Off Our Shores?

The day after last Thanksgiving, while half the country flocked to the malls looking for big pre-Christmas sales, Tony Amos went to the beach. He got there around 7 a.m. and stayed more than two hours.

He didn't get a tan. He didn't swim a stroke, either. For the 3,741st time, Amos drove along the coast of Mustang Island, Texas, taking detailed notes on everything he saw. Amos, a researcher for the University of Texas, has repeatedly surveyed the same seven-and-a-half-mile stretch of coastline near Corpus Christi since 1978. He has documented every squawking shore bird, every tossed-away beer can, every towel-toting tourist-and every empty chemical drum and oil-company hard hat that has washed ashore from rigs in the Gulf of Mexico.

"I've seen and counted more trash than anyone else," says Amos, who has the beard of an Old Testament prophet and the accent of an Oxford don.

His pickup truck creeps along Mustang Island, past signs that say "Keep Your Beaches Clean" and boardwalk stations for washing off tar balls. Every few feet he hits the brakes as he spots something worth noting on his battered old portable computer. Originally his only interest was in tracking the beach's wildlife, but over the years he has catalogued a steady flow of debris onto the beach, much of it from offshore rigs. He has found five-gallon buckets oozing unidentified gray stuff, sheets of plastic twisted in knots and battered 55-gallon drums.

After Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita roared through the Gulf last year, toppling offshore rigs, ripping out underwater pipelines and causing millions of gallons of oil to spill into the water, Amos says he found two unused escape pods for rig crews to use in emergencies. The hurricanes had blown the empty pods overboard, and they washed up on the beach looking like abandoned spaceships.

Sometimes it's difficult to tell where the Mustang Island debris originated, Amos says. "But when some chemical drums are labeled Halliburton and other big company names involved in drilling out there, you know where it came from."

Over the past 40 years, companies like Halliburton have drilled about 10,000 oil and gas wells across the western and central Gulf. Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama have been willing to overlook the trash and tar that washed ashore in exchange for a rich bounty of cash and jobs.

But Florida's $50 billion tourist industry depends on clean beaches. The slightest taint in the emerald waters can be enough to send the tourists packing. For instance, when red tide plagued Southwest Florida last year, out-of-state visitors who got one whiff of all the dead fish quickly canceled their reservations. So, over the years, Florida's business leaders have always worked with environmental activists to keep the eastern Gulf off-limits to offshore drilling.

"Our board passed a resolution that said we are opposed to drilling anywhere around the Florida peninsula," says Marietta Mudgett, executive director of the Fort Myers Chamber of Commerce. "That was a stand we took several years ago, and we haven't changed our minds about it, because of our concern for our environment and the economy of our state."

In the face of such widespread disapproval of drilling, finding a Florida politician who would side with the oil companies was about as likely as finding one who would shake hands with Fidel Castro. They were almost uniformly opposed to drilling, and their united front seemed as sturdy as a brick wall.

Until last fall, when the wall began to crumble.

When Katrina and Rita disrupted gas production, prices at the pump more than doubled, climbing over $3 a gallon. Experts predict the offshore oil industry won't fully recover from the hurricanes until next summer at the earliest. To some, this showed how vulnerable the industry is to natural disaster. To others, this was a sign that Florida should drop its resistance to drilling in the eastern Gulf for the good of the country.

Senators and congressmen from other states began making noises about huge winter heating bills that would hurt poor senior citizens and ruin small businesses. The solution, they said, was to open up new coasts to drilling, particularly a section of the eastern Gulf known as Area 181, about 100 miles south of Florida's Panhandle.

"We believe 181 has to be done. It is the single most significant act to stabilize or possibly reduce the price of natural gas," Sen. Pete Domenici, Republican of New Mexico, chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said in September. (Power companies and the oil industry are, respectively, the second- and third-largest sources of Domenici's campaign contributions, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.)

Members of Domenici's committee urged Interior Secretary Gale Norton to start selling new leases in Area 181. She agreed the region has huge gas reserves-more than 6 trillion cubic feet, which backers said was enough to meet the needs of more than 4 million households for 20 years. But she pointed out that the administration had a deal with Florida to hold off selling any new leases there prior to 2007. Besides, she noted, even if new leases were sold immediately, no rigs could get set up and start producing gas for at least two years-hardly fast enough to bring down heating bills for the 2005 winter.

To address concerns about spills, some senators and congressmen talked of limiting the drilling to natural gas only. But Norton has called that impractical. No oil company would spend the hundreds of millions of dollars it costs to drill in the Gulf knowing that if oil turned up instead of gas, the company couldn't pump it out and sell it, she told The Tampa Tribune.

Despite Norton's cautionary words, congressmen in the House were pushing ahead on their plan to open up Area 181. Leading the charge was a California Republican named Richard Pombo, whose biggest campaign contributor in 2004 was the oil and gas industry, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Pombo, a rancher with a thin mustache who often poses for pictures wearing a cowboy hat, chairs the House Resources Committee. Under his direction, the committee has proposed rewriting the Endangered Species Act, selling off land in 15 national parks and easing restrictions on logging in national forests.

His committee was also proposing to allow oil and gas exploration within 125 miles of the U.S. coast, where it's currently prohibited, including Florida. In fact, the Pombo plan would give state legislatures the power to move the line even closer to their coasts-to within 25 miles for natural-gas drilling and 50 miles for oil. Most of Area 181 would be opened up within 90 days of the bill's passage. And to sweeten the pot, half the royalties the federal government collects from the oil company leaseholders would instead go to the affected states-a strong incentive for letting the oil companies get closer.

Pombo inserted this plan into a budget bill, rather than sponsoring it as a stand-alone measure. He touted it as a way to whittle away at the nation's trillion-dollar debt by raking in millions of dollars from new offshore lease sales.

"Americans want Congress to cut the deficit," Pombo announced. "They also want more domestic energy production to help lower home-heating bills and prices at the pump. This package is going to give them both. In today's global energy market it would be irresponsible to continue restricting domestic energy production."

As always, opposition to drilling close to Florida ran the gamut of political persuasions. Take the two candidates for U.S. Senate. Rep. Katherine Harris, a Sarasota Republican, proclaimed, "I'm against drilling in the Gulf, and I'm going to stay there."

And the Democratic incumbent Harris hopes to beat, Sen. Bill Nelson, was dead-set against the Pombo plan, too. "Florida's overall economic health is dependent on preserving the coastal areas that draw tourists to our state from all over the globe," Nelson explained. "A single spill would leave blackened beaches and a devastated tourism industry."

But for the first time in memory, Florida's political leadership failed to show a united front on the issue.

Several of Florida's Republican congressmen said they supported the Pombo plan. Rising gas prices and the incessant pressure from the pro-drilling forces had persuaded them that this was the only reasonable position, they said. Currently what's protecting Florida from drilling close to shore is a patchwork of presidential executive orders and administrative moratoria on different parts of the eastern Gulf. With the Pombo deal, they said, Florida could ensure lasting legal protection against having oil rigs in sight of the beach.

Those arguments didn't sway the environmental groups. Though out of sight, the rigs would still be a lot closer than ever before.

"The price of gas is no reason to open up the coastline of Florida to such a risky venture," says Glenn Compton of the Sarasota-based group ManaSota-88.

Business leaders didn't back down, either. "We're not going to change, not even with gas prices being the way they are," says Mudgett of the Fort Myers chamber.

Yet the pro-Pombo forces had a trump card. On their side was the most influential Florida leader of all: Gov. Jeb Bush. He wasn't a recent convert, either. Bush had spent months negotiating with Pombo to create this particular plan.