Once again we are called upon to protect our community against changes that would turn it into the opposite of what we love most about it. The Federal Government’s Atlantic Ocean drilling initiative is an attempt to allow oil exploration and exploitation off our coast. If it succeeds, South Carolina’s Lowcountry will become America’s newest oil port. Murrell’s Inlet fisheries, Litchfield’s unparalleled beaches, Pawleys Island’s historic resort, and Georgetown’s seaport will industrialize in ways hard to imagine and even harder to live with.

Every dangerous proposition should entail a risk/reward ratio that looks promising to those assuming the risk. Oil drilling fails that test. Perhaps unwittingly, those who advocate drilling turn their backs on the prosperous tourism and fishing industries that provide the financial backbone of the coastline from North Myrtle Beach to Hilton Head and to much of the rest of the state. We can have oil and the dangers it imposes or we can have tourism, but not both. They are mutually exclusive.

Proponents of drilling make exaggerated claims concerning its benefits citing jobs, revenue, and energy independence. They support these claims with multi-million dollar studies commissioned by the American Petroleum Institute (API), the lobbying arm of BP, Shell, Exxon, Halliburton, and hundreds of  other companies in the oil industry. As time passes, we will provide analyses of these claims that lend a greater sense of reality to what lies in store for South Carolina if Obama’s Interior Department and the API have their way.

We are SODA – Stop Offshore Drilling in the Atlantic – a group of concerned, apolitical citizens doing deep research into the relevant issues. We seek the support of all South Carolinians who reject Houston and the Gulf Coast as appropriate models for our unique communities.

Please show your support for this effort by signing this petition to help community, state, and federal leaders understand the enormity of citizen opposition, across the political spectrum, to drilling in the Atlantic. Our voices count, and the greater the number the more attention we will command.

Our numbers will mushroom if you ask like-minded friends to join our effort to maintain the beauty and integrity of our world-class coastline.

Terry Munson
SODA (tmunson@sc.rr.com)