By JAD MOUAWAD


More than 40 years ago, a thick and pungent oil slick washed over the sandy-white beaches of Santa Barbara and went on to soil 65 kilometers of Southern California’s scenic coastline.

The Santa Barbara disaster of 1969 resulted from a blowout at an offshore platform that spilled 100,000 barrels of crude oil - almost 16 million liters in all. It marked a turning point in the oil industry’s expansion, shelving any chance for drilling along most of America’s coastlines and leading to the creation of dozens of state and federal environmental laws.

Is history about to repeat itself in the Gulf of Mexico?

It may seem so. Emotions are running high as an oil slick washes over the Gulf Coast’s fragile ecosystem, threatening fisheries, shrimp farmers and perhaps even Florida’s tourism industry. Thousands could see their livelihoods ruined. A cleanup could take years.

Beyond railing at BP, the company that owns the well now spewing oil, some environmental groups have demanded an end to offshore exploration and urged President Obama to restore a moratorium on drilling. The White House has said no new drilling permits will be approved until the causes of the accident are known. Additional government oversight seems inevitable.

But whatever the magnitude of the spill at the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, 80 kilometers off the coast of Louisiana, it is unlikely to seriously impede offshore drilling in the Gulf. The country needs the oil - and the jobs.

Much has changed since 1969. The nation’s demand for oil has surged, rising more than 35 percent over the past four decades, while domestic production has declined by a third. Oil imports have doubled, and the United States now buys more than 12 million barrels of oil a day from other countries, about two-thirds of its needs.

The politics have also changed. Republicans want to boost domestic oil production to reduce America’s dependence on foreign oil. High on the Democratic agenda is reducing carbon emissions that cause global warming. To bridge the gap, the White House has backed a compromise that would expand domestic offshore exploration in exchange for Republican support for its climate policy.

There is another reason offshore drilling is likely to continue. Most of the big new discoveries lie deep beneath the world’s oceans, including in the Gulf of Mexico. For the oil companies, these reserves are worth hundreds of billions of dollars and represent the industry’s future.

The Gulf of Mexico is the fastestgrowing source of oil in the United States. It accounts for a third of the nation’s domestic supplies, or 1.7 million barrels a day, mostly from the deepwater region.

A similar expansion is happening around the world, most notably off the coast of Brazil, where billions of barrels of oil reserves have been discovered. Big discoveries have also been made off the coasts of Ghana and Sierra Leone by Anadarko Petroleum, using technology pioneered in the Gulf of Mexico, where it is a leading explorer.

This latest spill could have the same pronounced impact on public policy as the Exxon Valdez accident in 1989, which dumped 257,000 barrels of oil into the sensitive waters of Alaska’s Prince William Sound. After that spill, tankers were forced to follow more stringent safety measures, and the owner of a rig or vessel was made legally responsible for cleaning up a spill. But tankers still roam the oceans.

Some in the environmental movement believe that public outrage will also push the government to aggressively develop alternatives to oil. They argue that the risks of oil production far outweigh the benefits.

“This is potentially a watershed environmental disaster,” said Wesley P. Warren, the director of programs at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “This one is a gigantic wake-up call on the need to move beyond oil as an energy source.”

But developing credible, cheap and abundant alternatives to oil will take many decades, and in the meantime, cars need gasoline and planes need kerosene. The United States is still the world’s top oil consumer by far. Even as China grows, the United States consumes twice as much oil.

In the wake of this Gulf spill, the government almost certainly will tighten oversight and force the industry to rethink its approach to safety in an effort to reconcile offshore production and safe environmental practices.

“We have not yet learned how to manage the challenges associated with energy development,” said Steve Cochran of the Environmental Defense Fund. “We assume our practices are safe, until a disaster strikes. That’s the hubris of mankind.”

But are there acceptable alternatives?

“A fossil-fuel free future isn’t inconceivable but it is decades away,” wrote Samuel Thernstrom, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, on The Times’s Room for Debate blog. “Meanwhile, we can’t drill our problems away, but drilling still has a role to play.”


The Gulf of Mexico is the fastest-growing source of oil in America. An oil spill on the surface of the Gulf. / PATRICK SEMANSKY/ASSOCIATED PRESS