California politicians and local activists heavily criticized the Trump administration’s plan to lease coastal waters for offshore drilling today at a standing-room only community meeting. 

Held at the Wharfinger Building Sunday morning, over 100 people attended. It was hosted by the Surfrider Foundation, the Environmental Protection Information Center (EPIC), and Humboldt Waterkeeper. Attendees were encouraged to fill out postcards pre-addressed to Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum with their hostility to offshore oil drilling.

Politicians from every level of government spoke for an hour, all of them to voice their opposition to the scheme: in attendance was Representative Jared Huffman, state assemblymembers Chris Rogers and Damon Connelly, Humboldt County Supervisor Mike Wilson, Eureka city councilmembers Kati Moulton and Leslie Castellano, and a smattering of other local bigwigs and activists. Huffman, Rogers and Connelly have attended several similar meetings along the California coast in the last few days.

They highlighted the negative environmental impacts of Trump’s plan, who said in November he wants to open up millions of acres along the West Coast and Florida to oil companies. Trump claims that drilling will bolster the economy, creating more jobs and lowering gas prices. Speakers focused on the potentially drastic, negative effects drilling has on the environment, as well as the devastation overusing fossil fuels is already causing to the climate and coastal communities. Many of them mentioned past oil spills that killed untold amounts of marine life and polluted waterways for years, like the 1989 Exxon Valdez, 1969 Santa Barbara, and 2015 Refugio spills.

“Thousands of pounds of toxic sludge are released due to routine operations of these facilities,” said EPIC climate attorney Matt Simmons. “I look out at Humboldt Bay, and I shudder to think about what a similar disaster would be for our community, for the jobs, the livelihoods, the cultures that all depend on the bay.”

Economic activities, like seafood harvesting and tourism, related to California’s coast brings in $1.7 trillion a year annually, Huffman claimed. Allowing offshore drilling would only increase that by a fraction while endangering other, more profitable activities.

“First, on the off chance that there’s someone in the Trump administration that still gives a damn about people and communities, we want them to hear loud and clear from us,” Huffman said. “We want them to know that support for offshore drilling is in the single digits, by which I mean the middle digit. I want to put it in terms that maybe Donald Trump can understand…I just want to tell the Trump Administration what part of the California coast they should open for new drilling: none of it.”

The speakers didn’t dive too deep into the specifics of their plans to combat Trump’s proclivity for fossil fuels. Huffman called for legislation that would permanently ban offshore drilling on the West Coast. Connelly mentioned Gov. Gavin Newsom’s 2020 30x30 executive order, which would set aside 30% of California’s land and water for conservation by 2030. Assemblymember Rogers said he was co-authoring a bill with Assemblymember Dawn Addis to block offshore drilling on California’s coast. Supervisor Wilson (who also sits on the California Coastal Commission) brought up the Save My Coast Coalition, of which Humboldt County is a part, that aims to stop offshore drilling. 

Eureka city councilmember Kati Moulton spoke about growing up on the Gulf Coast in Texas, kicking at wads of sargassum algae held together by “blobs” of crude oil on the beach, the horizon dotted with oil rigs. 

“If you ask the people around there what those are, they say they smell like money. That smells like our local economy,” Moulton said. “Even at their best, they’re a disaster…And then I came up here as a young adult, and Humboldt County really touched me, and I fell in love with this place.”

“I just wanted to point out that there are few communities that could get together and really fight against something, and this is one of them,” Moulton continued. “And I just wanted to echo some of the optimism that I’m hearing, some of the deep-rooted defense of this beautiful place where we are, because if anybody can help make this not happen, it is Humboldt County.”