PD Editorial: Protecting the coast is only half of the job

Twenty-five years ago, the Exxon Valdez struck a reef and spilled more than 11 million gallons of crude oil into Alaska's Prince William Sound. The catastrophic spill polluted 1,300 miles of shoreline, poisoned countless wildlife and launched a political war over energy production and coastal protection that still rages on.

California's North Coast is one of the battlegrounds.

Today, a quarter-century after the Exxon Valdez, environmental and tourism interests are closer than ever to permanently blocking offshore oil and gas development along the Sonoma and southern Mendocino coasts.

By this time next year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration itends to more than double the size of two Pacific Ocean sanctuaries that stretch from the Gulf of the Farallones to Bodega Bay. The new boundary would be about 60 miles farther north, near Point Arena.

Coupled with the recent addition of the Point Arena-Stornetta Public Lands to the California Coast National Monument, the expansion would reinforce the North Coast's growing reputation as a must-see destination, with visitors "spending the almighty dollar," as west county Supervisor Efren Carrillo indelicately put it this week.

It's also a testament to local activists, businesses and elected officials who worked for years to secure congressional approval before petitioning the Obama administration to exercise its executive powers to make the coast off-limits to drilling.

Our opposition to oil and gas development off the North Coast is no secret. It's a threat to the fishing and tourism industries, two cornerstones of the region's economy. If there's any disappointment here, it's only that NOAA isn't proposing to include the entire Mendocino County coast in the expanded marine sanctuary.

But the celebrations shouldn't overshadow this inconvenient truth: North Coast residents, and those dollar-bearing visitors, haven't stopped using fossil fuel. Blocking development in our region means that we're relying on others to accept the risk of oil spills in their communities.

Well, most of the risks. California imports about 12 percent of its oil from Alaska, transporting it aboard tankers that navigate the North Coast en route to refineries in communities such as Benicia, Richmond, Martinez and Long Beach.

After the Exxon Valdez disaster, California imposed a fee on oil shipped aboard tankers and through ocean pipelines to create a fund to cover cleanup costs for marine oil spills, such as the one in 2007 caused by a tanker striking the Bay Bridge.

With less oil coming from Alaska's North Slope, a growing volume is arriving in California by rail. As we noted last month, crude-by-rail imports went from virtually zero in 2009 to 2.83 million barrels in the last quarter of 2013, and state officials are only beginning to plan for a large spill or an explosion.

The challenge ahead is unchanged. It's conservation — driving less, making your next vehicle more fuel-efficient, whatever you can do to reduce our reliance on petroleum. Protecting the North Coast has taken a generation, but it may have been the easier task.