Close to 1,000 people packed the hearing room yesterday during a marathon meeting about the Cabrillo Port LNG project, the liquified natural gas terminal that Australian mining behemoth BHP Billiton Ltd so badly wants to anchor off the Malibu and Oxnard coasts. The Lands Commission voted 2-1 against awarding a lease to BHP, agreeing with residents' concerns over environmental damage and safety.

"We're ecstatic," said Susan Jordan, director of the California Coastal Protection Network, which provided the shirts and helped organize the opponents. "This effectively kills it."

Here's a little piece about the vote in BusinessWeek:

The 30-year lease considered by the three-member State Lands Commission would have granted BHP the right to build, operate, use and maintain the pipelines. The plan called for subsea lines, which would be laid about 100 feet apart, to be about 23 miles long but only cross about 4 1/2 miles of California land before reaching Ormond Beach in Ventura County.

Without the subsea pipelines, the terminal would essentially be inoperable.

Commission Chairman John Garamendi, who is also the lieutenant governor, said he voted against awarding the lease permit because "serious questions remain about the project's safety and its potential impact on the environment."

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has veto power over the project, but cannot overturn the commission's decision about the pipeline lease. He has not made a decision on what he'd do should the project move forward.

The LNG terminal would be 14 stories high and the size of three football fields, would play host to a constant conga line of diesel-belching supertankers, and would itself spew an annual 200 tons of smog-inducing pollutants into the air. If a fire broke out, it could flash-fry everything within a seven-mile mile radius with a single flaming vapor cloud.

There's lots more (like the fact the plant, located just outside the border of the ecologically sensitive Channel Islands National Park and Marine Sanctuary, would dump millions of gallons of hot sea water into the Pacific each day) so if you're interested, click here to see what drives the opposition.