President Trump is once again pushing to expand offshore oil and gas drilling off California’s coast — and calling it “national security.” Californians have heard this before. We also know what it risks: our coastline, our coastal economy, and the climate stability our communities depend on. And offshore drilling isn’t the only front. The same push is now aimed at California’s public lands, proposing to open more than one million acres statewide — including roughly 400,000 acres of parks, beaches, ecological reserves, and surrounding lands on the Central Coast and beyond — to new oil and gas drilling.

From the Birthplace of Earth Day: A Warning and a Way Forward

By U.S. Congressman Salud Carbajal and Sigrid Wright, CEO of the Community Environmental Council

In downtown Santa Barbara, less than a block from where one of the first Earth Day festivals took place in 1970, we recently gathered environmental and community leaders around a single question: What happens when Washington, D.C. walks away? We were joined by environmental leaders, policymakers, researchers, city officials, youth leaders, and non-profit advocates. Some arrived carrying hope, others exhaustion, most both. All were there because they could feel something shifting — and not for the better.