In the stand-off to see who wins in the great pipeline battle of the 2020s, it seems like Sable Offshore Corporation’s closer to the finish line than environmental organizations want it to be.
In May 2025, the oil company began pumping oil from its offshore oil platforms to its onshore facility in Las Flores Canyon, where it’s been stored in tanks “pending resumed petroleum transportation” (i.e. those dang pipelines that have been shut-in since 2015), according to Securities and Exchange Commission filings. The company, as of Dec. 23, “had not sold commercial quantities of hydrocarbons” yet.
But it sure seems like they might be there. Nothing seems to slow this company down! It neither begs for permission nor asks for forgiveness. Sable just barrels forward like a runaway train no lawsuit can stop.
If it doesn’t like what one agency says, Sable just jumps to a different track—from county to federal, from state to federal. The California Office of the Fire Marshal wasn’t going to approve the company’s restart plans because Sable didn’t comply with one requirement, so it asked a federal agency to take over jurisdiction—which the Trump administration was all too happy to oblige, of course.
Then that federal agency approved Sable’s pipeline restart plans and issued a 60-day emergency permit that waived the requirement it wasn’t complying with in the first place. Magic!
Our friends over at the Environmental Defense Center sued, of course, and put in an emergency motion to prevent the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration decisions from going into effect. But a judge didn’t grant the stay!
So where does that leave us? Are the pipelines going to start flowing with oil or not? The pipeline administration people didn’t say and neither did Sable. Shrug?
It seems like that might be the case, even though Santa Barbara County denied Sable’s permit transfer request for the Santa Ynez Unit and its affiliated facilities and pipelines.
Sable said it’s already spent more than $200 million repairing the pipelines (even though the state believes none of that work should have happened in the first place). Trump signed an executive order stating that energy production was insufficient and causing a national security emergency.
So I guess, his administration just gets to do whatever it wants, regardless of precedence, deference, or rule of law.
They answer to no one, as the executive director of 805 UndocuFund put it. Primitiva Hernandez said the last week of December was unprecedented on the Central Coast when it comes to immigration enforcement.
In four days, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested at least 147 people across Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties, with more than 80 of those arrests in Santa Maria.
ICE insists that the people arrested were the “worst of the worst,” but it doesn’t seem to have shaken out that way. And, of course, the administration’s press release is nasty and pointed about taking “illegal alien” criminals off the streets.
“The majority of the people were farmworkers, migrant, Indigenous from the Mixtec, Zapotec, and other Indigenous peoples, so people who are very, very vulnerable,” she said. “Very, very prone to abuses of power.”
Take from the poor, give to the rich. That’s the Trump administration’s motto. Only three more years to go.
The Canary’s always counting. Send an abacus to canary@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in January 8 – January 15, 2026.