Julia Louis-Dreyfus Fights Oil Drilling Off California Coast

Julia Louis-Dreyfus has three words for the nation’s political elite: “Grow a set.” 

The acclaimed actress is best known for playing iconic women, from Elaine Benes in Seinfeld, to Vice President Selina Meyer in Veep, and diabolical CIA director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine in the new Avengers movie, Thunderbolts*. 

Louis-Dreyfus is also a longtime environmental and political activist. She has made it her personal mission to get California Governor Gavin Newsom, President Donald Trump, and every other political leader she can wrangle to understand that oil drilling is for suckers — and protecting our climate and the economies that thrive off of a healthy and sustainable environment is the stuff of true patriotism. It is not always an easy sell. 

Seated in her Santa Barbara, California, home with her dog Georgie vying for her attention — I fail to ask if he’s named after that George — it is clear that Louis-Dreyfus is pissed off. 

“The idea of this decrepit pipeline that failed so miserably and catastrophically a decade ago, the idea of that restarting is an impossible thing to contemplate, and it really has to be fought,” she tells me via Zoom.

A decade ago, one of the worst oil disasters in California’s history occurred not far from Louis-Dreyfus’ home. On May 19, 2015, a massive, corroded oil pipeline ruptured, releasing 140,000 gallons of heavy crude oil onto Santa Barbara’s Refugio State Beach. Oil poured into one of the most biologically rich areas of the Pacific Ocean, a key habitat for endangered whales and sea turtles, sea otters, sharks, and more than 500 fish species. It was carried down the coast past Los Angeles, oiling 150 miles of beaches and coastline. 

In June 2015, I walked the beach at the Santa Monica pier, 100 miles from Refugio. A fresh line of thick and pungent oil tar balls — some as large as a hand — lined the sand along the tideline, with new oil from the spill deposited with incoming waves. The spill devastated fisheries, tourism, and areas sacred to the native Chumash peoples. Then-Governor Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency, deploying the state’s Attorney General Kamala Harris. 

The oil came from ExxonMobil’s offshore operations. For 10 years, the people of Santa Barbara have successfully kept ExxonMobil from restarting those operations, including the ruptured pipeline. Resistance has been led by Louis-Dreyfus’ friend and ally, Linda Krop, chief counsel of Santa Barbara’s small but mighty Environmental Defense Center. 

I first interviewed Krop in 2015 just after the spill. She described watching aghast, the stench nauseating, as thick heavy waves of oil filled the ocean and poured onto Refugio Beach. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” she told me. “It was just devastating.” Last month, Krop and I walked along the same stretch of beach. Children played in the ocean and teenagers took surfing lessons, enjoying a healthy and beautiful shoreline. 

Krop is committed to keeping it this way. For 10 years, Krop and her allies have beaten ExxonMobil in the state legislature, the federal government, and in court battles stretching all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. 

“This project is the single largest threat to California’s coast,” Krop tells me. 

But now the entire project is poised to restart, with both state and federal agencies granting many of the necessary permits. It is fronted by a new company funded and backed by ExxonMobil — Sable Offshore Oil Corp, which is behaving with what many here describe as a “Trumpian” and “unprecedented” disdain for the law, under the hopeful eyes and dedicated support of the Trump administration. It would be the first newly started oil development off California’s coast in decades, and the single largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the county. The project could also usher in Trump’s plan to open the entire Pacific coast (and nearly all federal waters) to oil and gas drilling.

“President Trump made it clear that American energy should come from American resources,” Trump’s Interior Department said in a statement last week, crowing that “we’ve turned a decade-long shutdown into a comeback story for Pacific production.”

In response to detailed questions, an ExxonMobil spokesperson says that the company completed the sale of these operations with Sable more than a year ago, and passed me off to Sable for additional information.

Louis-Dreyfus and Krop are committed to stopping Trump. They are also clear that the final say on Sable’s project ultimately rests not with Trump but with Newsom, who they argue is failing to act. 

“He has an opportunity right now to do the right thing,” Louis-Dreyfus says of the governor. “This is far from over.”

“I will fight for my home”

On March 13, Louis-Dreyfus joined legendary actress and activist Jane Fonda for a press conference at the Environmental Defense Center in opposition to Sable’s project. Louis-Dreyfus then addressed a packed house of more than 500 people who filled the La Cumbre Junior High School in Santa Barbara for a town hall on Sable. Louis-Dreyfus and Krop were the final speakers, following presentations by representatives from nine state agencies with jurisdiction over Sable’s project.

Krop warmly introduced Louis-Dreyfus as a “local shero” and “a champion of fighting the fossil fuel industry and trying to protect the climate, our way of life, and a clean and healthy environment.” 

Louis-Dreyfus has a decades-long history of environmental and political activism. For her podcast, Wiser Than Me — just named one of the best podcasts of all time by TIME magazine — she interviews older women, including giants like labor leader Dolores Huerta, conservationist Jane Goodall, and acclaimed marine biologist Sylvia Earle, who are “brimming with the kind of unapologetic attitude and wisdom that only comes with age.” 

She was a staunch supporter of both Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris’ presidential campaigns against Trump. Last year, she moderated a forum of Democratic women governors and introduced the event as “what J.D. Vance might call a coven of semi-menstruating witches.”

But for Louis-Dreyfus, the fight against Sable is uniquely personal. Her husband was born and raised in Santa Barbara, where his family has lived for generations. Her family previously split their time between Santa Barbara and Los Angeles, but that was before their L.A. home was destroyed in the Palisades fire early this year. 

“The climate crisis is obviously real and upon us — it’s not coming, we’re living it right now. That was certainly felt by me during these devastating fires,” Louis-Dreyfus tells me. “Santa Barbara is a paradise worth defending and protecting,” she adds, explaining that the risk of this oil project “is very close to home… and something that is not possible to turn my back on.”

Louis-Dreyfus looked resolved as she approached the podium, scanning the sea of bright red T-shirts worn by the project’s opponents reading, “Don’t Enable Sable,” and the hundreds of competing hats emblazoned with Sable’s logo that were worn by the pipeline’s supporters. Confronting the obvious tension in the room, she leaned into the mic, stared down the audience, and said, “I smell a rat.” 

“I am here because I’m a resident of Santa Barbara County,” she began. “And this project is a rat.” 

She pulled no punches, describing the pipeline 10 years ago as “crap” and the people responsible for supervising it as irresponsible. “Thankfully, the whole decrepit thing was shut down,” she said. “But now, Sable Oil from Texas is trying to restart the very same, dangerously inadequate pipeline that ruptured. And incredibly, they’re trying to do it with zero environmental review and zero opportunity for public input. That is insane. It makes me furious. I know it makes you furious.” She called the project a catastrophe waiting to happen. 

As Louis-Dreyfus spoke, the audience erupted in applause and hoots of support, though there were some jeers and boos, too. The Sable supporters then rose and began filing out of the auditorium en masse. Unfazed, she continued on, calling out Sable for ignoring cease-and-desist orders issued by the California Coastal Commission and for behaving as “an incompetent operator trying to grease the wheels of government.” She declared, “We’re not going to let this happen without a fight,” adding: “I will certainly fight for my home.” 

“Sable Offshore management, employees, contractors, labor and supporters showed up today in good faith to participate in a town hall meeting where only government officials were on the agenda to present,” Sable vice president, Steve Rusch, told the Santa Barbara news outlet Noozhawk. “Project opponents forced the moderators to give them dedicated time to present biased information and smear the project. The opponents’ self-serving fundraiser and rally was not an appropriate use of public resources.” 

Louis-Dreyfus later tells me that she was surprised when Sable’s supporters walked out on her, and she wishes they’d stayed. “I was speaking truth to power pretty forcefully… and so they got pissed off,” she says. “I felt emboldened by it, to be honest. It was fuel, the good kind of fuel.” 

Krop says that Louis-Dreyfus’ speech was significant to those in the audience. “You could feel it in the room,” she said. “It was the kind of support people needed to hear.” 

Boxing Exxon

Krop has spent the better part of the last 40 years at the Environmental Defense Center. Working with a team of just 11 full-time staff, she has relentlessly and successfully gone head-to-head against the world’s largest corporations, cutting Exxon off in every effort to restart its Santa Barbara operations, and helping create some of the nation’s most powerful environmental and public health laws as a result. 

The nation’s first offshore oil drilling began in Santa Barbara in 1896. In 1969, it was also the site of what remains one of the nation’s worst oil disasters, when a blown-out well operated by Union Oil Company released 3 million gallons of oil into the ocean. The Environmental Defense Center was one of many local organizations born in the aftermath to protect the community from fossil fuels. Under the banner “Get Oil Out!” local organizers spawned a wave of activism credited with birthing the national environmental movement and achieving a series of legislative victories, including the federal National Environmental Policy Act of 1970 and the California Coastal Act of 1976.

They quickly won a ban on any new offshore oil and gas leasing or drilling in California state waters. In 1982, Congress followed suit, implementing a series of similar moratoria primarily off the Pacific and Atlantic coasts. Despite Congress and President George W. Bush allowing the federal moratoria to expire in 2008, no new fossil fuel leases have been granted in state or federal waters outside of the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska in decades due to staunch public opposition. 

The offshore oil and gas operations taking place today off the Pacific coast — all of which are offshore California — were grandfathered in; they were already underway when the bans and moratoria were imposed and were allowed to continue. 

“No one ever dreamed that they would still be here today,” Krop tells me. The oil from the existing operations was expected to quickly dry up. Instead, the companies developed new techniques to keep their grandfathered operations running decades longer than anyone anticipated.

ExxonMobil signed its first lease for the Santa Ynez Unit offshore Santa Barbara in 1968 and began production in 1981. Santa Ynez includes three platforms in federal waters named Harmony, Heritage, and Hondo, supported by pipelines that connect the platforms to shore and on to the Los Flores Canyon Processing Plant. ExxonMobil was able to greatly extend the life of its grandfathered platforms using drilling technologies learned from its operations in Russia, according to a 2010 ExxonMobil press release. It achieved “the world’s longest extended-reach well” at Santa Ynez, extending over six miles horizontally and more than 7,000 feet below sea level. 

Horizontal drilling is a technique used in fracking, using water and chemicals to blast open rock to release oil and gas. ExxonMobil revealed in a 2017 court filing that the Santa Ynez wells also require acid well stimulation treatments to keep producing;  acidization uses acid to dissolve the rock. Both techniques release toxic chemicals into the environment that are harmful to humans and wildlife. 

In 2022, the Environmental Defense Center and the Center for Biological Diversity won a lawsuit, begun nearly a decade earlier, that effectively bans fracking and acidizing from offshore oil and gas wells in the Pacific Ocean. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected a plea from ExxonMobil the following year to review the case, allowing the ban to stand. 

At the time of the 2015 oil spill, ExxonMobil’s oil and gas was carried from the Las Flores Canyon Processing Plant along the Pacific Coast Highway in an underground pipeline that was owned and operated by the Plains All American Pipeline company. When this pipeline ruptured, the oil entered a culvert which carried it directly into the Pacific Ocean and onto Refugio Beach. Federal regulators found that Plains had allowed the pipeline to corrode to such an extent that the thickness was reduced in places from 24 inches to just 1/16 of an inch. California’s then-Attorney General Kamala Harris secured a grand jury indictment of Plains on 46 criminal charges, including four felonies.

The Department of Transportation ordered the pipeline shut down, which is how it has remained ever since. Without the pipeline, ExxonMobil had no way to carry its oil to buyers and thus had no way to sell it, forcing the company to also halt production from its offshore oil and gas wells. ExxonMobil spent nearly a decade trying to secure permission to move the oil by truck, ultimately losing (again) to Krop. Companies are also barred from using tankers to move their oil offshore California.

During his first administration, Trump tried and failed to open virtually all federal waters to offshore oil and gas drilling. Under pressure from the fossil fuel industry — led by its largest lobbying group, the American Petroleum Institute — he’s now trying to do it again. “You cannot make offshore oil safe, and the Trump administration is trying to ramrod more offshore oil down our throats,” Krop tells me. Back in 2018, Krop helped secure state legislation prohibiting California from issuing new leases for any oil or gas-related infrastructure such as pipelines in the state’s coastal waters that would support federal operations, which also cut ExxonMobil off from building new pipelines to carry its oil to shore somewhere else.

The state has also taken additional actions against ExxonMobil. In 2023, Newsom sued ExxonMobil along with Chevron, BP, Shell, ConocoPhillips, Phillips 66, and the American Petroleum Institute, accusing the fossil fuel industry of lying to the public for decades about its products’ central role driving the climate crisis, and demanding payment for the resulting harm. Newsom is also suing ExxonMobil for engaging in a decades-long campaign of deception that caused and exacerbated the global plastics pollution crisis. 

ExxonMobil is counter-suing California and several environmental organizations for allegedly “engaging in a deliberate smear campaign” by conspiring to defame the company. 

Not long after the climate suit was launched, ExxonMobil announced its intention to exit California and promptly sold its onshore operations. Ditching its California holdings could potentially shield ExxonMobil from the state attempting to seize Exxon’s assets if California wins its climate suit and if Exxon were to refuse to pay any resulting damages. Announcing its departure meant that Exxon could no longer count the value of its offshore oil and gas leases as part of its reported earnings. In 2023, it had to take a $3.4 billion earnings cut due to its idled Santa Ynez Unit (the entirety of its offshore California holdings). Selling the operations removes this loss from Exxon’s balance sheet.

In 2024, Exxon financed the sale of its Santa Ynez operations and all related onshore facilities, including the ruptured pipeline, to Sable Offshore Oil Corporation. Exxon loaned Sable $623 million, nearly the entire amount required to fund the sale. 

Though the sale is complete, the handover is not. Exxon and Sable are currently suing Santa Barbara County for its refusal to transfer certain permits from Exxon to Sable. But, other than its gas stations, ExxonMobil now has no remaining significant holdings in California. ExxonMobil is likely playing the long game. While the company is for all intents and purposes being forced out of California, it also has an obsequious and acquiescent ally in Trump and his administration, which is simultaneously trying to undermine and undo climate and environmental actions taken by the state. Trump’s efforts are expected to cost American jobs and increase energy prices for consumers, including significantly raising gas prices at the pump. 

“Exxon’s Designated Operator”

“Sable is ruthless, they are absolutely horrible,” Mia Lopez tells me. Lopez is a member of the Coastal Band of the Chumash Nation, the first human inhabitants of the Central Coast of California. Refugio State Park is located near the original site of the historic Chumash village of Qasil. Just three days before the 2015 oil spill, Lopez was elected chair of her tribe. 

“It was so devastating, to our land, our sites, the ocean, the artifacts, so many things that were damaged,” Lopez tells me, pain gripping her face. “It affected our relatives in the ocean, so many birds, seals, dolphins, and whales. That’s my community. Those are my relatives. That’s who I became responsible for.” 

Lopez stepped down as chair in 2021, but explains, “I just realized there’s no way I can ever step away from this fight against the oil.” She has helped lead efforts to hold the companies accountable and keep the projects from reopening ever since. “They have proven from the moment they stepped in that they are untrustworthy. They have blatantly disregarded laws and regulations,” Lopez says of Sable.

Sable Offshore Oil Corp. was formed in 2021 by a group of men who have worked together for years heading small oil and gas companies, including companies with ties to the Santa Barbara oil spill. Santa Ynez is Sable’s only operation — and the only operation ever undertaken by the company. James Flores is chairman and CEO (his son is president of the company). Flores’ previous company, Sable Permian Resources, filed for bankruptcy in 2020 (recovering the following year). From 2001 to 2013, Flores served as the chairman and CEO of Plains Resources, Inc., a company formed in 2001 when it broke off from Plains All American Pipeline (the owner and operator of the failed pipeline found guilty of causing the 2015 oil spill). Flores also served as chairman and CEO of Freeport-McMoRan Oil & Gas, which currently operates several inactive platforms off of Santa Barbara’s coast. 

Sable is in a race against time: Exxon gave Sable just two years to either pay back its entire loan with interest or give back the assets. “It doesn’t have time to get a whole new pipeline approved and built, so it aggressively pursued restart of the old, corroded pipeline,” Krop explains. “No one thought this pipeline would ever be used again.”

Sable immediately set to work, receiving permits from state and federal agencies, but without a key permit from the California Coastal Commission, an independent state regulator established under the California Coastal Act. Sable contends that it does not need the permit; the commission asserts that it does. The two sides are currently fighting it out in court, with a hearing set for October. 

The commission has issued several cease-and-desist orders, which Sable ignored, and leveled an $18 million fine, the largest in its history, alleging months of illegal violations of the Coastal Act. “This is the first time in the agency’s history that we’ve had a party blatantly ignore a cease-and-desist order,” Cassidy Teufel, deputy director of the California Coastal Commission, said at the March town hall at which Louis-Dreyfus also spoke. “Sable representatives have told us that they’ll only stop if a court makes them.”

Louis-Dreyfus sees Sable as following the Trump playbook. “Following the rule of law all of a sudden seems to be up for grabs, and our country is based on rule of law,” she says.

Teufel said that Sable has identified more than 100 locations where the pipeline was defective that are within the coastal commission’s auspices. The company brought in heavy equipment to excavate, destroying and disrupting sensitive habitats and protected areas, including federally designated critical habitat for wildlife protected under the Endangered Species Act, and within sensitive stream corridors and wetlands, all without a permit and in apparent violation of the law, he said. 

Lopez watched in anguish as the work unfolded, taking place 24 hours a day, seven days a week, primarily carried out by hundreds of temporary contractors. Sable has just 161 employees, none of whom are unionized. “They did not have permission to dig in our lands. They did not have permission to dig up our sites. They did it under the cover of darkness. They did it without seeking the proper permits,” she tells me. “I watched them dig, and there was nothing we could do about it.”

In response to questions from Rolling Stone, Sable shared a statement from its vice president, Rusch, asserting that the company’s work to “ensure the safe condition of the pipeline” was “fully authorized by coastal development permits” and accusing the commission of exaggerating the project’s impact, “which were de minimis thanks to Sable’s implementation of best management practices.” The company further states that it “implemented several construction best practices to limit impacts” to coastal, biological, and archaeological resources.

“The project is supported by employees, small businesses and community leaders like the tribal leader of the Coastal Band of the Chumash Nation,” Sable spokesperson Alice Walton wrote in the email, attaching a statement written in October by then-tribal chief, Gabriel Dominguez Frausto. Walton did not mention that this statement was promptly voided by the Tribal Council and Frausto was forced to resign, having “overstepped his authority by responding without Tribal Council or membership approval.” In a subsequent letter, the new tribal chief and the Tribal Council stated their “unequivocal opposition” to the project, “and to any further or continued oil development on our homelands and within our coastal waters.”

On May 19, the 10-year anniversary of the oil spill, Sable announced that it had restarted production at Santa Ynez, completed its repair program on the onshore pipeline, and expected to “recommence oil sales in July.” A class action lawsuit alleges that Sable committed securities fraud or other unlawful business practices based on these claims, misleading investors to inflate its stock price just before a major stock offering. It cites the California State Lands Commission, which says that Sable conflated offshore well testing with the restart of operations, appearing to “mischaracterize the nature of recent activities, causing significant public confusion and raising questions regarding Sable’s intentions.” In the strongly worded letter, commission chair and Lieutenant Governor Eleni Kounalakis accused Sable of a willful disregard for the directives of state regulatory agencies and threatened to withhold its leases, calling the company “Exxon’s designated operator.” 

A few days later, the Superior Court of Santa Barbara sided with the Coastal Commission and ordered Sable to stop any further coastal work until it obtains the necessary permits.

Despite these warnings and several ongoing legal battles, in Sable’s most recent filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on July 11, the company said that it continues to produce from the Santa Ynez Unit, anticipates receiving approval to restart the pipeline, and would begin selling oil on August 1 (it has not). Six days after the filing, hedge fund Encompass Capital Advisors announced its purchase of over 5.2 million shares of Sable, representing over 5.2 percent of the company’s stock. In June, BlackRock Inc., the world’s largest asset manager, reported acquiring over 5 million shares of Sable, representing 5 percent of its stock, according to an SEC filing. 

Sable has not and cannot restart the pipeline until it receives final approval from state and federal regulators. It did not answer questions from Rolling Stone as to whether it has secured buyers for its oil if the pipeline does restart.

Sable has also gone on offense, hiring Exxon’s lobbying firm, Crossroads Strategies, to lobby the federal government and Platinum Advisors to lobby in Sacramento. Platinum’s clients include the California Business Roundtable and the Plastics Industry Association, as well as progressive groups, including the SAG-AFTRA actors union.

Krop is suing on several fronts, including charging state regulators with illegally issuing a key waiver to Sable. She and Louis-Dreyfus are also calling on Newsom to put a halt to Sable’s project once and for all.

“He has an opportunity right now to do the right thing,” Louis-Dreyfus says. She applauds Newsom’s forceful response when Trump sent the National Guard and Marines into Los Angeles. “I’m hoping that the same speaking-truth-to-power that he exhibited then will now be applied to this fight.”

“Silence is the enemy”

“The governor’s office could have prevented all of this,” Professor Paasha Mahdavi, Director of the Energy Governance and Political Economy Lab at the University of California in Santa Barbara, tells me. “Newsom’s office could have just killed this upfront.”

Governor Newsom declined a request for an interview. In an emailed statement, a Newsom spokesperson says, “While some offshore drilling continues in federal waters under longstanding federal leases, the governor remains unwavering in his commitment: no new offshore drilling — period.” 

The governor’s office stresses the necessity of allowing the legal and regulatory process to play out. It disputes Sable’s predictions of a rapid completion timeline, instead asserting that any conclusion is likely far off given multiple barriers in the regulatory landscape to Sable restarting the pipeline, including in the coastal commission’s case.

Newsom has taken an aggressive stand against Trump, including the administration’s efforts to open all federal waters to offshore oil and gas drilling. Trump’s Department of Transportation has also recently proposed weakening federal oil and gas pipeline safety regulations and speeding up approvals for new pipelines. Many fear that allowing Sable to restart Exxon’s offshore operations will provide Trump with the opening his administration is looking for to assert that Californians support and even condone offshore drilling, and that the door should be open for more.

Krop wants Newsom to publicly oppose Sable’s project, citing the risks of another massive oil spill and climate change. She wants him to commit state agencies to conducting environmental reviews and public hearings. “We’re at the tail end of this project potentially being approved and given the green light,” Krop warns. “It’s time for Newsom to act.”

Louis-Dreyfus joined what was likely the largest protest in Santa Barbara’s history in June as more than 10,000 people participated in the No Kings national day of protest against Trump. The mood in Santa Barbara was joyous and defiant as people stood side-by-side in a mile-and-a-half-long line, their backs to the Pacific Ocean, in a visual blockade against Trump. It was one of more than 2,000 actions drawing over 5 million people nationwide. 

Louis-Dreyfus wants readers to share her belief in activism, and know that when they engage, they can make a difference. “This now is the moment. Do not be silent. Silence is the enemy,” she says.