David Helvarg
Advocates for a healthy ocean, myself included, see the upcoming November elections as a major opportunity. We’ve launched “Sea Party 2018,” which aims to encourage people to vote to protect the ocean and coast. Our focus is on districts in Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, and California, where people regularly come face-to-face with the costs of offshore oil drilling, sea level rise, and ocean pollution.
Momentum has been building for years. Sea Party was originally kicked off in 2015 in Washington, D.C., at a press conference held beneath a ninety-foot inflatable blue whale. Speakers included then-U.S. Representative Sam Farr, Democrat of California, climate activist Bill McKibben and others from Greenpeace, Surfrider, Blue Frontier, and other ocean conservation groups.
Also speaking was U.S. Representative Mark Sanford, Republican of South Carolina, then one of a handful of conservative Republicans opposing offshore drilling that at the time was being proposed by the Obama Administration. After our press conference, the Post and Courier, the largest newspaper in South Carolina, ran an article headlined, “Mark Sanford, from Tea Party to Sea Party.”
Momentum has been building for years.
In June, Sanford lost his primary race in South Carolina’s First District to Katie Arrington, who claimed he was not sufficiently pro-Trump. Since then, she’s affirmed her support for offshore drilling— just not off of South Carolina. That has not convinced at least five of the district’s Republican mayors. All of them have endorsed Democratic candidate Joe Cunningham because of his stronger anti-drilling position.
In Georgia’s First District, Republican incumbent Buddy Carter strongly supports offshore drilling, while his Democratic opponent Lisa Ring states, “No drilling. Period.” With a strong coastal ethic, particularly in the city of Savannah, this is another election where voting blue might literally mean casting a vote for the ocean.
The issue of offshore drilling has also surfaced in the House race in Virginia’s Second District. Republican Representative Scott Taylor is opposed to drilling off Virginia but had remained quiet on the issue since taking office in 2017. When the Trump Administration announced plans to open more than 90 percent of federal waters to oil leasing, Taylor took a public position against it, saying drilling could interfere with military training and faces stiff opposition from coastal communities and industries in his District.
Taylor’s Democratic challenger, Navy veteran Elaine Luria, also opposes drilling and links the area’s growing flooding problem and king tides to rising sea levels. Virginia’s tidelands, along with those in South Carolina and south Florida, are among the most vulnerable. With its major base in Norfolk, the Navy has also tracked how flooding is already delaying some ship deployments and will require major infrastructure upgrades in the coming years.
“This isn’t a political issue, this is a practical concern,” says retired Rear Admiral Ann Phillips of the Center for Climate and Security, who is working on local salt marsh restoration that can help mitigate some of the impacts of sea level rise.
In North Carolina, where opposition to oil drilling is widespread along the coast and Outer Banks, Seventh District Democrat Kyle Horton has made his quest to unseat Republican Representative David Rouzer personal.
“My family tragically lost someone we love in the Deepwater Horizon disaster, and now the Trump Administration is expanding drilling and obliterating safety protections for workers,” Horton has tweeted.
Rouzer says he supports drilling, “at least thirty miles off the coast.”
Florida’s Twenty-Sixth District includes the Everglades and Florida Keys, where both candidates oppose oil drilling and say they want to address sea level rise. Republican candidate Carlos Curbelo is, like Sanford, an outlier in his party on ocean and climate issues but supportive of Trump on other issues. Given the exposure Keys residents face from warming ocean water supercharging hurricanes like Irma, which devastated the central Keys last year, voters in Monroe county may have to decide not between two pro-environment candidates but on which party is more likely to protect them from the waters they see continually rising around their low-lying porous limestone island homes.
Meanwhile, Florida’s Thirteenth District on the Gulf Coast is experiencing persistent and devastating red tides. In Manatee County, workers in the last two weeks have cleared beaches of 120 tons of fish killed by red algae blooms. In Sarasota County, 200 sheriff’s “offenders” have been used to clean up more tons of dead fish. Dolphins, manatees, sea turtles, and sharks have also died while humans have suffered severe respiratory distress from the red tide.
The issues of offshore drilling, climate change, pollution, and harmful algae blooms are all expected to play major roles in upcoming races.
The issues of offshore drilling, climate change, pollution, and harmful algae blooms are all expected to play major roles in the Florida Senate race between incumbent Democrat Bill Nelson and Republican Governor Rick Scott. Scott, who recently declared a state of emergency in response to the red tide (and green algal blooms on the state’s east coast), is a longtime ally of Big Sugar, whose sugar cane fields deliver major pulses of phosphate and nitrogen into the ocean, feeding the algae blooms.
California’s Forty-Fifth, Forty-Eighth and Forty Ninth Districts are all Southern California Orange and San Diego County areas that while traditionally conservative are going through rapid political and demographic change. The Forty-Eighth District incumbent is Republican Dana Rohrabacher, a right-wing surfer who is both pro-drilling and pro-Russia (even before Trump).
David Helvarg
While health care, the economy, and Donald Trump’s version of celebrity fascism—and the resistance candidates it has generated—are all expected to play a major role in the midterm elections, the threat of offshore drilling, plastic and nutrient pollution, rising seas and other threats to coastal America (and inland voters who care about our seas) could prove critical to restoring the blue in our red, white, and blue.
David Helvarg is an author and executive director of Blue Frontier, an ocean conservation and policy group www.bluefront.org. The Sea Party Speaking Tour is still doing outreach for invitations and to cover travel expenses. For more information, contact info@bluefront.org or the author directly at Helvarg@bluefront.org