What’s a big oil lobbyist doing chairing a marine protection panel?

What’s a big oil lobbyist doing chairing a marine protection panel?

Marine 'guardian' wants less regs for big oil, more for public

by Dan Bacher

Catherine Reheis-Boyd, a big oil lobbyist who serves as president of the Western States Petroleum Association, claims that the oil industry is too heavily regulated in California.

Citing President Obama's order to federal agencies to review existing regulations and to streamline or eliminate those regulations "that are not smart, unnecessary, unreasonably costly or no longer needed," Reheis-Boyd, argues for reducing "costly" regulations imposed on the oil industry in a statement, "Review of Regulations a Welcome Development," on the association's website (http://www.wspa.org).

"Few industries are more heavily regulated than California’s petroleum industry," says Reheis-Boyd. "While the environment, workers, and consumers have benefited from many of these regulations, other regulations are duplicative, no longer needed or are unduly expensive. They often require costly solutions to problems that could be solved more easily and less expensively if our industry had the flexibility to do so."

"California, with an unemployment rate stuck at more than 12 percent, would do well to take a serious look at reducing the crushing load of regulations it imposes on businesses. Surely there are ways to ease that burden, promote job creation and restore economic vitality without putting the environment or consumers at risk," she notes.

However, this call for less regulation of the oil industry is extremely hypocritical, when one considers that Reheis-Boyd wears another hat as well: “marine guardian.” Ex-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger made her the chair of his Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA) Blue Ribbon Task Force for California’s South Coast and a member of the task forces for the North Central Coast and North Coast.

During this widely-contested process, she and other task force members went out of their way to take water pollution, oil spills and drilling, military testing, wave energy projects, corporate aquaculture, habitat destruction and all other human impacts on the ocean other than fishing and gathering off the table in the so-called marine protected areas created under the privately funded initiative.

This unjust implementation of the law under Schwarzenegger violated both the letter and the spirit of the Marine Life Protection Act of 1999, a landmark law that aimed to comprehensively protect the ocean by creating a network of marine protected areas along the California coast.

Her attitude is to impose the burden of "protection" on recreational anglers, commercial fishermen and the public, who are more heavily regulated in California on any place on the planet, and let everybody else off the hook.

Reheis-Boyd wants new oil drilling off California coast

At the same time she oversaw the creation of fake marine protected areas in California, Reheis-Boyd repeatedly called for new oil drilling off the California coast. Reheis-Boyd told the San Francisco Chronicle on March 31, 2010 that she hopes the Obama administration "will eventually allow new drilling off the California coast." (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/03/31/MNU41CO3O4.DTL)

“We are disappointed,” Reheis-Boyd said, in response to Obama’s March 30, 2010 announcement that the U.S. will begin drilling for oil in the waters off the Atlantic Coast and the Gulf of Mexico - and NOT in the waters off California. “When you look at the resources here, they’re considerable.”

Critics of her appointment to the panels believe that she has been placed there to protect the oil industry's interests - and to make sure that so-called "Marine Protected Areas" don't conflict with the operation of existing offshore oil rigs or the installation of new rigs if the Obama administration lifts the ban on oil drilling off the California coast.

"There are more than 10 billion barrels of crude oil reserves located off the California coast and huge reserves of natural gas," Reheis-Boyd said last year in a "A Message from WSPA" on the oil industry group's website (http://www.wspa.org/wspa-message.aspx?id=17). "Our industry has demonstrated over the past 40 years it can and does operate safely in the marine environment."

I find it beyond shameful that the "leaders" of corporate "environmental" NGOs who claim that the MLPA process is "open, inclusive and transparent" refuse to speak out against the travesty of having a big oil lobbyist chair the South Coast MLPA task force and sit on the task forces for the North Coast and North Central Coast.

Corruption, conflicts of interest taint MLPA process

The MLPA process has been ridden with corruption, conflicts of interest and institutional racism since Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger privatized the initiative in 2004 by directing the Department of Fish and Game to sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the shadowy Resources Legacy Foundation, a private corporation.

The initiative, until June 2010, made no provisions whatsoever to protect Tribal gathering rights. No Tribal representatives were appointed to the MLPA Blue Ribbon Task Force until 2010 and no Tribal scientists have ever been appointed to the MLPA Science Advisory Team, in spite of the fact that the Yurok and other Tribes have large natural resources departments that employ numerous scientists.

The MLPA officials have violated numerous state, federal and international laws, including the California Public Records Act, the California Administrative Procedure Act, the Bagley-Keene Open Meetings Act, the American Indian Religious Freedom Act and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

However, the corruption and violations of law are finally being exposed. George Osborn, spokesman for the Partnership for Sustainable Oceans (PSO), on February 2 presented the California Fish and Game Commission with a groundbreaking 25 page report containing numerous emails and correspondence documenting illegal private, non-public meetings of Marine Life Protection Act Initiative officials.

“After reviewing the documents turned over to us, which previously the BRTF had improperly withheld from the public, we now have evidence, indicating that the public meetings of the BRTF have been an elaborately staged Kabuki performance, choreographed and rehearsed down to the last detail, even to the crafting of motions, in scheduled private meetings held before the so-called public meetings of the BRTF," said Osborn. "Clearly, this has not been the most open and transparent process, as it has so often been described.”

The Coastside Fishing Club, United Anglers of Southern California, and Robert C. Fletcher filed suit in San Diego Superior Court in late January, seeking to overturn South Coast and North Central Coast MLPA closures, alleging violations of the State Administrative Procedure Act.

To see Osborn's testimony, go to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7_04BC1acA

To see the entire set of BRTF private meeting documents, go to the San Diego Freedivers website:http://www.sandiegofreedivers.com/MLPABRTFofflinemeetingdocumentation.pdf