Editorial: Oil drillers want to overturn California’s new health protections. Don’t let them.
One of the biggest myths circulating among the anti-corporate oil industry contingent is that California is trying to protect consumers from irresponsible oil production.
The premise is that the state has placed new regulations on oil producers that would prevent them from setting a price too high, or from overstating the value of their assets, and that oil companies are looking to break into California in order to circumvent its laws and steal customers from its mom and pop oil producers.
If this were the real story, we could expect the Oil and Gas Accountability Project, a new organization started this week by oil industry insiders and some public interest organizations, to write about the California law that requires drillers to disclose how they will reduce greenhouse gas emissions, as part of what is being described as a “green” law. Unfortunately the new organization does much more than that.
The O&G Accountability Project seems to argue that California is trying to protect consumers from irresponsible oil production. In some cases, the O&G Accountability Project suggests, the state has no choice but to step in to stop the oil companies they describe as “bad actors.” This argument is advanced in the organization’s own press release, which goes on to argue that the regulation of greenhouse gas emissions by the state is “a blatant attempt by the California legislature to protect consumers from abusive oil companies and stop them from overstating the value of their assets.”
As we noted in our blog post titled “California Oil Industry Blunders,” California’s new regulations do more to protect consumers from irresponsible oil production than the Oil and Gas Accountability Project seems to admit. The new regulation exempts California drillers from state regulations that would have required them to show how their development of oil and gas would reduce greenhouse gases. This means that any drilling in California will be exempt from those provisions that California is obligated to implement under the federal Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Air Act, if it wants to avoid fines and regulation of emissions.
The regulations, which became effective on January 1, require oil and gas companies to disclose how they will reduce greenhouse gases and have nothing to do with California’s energy policy, which is largely dominated by the oil industry.
More important than the new disclosure provisions of the California regulations is the California Energy Commission’s determination that “the sale of oil and gas does not contribute to greenhouse gas emissions and