Trump’s Offshore-Drilling Dream Is a Recipe for Poisoning the Oceans

Seven months later, just eleven kilometres from the coral garden, a blowout on BP’s Deepwater Horizon drilling rig caused an explosion that killed eleven workers and sent oil gushing up from the seafloor. By the time the spill was finally capped, three months later, seven hundred and eighty million litres of crude had billowed into the water—the largest marine oil spill in history. Cordes was horrified, but he hoped that his coral forest would be safe: oil floats, because it’s lighter than water.

When his team returned to the deep-sea site, however, its brilliant colors were smothered under a blanket of fluffy gray scum. Mucus oozed out of the coral stems, a telltale response to trauma. The researchers realized that a mixture of oil, plankton, and a chemical dispersant—used to break up slicks before they choke coastal ecosystems—had rained down onto the seafloor.

“It was shocking,” Cordes told me.

“Everything kind of stopped.” Cordes’s career took a dramatic turn. He would no longer study the unspoiled biodiversity of the Gulf’s corals.

Instead, he thought of the tainted ecosystems as E.

R. patients; he would conduct a forensic damage assessment.

“This was disaster response,” he told me.

“We needed to see who had survived. We needed to get to work.” In the years since then, Cordes and his team have followed nearly three hundred individual coral colonies within sixteen kilometres of the spill, recording minuscule changes in color, branch lengths, and physical integrity.

One of the researchers on the project found that coral colonies died when they were more than half-covered by the petrochemical goo.

According to Cordes’s estimates, twenty-five per cent of the corals he studied have either died or show no signs of recovery. Some were probably centuries old. Cordes’s cohort of scientists helped to show that the devastation of oil spills goes far beyond our coasts, where birds and fish are the most visible victims.

In the surface waters of the open ocean, plankton can absorb oil compounds, compromising their ability to photosynthesize and produce oxygen. When they die and sink through the water column, other marine animals eat their remains, toxins and all. Fish embryos that grow in the presence of oil may be born with heart defects, as well as spine and skull deformities.

Still, he took comfort in the idea that American offshore drilling—and therefore many oil spills—might eventually be relegated to history. The Deepwater Horizon disaster sparked new regulations. Oil companies began to turn away from the areas he studied and toward deep-water deposits in other places, including the southern Caribbean and the West African coast.

“We were ramping down, at least in U.S. waters,” Cordes said. Then Donald Trump took office for the second time, and in his Inaugural Address he told the nation, “We will drill, baby, drill.” This past November, the U.S. Department of the Interior released plans to lease up to 1.27 billion acres of public waters for new offshore-drilling efforts.

(Such plans don’t automatically translate into new rigs; leases had been available for years, including under the Biden Administration, but regulatory costs and low oil prices had limited their appeal.) The Center for Biological Diversity soon warned that, if the Trump Administration carried out its plans, it could cause more than four thousand oil spills—not including large-scale disasters like Deepwater Horizon.

“These catastrophic incidents will become more likely as the Trump administration rolls back offshore drilling safety rules,” the Center said on January 6th. The Trump Administration went on to rescind key regulations from the National Environmental Policy Act, and to exempt drilling projects in the Gulf from Endangered Species Act requirements.

In the past month, since the U.S. and Israel began waging war in Iran, oil prices have spiked, which incentivizes fossil-fuel companies to drill new wells. On March 9th, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management released an estimate of undiscovered oil and gas reserves in U.S. waters; two days later, it sold twenty-five leases, covering a hundred and forty-one thousand acres in the Gulf of Mexico, at record-low royalty rates. Two days after that, the agency greenlit Kaskida, a new five-billion-dollar ultra-deep drilling project southwest of New Orleans, which could start pumping eighty thousand barrels of oil a day as early as 2029.

The Gulf is open for business again, and Cordes is bracing himself.

“The more drilling we do, the more oil we’re going to release into the environment,” he said.

“It’s really that simple.” In the past fifty years, he said, North American waters have seen three catastrophic spills: Ixtoc I, in 1979; Exxon Valdez, in 1989; and Deepwater Horizon, in 2010.

“It’s been fifteen years since we’ve had one,” Cordes said.

“You can do the math. We’re just about due for another.” Summerland Beach is a mile-long crest of sand just down the coast from Santa Barbara.

The Santa Ynez Mountains rise directly to the north, pinning Highway 1 tightly to the coast. On most days, the surf is loud enough to mask the steady purr of cars. In the eighteen-nineties, oil drillers tapped into pools beneath the sand; new wells crept all the way to the surf’s edge, and eventually into the water.

Droves of workmen were hired to build sturdy piers. By 1896, the offshore rigs were operational; their pipes extended down through several metres of water and a couple hundred more of seafloor sediment. A bust inevitably followed.

In 1903, a vicious winter storm reduced most of the piers to splinters, and by 1906 offshore oil production at Summerland had all but ceased. Still, a threshold had been crossed: Offshore wells proliferated. Steel piers replaced wooden structures, and rigs reached farther from shore.

Along the Gulf of Mexico coast, drilling ships allowed for mobile “overwater” operations. Floating platforms moved into deeper waters. Between 1954 and 1971, offshore oil production in the United States expanded more than tenfold.

Off the coast of Summerland, standalone platforms named Hazel, Hilda, and Heidi were erected in California’s waters, which extended five and a half kilometres from shore. Beyond that, in federal waters, were Hogan, Houchin, and Platform A. On January 28, 1969, a drill extending eleven hundred metres into the sea floor beneath Platform A punched through a layer of rock and into a pocket of oil. When the crew retracted the drill to replace its bit, an overpowering jet of oil fountained from the well.

They managed to plug the pipe, but growing subterranean pressure created cracks in the sea floor. Oil rushed through the sediment and rock and blackened the water. Eleven million litres of oil spread across an area of two thousand square kilometres.

Even after the leaks were plugged with cement, rivulets of oil persisted for months, and the oil spill’s ecological and cultural impacts lasted even longer. Dead seals and dolphins washed ashore. Fishermen found lobsters and crabs painted black and weighed down by oil.

It was the birds, though, that seized the public’s attention and launched a movement. From Ventura to Santa Barbara, gulls, pelicans, murres, and grebes staggered along beaches, unable to fly. Locals mobilized to save them; a nearby zoo recommended feeding the birds butter to emulsify and flush out the oil in their throats.