Oil brings in revenue for Santa Barbara County. This has been a selling point when new drilling permits are sought. But oil operations cost us more than they generate. Some direct costs include fire department enforcement of violations, unreimbursed disaster response, staff time for the treasurer-tax collector to get oil companies to pay millions of dollars in unpaid property taxes that they owe, and costs for the monitoring or closure of orphan wells.
That’s only a start because there are also indirect costs like damage to road infrastructure caused by tens of thousands of trips by heavy trucks, emphysema and other maladies resulting from increased air pollution, and water wells that cannot be used because they have been contaminated with toxic chemicals from oil activities.
It would be helpful to put a dollar amount to all this. UCSB’s economics professor Dr. Peter Rupert has done partial accounting of the economic and financial effects of oil operations. Some of his work has been directly or indirectly sponsored by the oil industry itself. And both his use of statistics and the conclusions themselves have been misleading, allowing the oil industry to cite them in its defense.
Wouldn’t it be a service to our community if Dr. Rupert would employ his abilities to perform a more objective and complete study? By taking account of the various direct and indirect costs of oil production, including the risk of catastrophic contamination to our ag and drinking water supplies, such a study would be invaluable in decision-making as the county considers the potential for a massive increase in oil activities here.
This article appears in Jul 19-26, 2018.