From rocket ships to oil rigs—how twisted does a tale have to be to connect the two? I’ve got a dense story for you, but density is my brand. I promise this will all come together, like a hospital gown.
SpaceX, proposed oil rigs, and the Commerce Department’s review of California’s coastal-management program are all pieces in the fight over who gets to control California’s coast. The current administrations in Washington and California fundamentally disagree about what the coast is for. One would think it would be for California.
Let’s pick up the story where Elon Musk decides to go to Mars. Musk poured money into SpaceX and by 2024, Vandenberg Space Force Base in Santa Barbara County launched 46 SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets. Musk aimed to increase the launches to 100 per year for the rapid deployment of the Starlink satellite internet constellation.
The California Coastal Commission (CCC) was alarmed by this and began reviewing the proposed increases. California voters created the California Coastal Commission in 1972 to give the state a strong voice in protecting its coast. SpaceX said it didn’t need CCC permission. This clash over who gets to say yes to a rocket bizarrely turns into a struggle over who gets to say no to an oil rig. If you’re confused, we’re on the same page.
The CCC objections cite concerns over increased sonic booms, wildlife disruptions, and public coastal closures. After reviewing the proposed increase and repeatedly seeking information that SpaceX and the Air Force did not provide, the commission objected to the increase in launches (eenews.net).
ENTER PRESIDENT TRUMP, NOT A FAN OF CALIFORNIA
“I hate the way California is being run” (January, 2026). “Maybe we’re just going to have to make them pay… because they don’t listen to us” (October, 2020).
Connected to Musk in the good-old-billionaire-boy network, in August 2025 Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to accelerate commercial space development. Two months later, the Air Force authorized the increase. But Trump’s order did something else. On May 20, 2026, the Commerce Department ordered a full formal review of California’s Coastal Management Program, the legal machinery that gives California a voice when federal activities affect its coast. Emma Haydocy, Senior Manager of Coasts and Climate Initiative at the Surfrider Foundation says attempts followed in Congress to restrict the CCC and weaken provisions of the Coastal Zone Management Act (CZMA), but those legislative efforts went nowhere.
The surfers’ paddle-out
On August 4, 2026, the Surfrider Foundation gathered coastal activists online to explain why they believe the California coast is facing one of its most dangerous attacks on the California Coastal Commission. Surfrider acts as a bare feet on the beach watchdog for coastal protection. They also warned that the federal government is moving toward possible new oil and gas leasing off California. Surfrider thinks those two developments belong in the same story. The federal government says it is conducting a program review — Surfrider says the administration is preparing to take a wrecking ball to California’s coastal protections. Somewhere between those two portrayals lies a question for anybody standing on West Cliff looking out at Monterey Bay: Who gets to decide what happens to the California coast?
CAN WASHINGTON TAKE CALIFORNIA’S VOICE AWAY?
Surfrider believes that’s what the review is really about. Jennifer Savage, Surfrider’s California Policy Associate Director, told the August 4 webinar that the federal government could eventually attempt to defund or withdraw approval from California’s coastal-management program.
“This is an unprecedented action,” Savage said. She said it would not happen overnight. There are procedures, hearings and opportunities for California to respond and she expects any serious attempt to strip California’s program of its federal status to wind up in court. But Savage has no doubt about what she thinks is happening.
“This is a rigged review,” she said, “and our coast is being singled out.”
Emma Haydocy calls the review a weaponization of the federal law that had been passed to allow cooperation between Washington and coastal states. She says that today, California is the target, but tomorrow it could be any state with coastal regulations that conflict with a presidential administration. “It could be Florida,” Haydocy said. “It wasn’t this time, but it really could be any coastal state.”
This odd environmental battle then becomes a battle for states’ rights.
THE NEVER-ENDING STORY
Few people have spent more of their lives fighting for the protection of the California coast than Dan Haifley.
Haifley spent decades with Save Our Shores, served as its Executive Director from 1986 to 1993, helped lead the campaign for the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary and led the successful landmark anti-offshore drilling campaign of the 80s and 90s. He is still very much in the game; he writes about ocean policy and serves on the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary Foundation board.
I asked Dan, “This never ends, does it?”
“No, it never ends and new things keep coming at us. They’re throwing in seabed mining, fracking, offshore oil, ocean space launches, floating nuclear stations, attacking our ability to review federal projects affecting the coast. All at the same time. All at once.”
“How is this different from the fight in the 80s? Is it worse, or just different?”
“We are in a more perilous and risky time than we were four decades ago,” Haifley said. “They’re using every legal mechanism to come after our coast and ocean in California.”
He sees these as part of a pattern.
“One is the Defense Authorization Act. The other is weakening the California Coastal Commission. Another is proposing looking at floating nuclear power stations. Another is looking at fracking, looking at seabed mining, weakening the rules around seabed mining. It’s just a whole suite of tools that they are using to get at the resources on our seafloor or to use the ocean for uses that may be damaging to it.”
Haifley says the administration is gambling with an economic resource as well as an environmental one. The Coastal Commission estimates California supports a $51 billion coast and ocean economy. But it’s hard to put a price tag on the coast itself. The numbers don’t account for beaches available free to the public, clean water, wildlife habitat, erosion protection, carbon sequestration, cultural value, property values tied to ocean views and the value we put on simply knowing that Big Sur, Monterey Bay or Año Nuevo remain intact. The California coast makes us feel whole.
THE TORTOISE AND THE HARE
Then Dan Haifley said something that surprised me and may let me get to sleep tonight. He thinks that the half of a century of fortifying California coastal protections will save it.
“It’s kind of like the tortoise and the hare. The hare is the administration, throwing so many things at us, all at the same time. We’re the tortoise, so we methodically use what we have right in front of us, which is five National Marine Sanctuaries off California, 27 local onshore facilities laws, the courts and the law. And of course, public opinion. I think that we will prevail. It’s just exhausting.” The problem with being the tortoise is that the hare uses executive orders.
Haifley and Surfrider’s bigger worry is what happens if Washington systematically weakens California’s mechanism to protect its coast. In the 80s, Haifley traveled California’s coast helping communities adopt local laws restricting the onshore facilities the offshore petroleum development would need. He describes those local ordinances as a “blue wall.” And now, he says coastal activists are updating and reinforcing that tactic and cites Measure D on the November 3 ballot. Haifley argues that removing existing prohibitions against offshore oil development within California’s national marine sanctuaries would require congressional action.
I ask him, “Has Trump hacked the system to the point that the outcome of the review has already been determined?”
“No, he has not. The Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary staff are NOAA employees. NOAA employees tend to be scientists, educators and subject-matter experts. And they’re there, not for the money, but because they want to serve their country and they want to protect the environment and its resources. And in terms of this review, I’m confident that the career officials and NOAA will be very fair, as they have in past evaluations.”
He’s concerned about when the new evaluation gets above NOAA, up to the commerce secretary level.
“Once you get to Secretary of Commerce (appointed by President Trump), you get more of the political aspect,” Haifley said.
Why does all this bureaucratic process with comments matter? A surfer carrying a protest sign would make a cool photo. A comment paragraph buried in the administrative record might someday help win a lawsuit.
I asked Haifley if this might be about political revenge. His answer indicated it might be more about our history. “California is really the only space on the West Coast where there are offshore oil platforms,” he said. “We have existing infrastructure. So, it’s inviting.”
California offshore oil production was born in 1896, at Summerland near Santa Barbara. As much as we’d like to escape the industrial legacy, we already have the infrastructure, at least in the Santa Barbara area, that could make development in the future more plausible.
I LOVE IT WHEN YOU TALK CRUDE TO ME
The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management has begun a process that could eventually lead to oil-and-gas lease sales off California. Surfrider’s Pete Stauffer said, “We’re pretty certain that most of the California coast, or at least significant chunks of California’s coast, will be included in this offshore drilling plan.”
I independently put the same question to three geologists with knowledge of California petroleum geology: “If you were running a major oil company and spending your own company’s money, would you explore for oil off the Central Coast?”
Dwight Harbaugh said, “Definitely no.”
Vic Madrid, who spent a decade working for Chevron before moving into environmental restoration, agreed with Dwight. “No,” he said. “If I had an oil company, that’s not where I would invest my money.”
Then I asked Rick Stanley, a retired research geologist and expert on Santa Cruz geology. “I don’t think I would,” Stanley said. “I think it’s too risky geologically.”
Three geologists, with three ways of saying, “No.” Not exactly a bidding war.
That doesn’t mean there isn’t petroleum underneath the ocean off Santa Cruz. Stanley says, “It is possible that there is oil… we can’t deny that.” During an offshore exploration program in the 1960s, Shell drilled wells off Santa Cruz and San Mateo counties into a sedimentary basin that Stanley says stretches roughly 80 miles northwest from near Santa Cruz toward the Farallon Islands. The sedimentary rocks are at least 10,000 feet thick in places, he said, and include the Monterey Formation—the oil-rich formation associated with much of California’s petroleum production. How would we find out?
“More wells.” Offshore exploratory wells are expensive ways of purchasing information. Madrid knows that firsthand; during his Chevron years, he spent time on offshore rigs exploring the Monterey Formation near Point Arguello. He remembers exploratory wells during the 1980s costing $6 million to $10 million apiece. Those wells weren’t drilled to pump oil, but they were drilled to find out whether oil worth pumping was there. Today, to drill an exploratory well you’d have to be rich as a Rockefeller. Oh wait, wrong industry to worry about that.
Oil wells wouldn’t pop up for starters anyway. First, it would be seismic exploration to see beneath the seafloor, generating acoustic energy and measuring its return to map underground rock formations and identify structures capable of trapping petroleum.
“If you were gonna drill off Santa Cruz,” Dwight Harbaugh said, “you’d want to know if there’s favorable structures under the seabed.” Which means the environmental battle can begin long before anybody drills a producing well. Harbaugh thinks offshore drilling is a bad trade for the California coast. “Extraction is temporary,” he argues. “A coastline supporting tourism, recreation and communities can keep producing value generation after generation.”
OIL RIG BEHIND STEAMER LANE?
So, can Donald Trump put an oil platform behind Steamer Lane? Not tomorrow, not next year. And after hearing from the geologists, Dan Haifley and the Surfriders, I won’t be looking over a surfer’s shoulder for one.
A federal lease sale is not an oil rig, a federal review of California’s coastal program is not decertification, and a Commerce review does not erase half a century of California coastal law. But the administration does not have to put an oil rig behind Steamer Lane for California to lose. It only has to weaken California’s ability to fight the next federal project.
If California loses federal-consistency authority, Haifley doesn’t think Santa Cruzans will walk outside the next morning and discover an oil platform blocking the sunset. It’s about leverage.
“It would be a lot easier to site federal projects in the California coastal zone and in California federal and state waters than it would have been before,” he said.
The question is whether California will possess the same power tomorrow that it possesses today when Washington proposes the next oil lease, the next seismic survey, a floating nuclear power plant, a space launch, a seabed-mining operation, or maybe something that hasn’t been proposed yet.
WHAT CAN WE DO?
Peter Douglas, the legendary executive director of the California Coastal Commission, liked to say: “The coast is never saved.” People who want to get involved might start with the Surfrider webpage: surfrider.org/action, which tracks current campaigns to protect California’s coast.
Dan Haifley said, “Residents could vote yes on MRichard Stockton traces how SpaceX launches, a new federal review of California’s coastal program and possible offshore oil leasing have converged into a larger fight over who controls California’s coast.easure D on November 3 or vote by mail. Measure D will be on the Santa Cruz County ballot, and every voter in the county can vote on this. It would require that any onshore facility, any zoning changes for onshore facilities, for seabed mining, or offshore oil and gas, be subject to a vote of the people.”
“We’re girding the blue wall,” Haifley said. At last, a wall Santa Cruz likes.
For half a century, Californians have fought tooth and nail to protect the most valuable shoreline on Earth.
It is a major part of our income. We hold it in our hearts, we get married there, we restore ourselves there. It is precious to our spirit.
In 2026, Washington is not just asking “What should happen on California’s coast?” Washington is telling us to shut up about it.
