Businesses from across the country oppose oil drilling off East Coast

Across the South and Mid-Atlantic, more than $40 billion is generated annually from ocean-related tourism, recreation, and fishing. The seafood industry alone supports more than 244,000 jobs in the region, according to the National Marine Fisheries Service.

Yet right now, our massive coastal economy is threatened. For the first time since 1983, the federal government is considering opening up the East Coast to offshore oil and gas drilling. By announcing a leasing plan for oil drilling from Virginia to Georgia, the U.S. Department of the Interior is putting our pristine shoreline – and our coastal economy – at grave risk.

It’s no surprise, then, that communities along the Southeastern coast are rising up to oppose drilling off our beaches. More than 80 East Coast governments – many located in some of the most conservative congressional districts in the country – are demanding that the Interior Department permanently end offshore drilling.

But it’s not just coastal mayors, townspeople and city councilmembers who are voicing their opposition. From coast-to-coast and practically everywhere in between, businesses are speaking out, too, claiming that offshore drilling is bad for our environment and bad for our economy.

This month, more than 160 members of the national nonpartisan business group Environmental Entrepreneurs (E2) signed a letter to Congress calling upon the federal government to permanently end offshore drilling in the Atlantic and Arctic. The letter cites drilling’s threat to local economies, coastal environments and our climate.

The letter’s signatories are business leaders active in every sector of our nation’s economy, from tourism to tech to manufacturing. They hail from places like the Carolinas, Ohio, and Santa Barbara, Calif., which in May endured its own coastal oil spill when a pipeline burst near a popular state beach, not far from where one of the nation’s worst oil spills occurred 46 years ago. The most recent spill, while relatively small, led to roughly $100 million in clean-up costs.

Imagine the economic and environmental devastation wreaked by a much larger oil spill off of Wilmington or the Outer Banks. When the BP Deepwater Horizon blowout occurred off Louisiana in 2010, tourism-related economic activity along the entire Gulf Coast dried up overnight.

Along with the loss of 11 lives, the estimated loss of tourism dollars was expected to top $22 billion in the first three years following the BP spill. By 2020, more than 20,000 jobs are expected to disappear from the Gulf due to the blowout. And out at sea, as many as 5,000 marine mammals like dolphins and whales likely perished from BP’s spilled oil.

Shockingly, since the BP blowout, not a single law has been changed to make drilling any safer. This remained the case this summer even as Shell actively drilled in the remote, dangerous Arctic Ocean. (Fortunately, this fall the Obama administration canceled the remaining two years of leases in Arctic, granting a much-needed reprieve for a pristine ocean wilderness the oil industry has long hoped to exploit.)

If we truly want to expand our energy sector without putting our beaches and our precious tourism industry at risk, there’s a better way forward: Clean energy.

According to a recent study by the environmental advocacy group Oceana, North Carolina alone is a veritable Saudi Arabia of wind. Wind blowing untapped just off our Carolina coastline is capable of generating almost 32 gigawatts of electricity – the equivalent of 2.5 billion barrels of oil, much more than the amount of recoverable oil and gas under the sea floor.

All this wind would mean more jobs, building a new source of energy that’s off the horizon and out of sight. In the Atlantic, even modest development of clean, renewable offshore wind could create about 91,000 more jobs than offshore drilling, according to Oceana.

The study also found that a move toward offshore wind along the East Coast in the next two decades could produce 143 gigawatts of electricity — enough to supply 115 million homes.

We have a choice. We can gamble with the massive economic costs of an oil spill on our beaches, or we can benefit from the massive economic opportunities that come with developing offshore wind and other sources of clean, renewable energy.

For business leaders and choruses of communities across the country and up and down the Eastern Seaboard, the choice is clear: Clean, beautiful beaches free of oil – and clean, renewable energy from offshore wind.

Robbins is the owner of Cape Fear River Adventures in Wilmington, N.C.