As of this past Monday, the possibility of the giant plume of oil in the Gulf of Mexico moving onto the west coast of Florida remained uncertain. But the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig 50 miles from the Louisiana coast has already changed the equation for drilling near Florida's coast.
A Mason-Dixon poll released late last week showed that 55 percent of Floridians oppose offshore drilling, while only 35 percent support it. Less than a year ago, those numbers were nearly the exact opposite.
In 1969 a blowout in Santa Barbara, Calif., led to a significant paradigm shift in public opinion about offshore drilling, sparking the creation of Earth Day a year later. Critics of offshore drilling say the oil spill in the Gulf should lead to a similar recalibration of the country's energy policy.
Pinellas County Commissioner Ken Welch calls the current situation a "seminal moment" in the country's thinking on oil and alternative energy. Governor Charlie Crist is now considering a special session to have the Legislature vote on placing a Constitutional Amendment on this year's ballot that would allow Florida voters to ban drilling in state waters forever.
"We have to take care of ourselves"
In the short term, Tampa Bay residents and government officials have responded as if at war.
Last week the U.S. Coast Guard set up a command post in St. Petersburg. The day before officials spoke with the press about their plans, Coast Guard and Department of Environmental Protection officials met with a variety of local and state environmental groups and government agencies for a briefing.
Environmental activist Lorraine Margeson attended that meeting and said that it was extremely productive, as agency leaders exchanged contact information for what might be needed if the spill does move toward Tampa Bay. She said she didn't mean to slight the Coast Guard, but "we all really realized that we have to take care of ourselves…. …There's no way that the Coast Guard or BP can take care of us, there's not enough paid bodies."
Last Wednesday night in Gulfport, Sierra Club activist Cathy Harrelson, one of the organizers behind the successful "Hands Across the Sand" rally last February to protest drilling off state waters, hosted a meeting for approximately 80 people concerned about the spill.
After an hour's briefing from House Democrat Jim Frishe and a liaison from Senator Bill Nelson's office, participants then broke into small teams, agreeing to perform a variety of different tasks in the coming weeks, such as phone banking, organizing volunteers, writing op-eds, social networking and raising funds.
At one point, an attendee spoke disparagingly of Dick Cheney and BP, prompting organizer Harrelson to interject. "We're dealing with the reality of what's happening," she said, her voice rising above the din. "What can we do to keep this from happening again? And more importantly, can we do something about the addiction to oil in this country? Because until we figure out that this is the problem here, then this stuff is going to keep on happening."
"A very delicate situation"
This "stuff" that is the enormous Gulf Coast oil spill has not only caused fear and loathing for millions of Floridians and others across the country, but also created anxieties for local hotel and restaurant owners, who fear that tourists may avoid Pinellas County, which depends on tourism as the area's #1 economic driver.
David Downing is assistant director of Visit St. Pete/Clearwater, the region's convention and visitors bureau. He says the threat of the oil spill makes "this a very delicate situation we have to weigh… Any decision we have to make in a message to the consumer has to be very carefully considered, which is why we take this on a day-by-day basis."
Downing says hoteliers and others who rely on tourism face a "perception problem," and the only way to combat that is with "the actualities" of what's happening. (By the end of last week Visit St.Pete/Clearwater featured Webcam shots from the Don CeSar on St. Pete Beach and Pier 60 in Clearwater, both looking pristine.)
Gregg Nicklaus, president of the Sirata Beach Resort in St. Pete Beach, said late last week that he had been "inundated with concerns about whether this will be an economic debacle," but said the reality obviously lies in BP's success in capping the well. "We may be fortunate," he said. "Right now 1,200 miles of beaches in Florida have not been affected yet, and that's important for people to understand. Do not change your plans based on the hysteria that is coming from some of the media sources."
Last week Carol Dover, CEO of the Florida Restaurant and Lodging Association, told the Orlando Sentinel that the issue of offshore drilling is now over. "We're adamantly opposed to it," she said. Likewise, Richard Maladecki, president of Visit Florida, a tourist industry group, said his group, which a year ago agreed to study the issue, will now "re-review it."
The fact that those organizations had even been open to drilling in the first place, considering that their lifeblood is promotion of the state's white sandy beaches, demonstrates how the opposition had eroded in recent years, propelled in part by gasoline going up to $4 a gallon back in 2008.
"Off the table" in Tallahassee?
The pro-drilling agenda was promulgated by Florida's incoming legislative leaders, Senator Mike Haridopolos and Representative Dean Cannon. In 2009 and into this year, they conducted a year-long "study" of drilling within 3-10 miles of Florida's coast that inspired the "Hands Against the Sand" rally in February.
The duo's determination petrified their critics, but now they believe the Deepwater Horizon incident has changed the equation in Tallahassee.
Has it really? Well, Dean Cannon sounds convinced. Last week the House Speaker-designate confessed that the issue was now "off the table." And Haridopolos? Apparently he had his come-to-Jesus moment after taking an aerial tour over the spill in the Gulf, saying it was "a game changer." That was more declarative than he'd been a week earlier, when he mused aloud about "sabotage" being a possible culprit in the disaster that killed 11 BP workers.
Cannon/Haridopolos' previous campaign for drilling close to our shores was considered even more troublesome in that many of the lobbyists in a group promoting the plan had refused to disclose who they were. Pinellas County Commissioner Ken Welch, who argued against the proposal in a debate at Florida State University last fall, says those advocates were "selling Florida a bill of goods."
But the proposed Constitutional amendment against drilling would "drive a stake in the heart" of the Cannon/Haridopolos proposal, according to the bill's co-sponsor, Sarasota Democrat Keith Fitzgerald. While some state Republicans say the ballot measure is pure politics and unnecessary at this time, Fitzgerald counters that "as members of the Legislature we [he and St. Petersburg Democrat Rep. Rick Kriseman] know that bad ideas, when they're attached to special interests, ofen become vampires. They rise from the dead."
"This is war"
Will the spill also be a "game-changer" in Washington? Hopes are now being directed toward the U.S. Senate, where a climate change bill that has been sitting around for nearly a year was finally introduced this week by John Kerry and Joe Lieberman.
Opinions vary as to what the oil spill means for the legislation. Florida Democrat Bill Nelson says offshore drilling needs to be stripped out of any bill, which means it won't pass, since he believes it would be difficult to get 60 Senators to support that. Arizona Republican Jon Kyl agrees, saying that any legislation that includes putting a price on carbon emissions and more nuclear power must also have expanded oil and gas exploration, which is probably a non-starter in the wake of the current disaster.
And then there's the president of the United States, who has angered environmentalists by speaking up in the past for "clean coal," nuclear power and, on March 31, a plan that would open up the eastern Gulf to oil and natural gas drilling, moving drilling as close as 125 miles off Florida's coast. (On April 30 the administration said no new offshore drilling leases will be issued until after a "thorough review" of the Deepwater Horizon incident.)
Commissioner Ken Welch, who says he's a strong supporter of Obama, nevertheless said he'd like to hear the president recalibrate this position. "The risk is too great, the rewards too little," he says.
The U.S. currently gets approximately 37 percent of its energy from petroleum, and another 23 percent from natural gas. Supporters of oil usage say that no matter how odious people might feel about Big Oil today, the country may not be ready to dump the fuel for alternatives that don't exist in large enough quantities to handle the country's voracious energy needs.
Hogwash, charges Frank Jackalone, the senior field-organizing manager for the Sierra Club in Florida. "The first real set of real electric cars are coming out this year that won't use any oil. If we went into emergency mode and said we're going to get rid of oil in the same way we put a man on the moon in 1969, then in a few years we can largely be off oil. We have enough in existing wells, there's no doubt about that."
And journalist and educator Richard Heinberg, who has written extensively on oil depletion, says that the oil spill is just another wakeup call for this country to begin switching to renewables. He says it's time to reject the assumption that the country can't get off oil.
"We will get off of oil because it won't be there [in the future]. The only question is: Are we going to do this kicking and screaming and bloodied and battered, or are we going to plan for it?"
That's what Sierra Club activist Cathy Harrelson was asking of those who attended last week's Hands Across the Sands event. "If we don't realize that energy is the currency that we're living under today, and you don't realize that this is World War II, the Cold War and the Space Race all wrapped into one, we need renewables now. Not only are we clearing up, but were making a statement. Transition time is over. We wasted that time. …This is environmental, economic and social policy all wrapped up into one, so when I'm talking about political action… this is war."
But this is Florida, where progressive actions don't seem to come naturally to the majority party in Tallahassee. Sarasota's Fitzgerald says he wants to work with "anybody and everybody, not just the environmental community, but the business community, not just Democrats, but Republicans."
And while a Florida ban on offshore drilling excites critics, that wouldn't have prevented BP from setting up its rigs off of Louisiana's coast. And if the spill gets grabbed by the Gulf of Mexico's Loop Current and heads south, the Florida Keys and the east coast of Florida could realize all too clearly the dangers of offshore drilling anywhere.
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This article appears in May 13-19, 2010.