oil production helps contain.
A trio of sturdy platforms — Hondo, Harmony, and Heritage — part of the Santa Ynez Unit (SYU), sit 5 to 9 miles offshore in the Santa Barbara Channel. Discovered in 1968 and developed by ExxonMobil, they once pumped around 45,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day before the 2015 Refugio spill – and the regulatory kibosh that followed – mothballed everything. Sable stepped in two years ago to revive this federal asset. Early results are already beating expectations: Harmony is flowing thousands of barrels daily, with full ramp-up targeting 50,000-plus. This isn’t green, taxpayer subsidized fantasy. It’s proven American infrastructure ready to slash foreign imports and supercharge California production.
Clean, Environmentally Friendly Oil Here for the Taking
Flores, fresh from a helicopter trip offshore, was upbeat: “You don’t get a project like this off the ground without help from everybody, top to bottom... We just came in from offshore, had a spectacular trip up there, and look forward to many, many years of great work here, trying to help provide the energy needs to the United States.” And on the local connection: “Sable is California... we’re going to be here forever.”
An energetic Secretary Wright shot straight to the point: “Energy is life, energy is national security, energy is economic security, energy is health, opportunity, and better lives.” On Trump’s agenda: “President Trump got elected to grow American energy production to benefit Americans through lower cost, through greater security... More energy means more jobs and lower prices seems like common sense.
“Why is it controversial?”
Why indeed…
Because it offends today’s coastal religion: “Gavin Newsom and too many other California politicians,” Wright notes, “want to be in fashion with the Chardonnay set in hoity-toity Marin (and for that matter, Santa Barbara) County. It’s very fashionable to be adamantly against common sense... We prefer to import that oil from Iraq and Indonesia and Ecuador... We prefer to make gasoline and diesel and all energy in California massively more expensive.”
Wright continued: “California imports over thirty percent of its electricity, holds the nation’s highest adjusted poverty rate, and remains heavily dependent on foreign oil, all while badmouthing oil and gas, which does not replace them.” On the Defense Production Act: “We did use the Defense Production Act, because California has thirty military facilities, more than any state in the country.” And on results of California’s decades long fascination with alternative energy, it’s a bust: “California gets over seventy-five percent of its energy from oil and natural gas... higher than the national average.”
Sable’s Oil Gummed Up by Frivolous Lawsuits
Doug Burgum, the man who turned North Dakota into an energy powerhouse, delivered the unvarnished physics lesson: “It’s about math, it’s about people, it’s about economics, it’s about physics. It’s not about ideology.” Low prices improve “everything about human prosperity.” North Dakota got richer and cleaner. Royalties from Sable alone will deliver over $3.3 billion to the Treasury. Pump prices? “$5.95 here versus $3.63 in New Jersey. That’s because of policies.”
I asked about ramping up federal oversight to cut through California’s regulatory spaghetti. Wright called the state an “exception” that has stunted development, noting that local production under strict American rules beats shipping emissions overseas. Burgum spoke of the Commerce Clause when one state’s ideology harms its neighbors.
Flores added some local flavor: “Why does asphalt cost four times more in Santa Barbara County than neighboring Ventura? Hmm, let’s see, they’ve got oil production in Ventura, and Santa Barbara County outlawed oil production.”
The national press, bless their hearts, stuck rigidly to script — stranded assets, future lease plans, and tanker contingencies — without seriously engaging any of the data or logic laid out before them.
Back in the real world, Sable remains mired in lawsuits from a cozy tandem of local officials and NGOs. Despite Sable’s recent court wins, Santa Barbara County Supervisors and the Coastal Commission keep throwing wrenches — denied permits, injunctions, penalties — all cheered on by their nonprofit allies.
This is classic Santa Barbara: platforms operating under tough American standards that produce cleaner energy than the imports we depend on are treated as an existential threat. The result? Families paying through the nose at the pump, military bases reliant on foreign suppliers, and genuine environmental progress sacrificed for performative gestures that simply move the mess somewhere else.
Wright, Burgum, and the Sable team, offered a better script: abundance over subtraction, physics over fashion. It’s long past time our County Supervisors, the Coastal Commission, and the nonprofit industrial complex ended this expensive charade. The physics aren’t going away — and neither are the $6 gallons.
Nearly 45 years ago, on a ranch not far away, Ronald Reagan defied a similar “cult of malaise” with his landmark 1981 tax cuts. Critics sneered then too. Yet what followed was 92 months of continuous economic growth — the longest peacetime expansion America had seen at the time.
The right side of history belongs to the doers. If only the trolls would get out of their way.
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