Protect public land in CA from oil drilling for public health

By Ashley McClure, MD, especially for CalMatters

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For nine years, I practiced primary care in the East Bay, caring for people from all walks of life. Lately, I’ve noticed a troubling pattern in my exam rooms: more young people needing asthma inhalers, more middle-aged patients developing new seasonal allergies that worsen each year as temperatures rise, and more elderly patients struggling with wildfire and heat wave season.

I’ve watched parents miss work to care for children whose asthma flares up on days with poor air quality. I have counseled pregnant women about the risks of exposure to polluted air.

These are not just statistics in a medical journal. They are my patients—real people whose health is suffering because of the pollution associated with oil and gas and the global warming they cause.

We know that Fossil fuel-related air pollution causes 1 in 5 deaths worldwide each year. As a physician, I strongly oppose the Trump administration’s proposed plan to lease new oil and gas drilling to private corporations on our public and federal lands in 17 California counties, up and down the state.

Trump’s Bureau of Land Management is preparing new resource management plans that could pave the way for expanded oil and gas drilling on more than one million acres of public lands in California – by San Joaquin Valley all the way up Central Coast to San Francisco Bay Area. The recent draft environmental impact report opened a 30-day public comment period when the public can get involved. (This is Scrooge time, of course).

This plan is the next front in President Donald Trump’s full-scale assault on our public lands and the next step in his “exercise, baby, exercise” agenda. If approved, this plan could block decades of new toxic oil drilling in wild spaces that should be open to all or near frontline communities already living with the deadly impacts of air pollution, water pollution and environmental injustice.

This year’s California air quality report shows a failing grade for many counties, with 98 percent of the state’s population experiencing unhealthy air at some point during the year, according to The American Lung Association’s State of the Air 2025 report. It will absolutely get worse if we allow the Trump administration’s land management plans to move forward.

Public lands belong to all Americans. They should promote our health, not undermine it. These are the places families visit to breathe fresh air, where watersheds begin, where ecosystems provide natural buffers against climate impacts.

With enough political opposition, we can absolutely stop Trump and his friends in the oil lobby from looting and pillaging our natural public lands. Objectors just did in the US Southeast in late October. Concerned environmentalists and some Republican stakeholders worried that offshore drilling would hurt tourism were successful in protecting their waters.

Now it’s our turn. Now is the time for California’s elected leaders to stand up and vehemently oppose the plans of Trump and his fat campaign financiers before the polls begin.

Our public lands should be a source of health, recreation and sustainability; and not another source of the filthy contamination that makes my patients sick. Protecting public lands from oil and gas drilling is not just environmental policy; it is preventive medicine. I choose a future where I spend less time treating pollution-related illnesses and more time helping patients thrive.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.