On Jan. 29, 1969, Bob Sollen, a reporter with the Santa Barbara News-Press who covered offshore oil drilling, received an anonymous phone call: "The ocean was boiling around platform A. There had been a blowout," he remembers.

Even after the blowout had been brought under control, the oil continued to seep out of the ocean floor, Sollen says. "The pressure from the blowout fractured the bottom of the ocean all around the platform, so even when you controlled the pressure in the well, the blowout continued, because it was coming out through the cap-rock all around the well."

Sollen says he witnessed oil washing up on shore for many months afterward. At the time, the cleanup technology available was primitive: mostly straw and pitchforks.

The Santa Barbara spill, say environmentalists, turned California against offshore drilling. It also inspired state and federal regulations that require environmental impact statements to this very day. Before the spill, "there was no environmental review of any projects. Agencies had no official way to determine whether or not oil development or a dam project would impact the environment," says Linda Krop, chief council and executive director of the Environmental Defense Center, a public-interest law firm in Santa Barbara. "It's been referred to as the oil spill heard around the world."

And even though most Californians may not remember the 1,000 oil-soaked bird corpses that cleanup workers collected more than 30 years ago, they remember that they're against offshore oil drilling when they go to the polls: "Whenever there's a partisan election, the Republicans and the Democrats try to outdo each other in their opposition to offshore oil activities," says Sollen.

Scorning offshore drilling is so mainstream here that even the Republican candidate for governor, Bill Simon, used the issue to try to paint the incumbent Democrat, Gray Davis, as soft on the environment in Simon's failed attempt to win the governorship this year. Simon argued that Davis hadn't been sufficiently protective of the coast, because he'd failed to stop existing oil leases.

"Opposition to offshore drilling has become almost like kissing babies for California politicians," says Bill Magavern, a senior lobbyist for the Sierra Club.

"But President Bush still wants to produce more oil, open up more platforms off the California coast," says Sollen.

At issue is the extension of 36 leases for offshore drilling in 324 square miles off the coast of Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo. The state of California and environmental groups have sued to stop the extension, taking the position that it should not have been granted without local approval. But when a court upheld California's position, the Bush administration appealed.

The Bush administration's position in California, it's worth noting, is in sharp contrast to its policy in Florida. Bush has pledged $235 million to buy out similar leases in the coastal waters of Gov. Jeb Bush's Florida. But Bush owes nothing to California, a state that not only went for Gore in 2000, but even eschewed the so-called Bush effect that dominated this year's elections in other states, electing Democrats to the state's highest offices from governor to treasurer.

On Dec. 2, a federal appeals court in San Francisco blocked the extension of the leases again. In a unanimous decision, three justices ruled that the state of California can review the potential environmental impact on the coastline, before the federal Department of the Interior can extend existing leases.

A triumphant Gov. Gray Davis said: "The court's ruling is essentially a big stop sign to Washington. They should take the hint and halt further attempts to exploit California's spectacular coastal resources. Today's decision is a victory for all Californians, the environment, and states' rights."

On Dec. 12, the same court struck another blow against the Bush administration when it reinstated the Clinton administration's ban on road construction in almost 60 million acres of national forest, a ban intended to block logging, mining and oil-drilling.

But the rulings do not mean that California is winning the war. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has long been criticized by conservatives as excessively liberal (although it could be argued that upholding a state's jurisdiction over the federal government is a classic conservative position.)

The Department of the Interior has not yet decided if it will appeal the court's ruling on oil drilling off the California Coast to the Supreme Court, but if it does, it may find the weather there more to its liking.

And even if the ruling stands, the Bush administration could still invoke a federal override provision in the environmental law that protects the coast, and go ahead and extend the oil leases anyway.

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