‘Defending Paradise’: Julia Louis-Dreyfus Takes on Big Oil in California
ROLLING STONE
‘Defending Paradise’: Julia Louis-Dreyfus Takes on Big Oil in California
Julia Louis-Dreyfus has three words for the nation’s political elite: “Grow a set.”
The acclaimed actress is best known for playing iconic women, from Elaine Benes in Seinfeld, to Vice President Selina Meyer in Veep, and diabolical CIA director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine in the new Avengers movie, Thunderbolts*.
Louis-Dreyfus is also a longtime environmental and political activist. She has made it her personal mission to get California Governor Gavin Newsom, President Donald Trump, and every other political leader she can wrangle to understand that oil drilling is for suckers — and protecting our climate and the economies that thrive off of a healthy and sustainable environment is the stuff of true patriotism. It is not always an easy sell.
Seated in her Santa Barbara, California, home with her dog Georgie vying for her attention — I fail to ask if he’s named after that George — it is clear that Louis-Dreyfus is pissed off.
“The idea of this decrepit pipeline that failed so miserably and catastrophically a decade ago, the idea of that restarting is an impossible thing to contemplate, and it really has to be fought,” she tells me via Zoom.
A decade ago, one of the worst oil disasters in California’s history occurred not far from Louis-Dreyfus’ home. On May 19, 2015, a massive, corroded oil pipeline ruptured, releasing 140,000 gallons of heavy crude oil onto Santa Barbara’s Refugio State Beach. Oil poured into one of the most biologically rich areas of the Pacific Ocean, a key habitat for endangered whales and sea turtles, sea otters, sharks, and more than 500 fish species. It was carried down the coast past Los Angeles, oiling 150 miles of beaches and coastline.
In June 2015, I walked the beach at the Santa Monica pier, 100 miles from Refugio. A fresh line of thick and pungent oil tar balls — some as large as a hand — lined the sand along the tideline, with new oil from the spill deposited with incoming waves. The spill devastated fisheries, tourism, and areas sacred to the native Chumash peoples. Then-Governor Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency, deploying the state’s Attorney General Kamala Harris.
Longtime Santa Barbara residents Morgan Miller, left, and Josh Marsh, right, walk an oil-coated beach at Refugio State Beach looking for wildlife to rescue on May 19, 2015 in Goleta, California. Al Seib/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images
The oil came from ExxonMobil’s offshore operations. For 10 years, the people of Santa Barbara have successfully kept ExxonMobil from restarting those operations, including the ruptured pipeline. Resistance has been led by Louis-Dreyfus’ friend and ally, Linda Krop, chief counsel of Santa Barbara’s small but mighty Environmental Defense Center.
I first interviewed Krop in 2015 just after the spill. She described watching aghast, the stench nauseating, as thick heavy waves of oil filled the ocean and poured onto Refugio Beach. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” she told me. “It was just devastating.” Last month, Krop and I walked along the same stretch of beach. Children played in the ocean and teenagers took surfing lessons, enjoying a healthy and beautiful shoreline.
Krop is committed to keeping it this way. For 10 years, Krop and her allies have beaten ExxonMobil in the state legislature, the federal government, and in court battles stretching all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“This project is the single largest threat to California’s coast,” Krop tells me.
But now the entire project is poised to restart, with both state and federal agencies granting many of the necessary permits. It is fronted by a new company funded and backed by ExxonMobil — Sable Offshore Oil Corp, which is behaving with what many here describe as a “Trumpian” and “unprecedented” disdain for the law, under the hopeful eyes and dedicated support of the Trump administration. It would be the first newly started oil development off California’s coast in decades, and the single largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the county. The project could also usher in Trump’s plan to open the entire Pacific coast (and nearly all federal waters) to oil and gas drilling.
“President Trump made it clear that American energy should come from American resources,” Trump’s Interior Department said in a statement last week, crowing that “we’ve turned a decade-long shutdown into a comeback story for Pacific production.”
In response to detailed questions, an ExxonMobil spokesperson says that the company completed the sale of these operations with Sable more than a year ago, and passed me off to Sable for additional information.
Louis-Dreyfus and Krop are committed to stopping Trump. They are also clear that the final say on Sable’s project ultimately rests not with Trump but with Newsom, who they argue is failing to act.
“He has an opportunity right now to do the right thing,” Louis-Dreyfus says of the governor. “This is far from over.”
“I will fight for my home”
On March 13, Louis-Dreyfus joined legendary actress and activist Jane Fonda for a press conference at the Environmental Defense Center in opposition to Sable’s project. Louis-Dreyfus then addressed a packed house of more than 500 people who filled the La Cumbre Junior High School in Santa Barbara for a town hall on Sable. Louis-Dreyfus and Krop were the final speakers, following presentations by representatives from nine state agencies with jurisdiction over Sable’s project.
Krop warmly introduced Louis-Dreyfus as a “local shero” and “a champion of fighting the fossil fuel industry and trying to protect the climate, our way of life, and a clean and healthy environment.”
Louis-Dreyfus has a decades-long history of environmental and political activism. For her podcast, Wiser Than Me — just named one of the best podcasts of all time by TIME magazine — she interviews older women, including giants like labor leader Dolores Huerta, conservationist Jane Goodall, and acclaimed marine biologist Sylvia Earle, who are “brimming with the kind of unapologetic attitude and wisdom that only comes with age.”
She was a staunch supporter of both Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris’ presidential campaigns against Trump. Last year, she moderated a forum of Democratic women governors and introduced the event as “what J.D. Vance might call a coven of semi-menstruating witches.”
But for Louis-Dreyfus, the fight against Sable is uniquely personal. Her husband was born and raised in Santa Barbara, where his family has lived for generations. Her family previously split their time between Santa Barbara and Los Angeles, but that was before their L.A. home was destroyed in the Palisades fire early this year.
“The climate crisis is obviously real and upon us — it’s not coming, we’re living it right now. That was certainly felt by me during these devastating fires,” Louis-Dreyfus tells me. “Santa Barbara is a paradise worth defending and protecting,” she adds, explaining that the risk of this oil project “is very close to home… and something that is not possible to turn my back on.”
Louis-Dreyfus looked resolved as she approached the podium, scanning the sea of bright red T-shirts worn by the project’s opponents reading, “Don’t Enable Sable,” and the hundreds of competing hats emblazoned with Sable’s logo that were worn by the pipeline’s supporters. Confronting the obvious tension in the room, she leaned into the mic, stared down the audience, and said, “I smell a rat.”
“I am here because I’m a resident of Santa Barbara County,” she began. “And this project is a rat.”
She pulled no punches, describing the pipeline 10 years ago as “crap” and the people responsible for supervising it as irresponsible. “Thankfully, the whole decrepit thing was shut down,” she said. “But now, Sable Oil from Texas is trying to restart the very same, dangerously inadequate pipeline that ruptured. And incredibly, they’re trying to do it with zero environmental review and zero opportunity for public input. That is insane. It makes me furious. I know it makes you furious.” She called the project a catastrophe waiting to happen.
As Louis-Dreyfus spoke, the audience erupted in applause and hoots of support, though there were some jeers and boos, too. The Sable supporters then rose and began filing out of the auditorium en masse. Unfazed, she continued on, calling out Sable for ignoring cease-and-desist orders issued by the California Coastal Commission and for behaving as “an incompetent operator trying to grease the wheels of government.” She declared, “We’re not going to let this happen without a fight,” adding: “I will certainly fight for my home.”
“Sable Offshore management, employees, contractors, labor and supporters showed up today in good faith to participate in a town hall meeting where only government officials were on the agenda to present,” Sable vice president, Steve Rusch, told the Santa Barbara news outlet Noozhawk. “Project opponents forced the moderators to give them dedicated time to present biased information and smear the project. The opponents’ self-serving fundraiser and rally was not an appropriate use of public resources.”
Louis-Dreyfus later tells me that she was surprised when Sable’s supporters walked out on her, and she wishes they’d stayed. “I was speaking truth to power pretty forcefully… and so they got pissed off,” she says. “I felt emboldened by it, to be honest. It was fuel, the good kind of fuel.”
Krop says that Louis-Dreyfus’ speech was significant to those in the audience. “You could feel it in the room,” she said. “It was the kind of support people needed to hear.”
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