Gov. Moonbeam Suffers Rare Bout of Sanity

He apparently wants to ease the burdensome regulations on the oil industry and has fired two regulators who got in his way:

Late last year, Gov. Jerry Brown pushed for a top state regulator to ease key requirements for companies seeking to tap California's oil. The official balked.

Relaxing rules on underground injection, a risky method of oil extraction common in the state, would violate environmental laws, wrote Derek Chernow, then head of the Department of Conservation, in a memo obtained by The Times.

The process, in which a rush of steam, water and chemicals flushes oil from old wells, had been linked to spills, eruptions and a Kern County worker's death. The federal government had asked the state to tighten its regulations, but the oil industry complained that the stringent rules were killing jobs.

A week after Chernow wrote his memo, Brown had him fired, along with a deputy, Elena Miller. The governor appointed replacements who agreed to stop subjecting every injection project to a top-to-bottom review before issuing a permit.

Brown's decision to side with energy interests over his regulators reflects the economic and political pressures on the governor during his return engagement in Sacramento. The economy is still sluggish in the wake of a deep recession, and unemployment remains high.

Although Brown has fought offshore drilling and sued oil companies throughout his career, making him a favorite of environmentalists, he now talks of tossing cumbersome regulations to revive the economy. The oil industry, in particular, employs tens of thousands of Californians, many of them in Kern County, where the jobless rate is 14.5%.

We've allowed the environmental movement and the regulatory mess it has insisted on to trump common sense and stifle our state's economy. Good for Moonbeam to recognize the problem and do something about it.

Now if he'd just let us go after the oil we know is sitting just offshore, but this state has never gotten over the Santa Barbara spill of the late 60's and the people in power just assume there's been no improvement to drilling methods since then.