Global Justice Ecology Project executive director Anne Petermann was featured this week on the Sojourner Truth Show with her regular Earth Minute segment, discussing President Donald Trump’s executive order to expand offshore drilling.

The Sojourner Truth show airs daily on KPFK-FM radio in Los Angeles and in syndication and online around the world. Petermann’s transcript is below. Listen to Earth Minute on the Sojourner Truth Show on KPFK Radio.

Last week, San Francisco joined several other California cities in formally opposing President Trump’s executive order urging the expansion of offshore drilling. 

In the wake of record breaking climate disasters across the US, from hurricanes to wildfires, Trump wants to open federal waters in the Pacific to new oil leasing for the first time in over 30 years. He proposes new drilling in almost all federal waters, including those currently protected.  

There are already more than 30 offshore drilling platforms and hundreds of miles of underwater oil and gas pipelines off California’s coast. Operators also want permits for toxic offshore fracking.

The San Francisco resolution calls for a ban on fracking in federal and state waters off the California coast; and No new federal oil and gas leases in the Pacific, Atlantic or Arctic oceans; or the eastern Gulf of Mexico — areas currently protected from new leases. 

Several lawsuits challenging this latest Trump idiocy are pending.

For the Earth Minute and the Sojourner Truth show, this is Anne Petermann from Global Justice Ecology Project.