“People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.”
That old adage keeps me from giving advice on dieting or handwriting. It came to mind last week as I listened to a group of concerned (mostly) Aromas residents and environmental organizations encourage the county supervisors to make significant changes to the San Benito’s Oil and Gas Well Ordinance.
Some ideas were to add many pages of regulatory hoop-jumping to the permit process, ban hydraulic fracturing completely, reject all oil wells, increase operational setbacks to 1,000 feet from property lines, forbid any wells in rural areas with homes, or near the Monterey shale, or anywhere near a seismic fault, or some combination of all the above.
The irony was that these good people had piled into their cars, SUVs, and pickup trucks, almost all with internal combustion engines, and drove 15 to 20 miles to sing the praises of their semi-rural lifestyle and the county’s agricultural heritage and then enthusiastically bash those nasty oil companies that made both those dreams possible; then they drove home. Meanwhile, ‘back at the ranch’ they were regularly pouring human waste and wastewater into septic systems that are serious threats to the groundwater and environment and whose ongoing testing and upkeep are essentially unregulated. Just ask the same environmental groups that attended the oil-bashing party about that threat.
I’ll save you the trouble. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, which certainly opposes oil operations, some of the biggest threats to the groundwater and oceanic quality are septic systems, landfills, leaking underground storage tanks, and agricultural operations – but don’t tell anyone living in a rural area or engaging in agriculture. All humans have their self-serving blind spots.
A speaker or two asked what would happen if a holding pond or concrete casing failed during an earthquake. I wondered what would happen if an earthquake cracked all those old septic vaults – perish the thought. A few years back the state legislature proposed some tough regulatory standards for septic systems and California’s rural homeowners literally went crazy. Why now, they asked, we’ve never really had a problem. When the oil companies used the same argument, people belittled the argument.
I wonder if anyone but me noted the Sierra Club, speaking in opposition to oil exploration, also had joined the lawsuit opposing the proposed Panoche Valley Solar Project adding years and millions to the cost of renewable energy; so, no oil and no solar. I know – we’re going to regress to yoked oxen to deliver our crops and take us to those good jobs in Sunnyvale. Actually, this is all about oxen – about whose oxen are being gored.
We cannot have any disagreement in San Benito County unless one camp or the other is ridiculed as “outsiders” – that’s a special local rule. In this case, a letter brief from the oil industry was attacked as coming from outriders; meanwhile several of the environmentalists who were also outsiders were treated as long-lost friends. You take your political support where you can get it.
The truth is this is all about NIMBY: Not In My Back Yard. No, I do not want an oil well behind my house either, but I’m not going to claim that the oil companies are nothing but irresponsible brigands who require regulatory strangulation to win my point. There are reasonable incremental steps to take and we should take them; going overboard has its own risks.
As the board of supervisors should know by now, getting into any ordinance that contains the word environment is a lot easier than getting out of it.
Marty Richman is a Hollister resident and writes a column for the Free Lance.
