Dan Inskeep describes himself as a “bleeding edge” environmentalist. He drives a 2007 Vectrix electric motorcycle that weighs as much as a Harley Davidson because it is powered by 200 pounds of batteries. He hasn’t paid a SCE bill since installing solar panels on his Hermosa Beach walk street home in 2005. He converted his multi-unit rental property to solar power, despite the questionable economic benefits.
He volunteers for Grades of Green, teaching Hermosa elementary school students about environmentalism and he is the treasurer of the Hermosa Beach Education Foundation.
This commitment to the environment, he said, is what led him to co-found Environmentalists for Measure O. Measure O on the March 3 ballot would lift Hermosa’s ban on oil drilling, clearing the way for E & B Natural Resources to drill 30 oil wells from the city maintenance yard into the city’s tidelands.
“I look at everything through an environmentalist’s lens,” the semi-retired CPA said. “My family drives less than 3,000 miles annually. We bike or walk. To me, energy efficiency should be our focus. But we need to be realistic. As long as we depend on fossil fuel, we need to to recover it in a way that has the least impact on the environment. Storing these in fuel storage tanks can also help in an efficient transportation of these oil products.”
After E & B and Hermosa Beach reached their agreement in 2012, Inskeep began studying the maintenance yard oil drilling proposal.
“I looked at the environmental impact of drilling here versus drilling elsewhere. Drilling opponents such as Heal the Bay, Surfrider, the Sierra Club, the Manhattan Beach City Council and Robert Kennedy Jr. are only looking at how drilling affects the local environment,” he said.
“The holier than thou attitude of Measure O opponents turns hypocritical when they argue that they oppose drilling because ‘we’ can’t spend tidelands revenue. ‘We’ can spend it, if you understand ‘we’ to be all the people of California.”
“The project represents an environmental opportunity,” Inskeep said. Not necessarily just for Hermosa Beach, he said, but also for California and the rest of the world.
Inskeep based his conclusion on a review of the California Energy Almanac. In 2013, California imported 51 percent of its oil from foreign countries and another 12 percent from Alaska, according the almanac.
The consequences are political, financial, environmental and all negative, he said.
“Money leaves California and goes to Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Angola, Kuwait… not all of whom share our national interests and none of whom have the environmental protections California has.
“Their oil is shipped to us in tankers, further adding to the environmental footprint. The Exxon Valdez was on its way from Alaska to Long Beach,”
Inskeep visited E & B’s drilling facility in Huntington Beach, which is similar to what is proposed for Hermosa Beach.
“It’s a 35 year-old production site. It’s directly across the street from nice homes and it’s a non-issue for the neighbors. It isn’t noisy or smelly. The people who condemn the Hermosa project have no idea what’s proposed.”
“I visited the La Brea Tar pits while volunteering for a Hermosa Valley School field trip. It’s been an open tar pit for a millennium and it’s surrounded by expensive homes.”
“By comparison a downtown Hermosa Beach hotel will have a giant footprint, create a huge amount of traffic and generate a fraction of the revenue.”
When Inskeep canvasses in support of Measure O, he said, people who support drilling will only admit it after he assures them he supports it because the issue is so divisive.
“Drilling opponents will tell me, ‘You may be right, but we don’t want it in our neighborhood.’ But they don’t offer a solution. It’s not an environmentalist’s attitude. It’s an out of sight, out of mind attitude.” ER
