Instead, Catherine Reheis-Boyd, president of the Western States Petroleum Association, put out a perfunctory statement emphasizing that any such drilling would be subject to “stringent” and “overlapping” state rules as well as federal rules. And Golden State environmentalists and elected leaders pointed to all the different tools with which California could thwart the Trump administration initiative.

The most obvious is that the State Lands Commission controls and has long-established authority over the first three miles off California’s coast. No energy exploration company will pursue an offshore drilling project without certainty that it can get the oil or natural gas it pumps to refineries and related infrastructure onshore. Assemblyman Al Muratsuchi, D-Torrance, and Sen. Hannah Beth Jackson, D-Santa Barbara, announced that they are preparing legislation to forbid the Lands Commission from approving new pipelines or infrastructure related to new offshore drilling. If the state of California blocks the construction of pipelines offshore and needed facilities onshore, offshore drilling isn’t economically feasible.

Former Coastal Commission lawyer sees plan as ‘grandstanding’

The huge obstacles led Ralph Faust, former general counsel for the California Coastal Commission, to tell the Los Angeles Times that the Trump administration’s plan “just seems like grandstanding.”

The Coastal Commission also has tools that give it a potential veto over what is happening in the federally controlled waters beyond three miles from shore – if it finds federally sanctioned actions are incompatible with the state’s offshore management plan. The federal courts have at times sided with states and at times with Washington when such claims are made.

While California is the third-largest oil-producing state in the United States – after Texas and North Dakota – its untapped potential has frustrated energy exploration companies for decades. No new offshore drilling, such as the facility off the Santa Barbara coast that is pictured on this post, has been approved in more than 30 years.

On land, some geologists think there are vast amounts of oil in the Monterey shale – a massive underground area along the Central California coast and inland – that could be recovered with fracking. Similar finds have yielded billions of dollars for oil exploration firms and substantial new tax revenues in North Dakota, Texas, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

But while Gov. Jerry Brown initially seemed intrigued by the possibility of drilling in the Monterey shale after taking office in 2011, his interest disappeared after the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s 2014 decision to sharply reduce estimates of recoverable oil under the Golden State.

Florida’s request for exception quickly granted; California gripes ignored

Instead of grandstanding, as the former Coastal Commission counsel suggested, it’s also possible that the Trump administration and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke are trolling Gov. Jerry Brown and other Democratic leaders in the deep-blue Golden State.

On Tuesday, Zinke announced he was dropping plans to lease drilling sites off Florida at the request of the state’s governor, Rick Scott, a Republican.

Zinke has offered no comment on the far more vociferous objections to his offshore drilling plan from California’s top elected officials.

(Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

A strong majority of Californians say they support tougher limits on greenhouse gas emissions and more ambitious renewable energy goals to combat climate change, according to a statewide poll released late Wednesday.

Meanwhile, nearly two-thirds of those surveyed said global warming is contributing to California’s ongoing drought. About half said global warming is a “very serious” threat to the state’s future, according to the poll, conducted by the Public Policy Institute of California, a San Francisco-based nonpartisan research center.

“At a time when many Californians are making a connection between the current drought and climate change, there is strong support for expanding the state’s efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” said Mark Baldassare, the institute’s president, in a news release.

Results of the survey — titled Californians & the environment — are based on phone interviews with 1,702 California adult residents from in July.

Of those who took part, 44 percent said they were registered Democrats; 28 percent were Republicans; and 24 percent independents or decline-to-state voters, according to the institute.

Sixty-four percent of respondents said they believe there’s a connection between the drought and global warming, while 28 percent said they saw no link.

Spray irrigation on a field in the Imperial Valley in southern California. This type of irrigation is more efficient than flood irrigation that is popular in this region. Still, in the high temperatures of this desert region a lot of the water evaporates, leaving the salts, that are dissolved in the Colorado River water that is used, on the soil.

The institute has not asked that question in the past, said PPIC spokeswoman Linda Strean.

California is mired in its fourth straight year of severe drought. While not going so far as to say climate change has caused the drought, recent scientific studies have said global warming exacerbates the extreme high pressure systems that block rainfall in the Western United States.

PPIC’s past surveys have found strong support for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, including majorities across party lines a decade ago who favored California’s landmark emissions reduction law, AB32. That law requires the state to cut greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.

It was signed into law in 2006 by Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

“A strong partisan divide has opened up since then,” the institute observed in its release.

Now, 79 percent of Democrats and 74 percent of independents favor the law compared with 46 percent of Republicans, the institute said.

The poll also found that large majorities of Californians favor new, more aggressive goals for combating climate change.

Eighty-two percent of those polled said they support a proposal to require half of California’s electricity come from renewable sources by 2030. And 73 percent favor cutting petroleum use in vehicles by 50 percent.

Those are key pieces of Senate Bill 350, a bill introduced earlier this year by Senate leader Kevin de Léon.

Other findings from the PPIC survey include:

• 88 percent of adults favor building more solar power stations in California.
• 78 percent want to boost tax credits and other incentives for rooftop solar panels.
• 49 percent favor building the Keystone XL pipeline, while 38 percent are opposed.
• 56 percent oppose increased use of fracking to extract oil and natural gas. It’s the highest level of opposition since PPIC started asking about it in 2013.
• 53 percent approve of Gov. Jerry Brown’s job performance, while 47 percent approve of the way he handles environmental issues.
• 39 percent approve of the California Legislature’s job performance.
• 57 percent approve of President Barack Obama’s job performance.
• 29 percent approve of Congress’ performance.

Contact reporter Chris Nichols at chris@calwatchdog.com or on Twitter @ChrisTheJourno