Investigators believe a 1,200-foot cargo ship dragging anchor in rough seas caught an underwater oil pipeline and pulled it across the seafloor, months before a leak from the line fouled the Southern California coastline with crude.

A team of federal investigators trying to chase down the cause of the spill boarded the Panama-registered MSC DANIT just hours after the massive ship arrived this weekend off the Port of Long Beach, the same area where the leak was discovered in early October.

During a prior visit by the ship during a heavy storm in January, investigators believe its anchor dragged for an unknown distance before striking the 16-inch steel pipe, Coast Guard LTJG SondraKay Kneen said Sunday.

The impact would have knocked an inch-thick concrete casing off the pipe and pulled it more than 100 feet, bending but not breaking the line, Kneen said.

Still undetermined is whether the impact caused the October leak, or if the line was hit by something else at a later date or failed due to a preexisting problem, Kneen said.

“We’re still looking at multiple vessels and scenarios,” she said.

The Coast Guard on Saturday designated the owner and operator as parties of interest in its investigation into the spill, estimated to have released about 25,000 gallons of crude into the water, killing birds, fish and mammals.

The accident just a few miles off Los Angeles’ Huntington Beach fouled beaches and wetlands and led to temporary closures for cleanup work. While not as bad as initially feared, it has reignited the debate over offshore drilling in federal waters in the Pacific, where hundreds of miles of pipelines were installed decades ago.

The DANIT’s operator, MSC Mediterranean Shipping Company, is headquartered in Switzerland and has a fleet of 600 vessels and more than 100,000 workers, according to the company.

MSC representatives did not immediately respond to email messages seeking comment. A security guard reached by telephone at the company’s headquarters in Geneva said it was closed until Monday.

The vessel’s owner, identified by the Coast Guard as Dordellas Finance Corporation, could not be reached for comment.

The DANIT arrived in Long Beach this weekend after voyaging from China, according to marine traffic monitoring websites.

The investigation into what caused the spill could lead to criminal charges or civil penalties, but none have been announced yet, and Kneen said the probe could continue for months.

Attorneys for MSC and Dordellas will have the chance to examine and cross-examine the government’s witnesses in the case and also to call their own witnesses, according to the Coast Guard. The investigation also includes the National Transportation Safety Board and other agencies.

Kneen declined to say if any damage was found to an anchor on the DANIT after a team of at least five investigators spent much of Saturday aboard the ship.

At least two other vessels were previously boarded by investigators, who are examining logs kept by the ships’ captains, officers and engineers and voyage data recorders — equivalent to the so-called black box on airplanes.

In response to the new focus on the DANIT, the Houston-based owner of the damaged pipeline, Amplify Energy, thanked the Coast Guard for its continued work on the case.

Amplify representatives have not directly responded to questions about an hourslong delay between an alarm indicating a potential problem with the pipeline and the company reporting the leak to federal authorities.

The science is clear: Vaccines are a safe and effective way to prevent serious illness, hospitalization and death from the coronavirus, and vaccine mandates are an effective tool in promoting widespread vaccinations.

Still, the battle to inoculate the nation against the coronavirus has reached a fever pitch in recent months. President Biden has focused on getting as many Americans as possible vaccinated against the coronavirus, most notably rolling out wide-reaching vaccine mandates for government employees and for businesses with more than 100 workers.

But Republicans have grown increasingly hostile to the notion of mandatory vaccines — despite vaccine mandates existing in the background in parts of the United States since the 19th century — and have parlayed the fight against COVID-19 into a political battle, with vaccine mandates as the latest frontier in the great American defense of freedom and liberty.

These lawmakers decry the Biden administration’s actions as government overreach, but now themselves are telling employers they can’t impose mandates even if they want to.

Take for example Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, who earlier this week issued an executive order banning mandatory vaccines within private companies.

“No entity in Texas can compel receipt of a COVID-19 vaccine by any individual, including an employee or a consumer, who objects to such vaccination for any reason of personal conscience, based on a religious belief, or for medical reasons, including prior recovery from COVID-19,” Abbott wrote in his order.

The order notes that vaccines are “encouraged” for those who are eligible but should remain “voluntary.” Abbott is himself fully vaccinated against the virus and survived a brush with COVID-19 this summer.

Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis — also vaccinated against the virus — has vowed to sue the Biden administration over its federal vaccine mandates. So far, he has made good on his promise to keep such orders out of Florida, having previously fined a county in the state $3.5 million for imposing vaccine mandates on its employees.

“We’re going to make sure people are able to make their own choices. We’re not going to discriminate against people based on those choices, and you’re going to have a right to operate in society,” DeSantis said, painting the issue of vaccines as a matter of civil liberties.

A uniquely American predicament

Most Americans have in fact received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine.

A September Pew Research study found that in August, 73% of American adults said they had received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, and a majority said they had received the full course of the vaccine.

Among Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters, 86% said they were at least partially vaccinated against the virus, compared to 60% of Republicans. Unvaccinated Americans also tend to be younger than 50 and less educated.

For some of those who have not been vaccinated, the message from conservative leaders like Abbott and DeSantis about choice and liberty resonates, despite public health guidance on how to prevent serious illness and death from the coronavirus.

“Somehow it has morphed into not getting the vaccine as a way to defend their freedom and resist this ‘tyranny,’ ” said Ken Resnicow, a professor in the school of public health at the University of Michigan. “There’s not many countries that have this dynamic.”

Resnicow referenced a study on which he was the lead author that found a correlation between a person’s belief in conspiracy theories and the apocalypse, and their willingness to actively prevent the spread of the coronavirus. Particularly among self-identified evangelicals, Resnicow has found a distinct rejection of the coronavirus vaccine, which he said has made vaccine hesitancy especially difficult to address.

“There’s a sensitive issue — that it’s conflated with religion and evangelicalism, and people are scared to touch that third rail. And I think we have to confront how religion and science are now at loggerheads, and that wasn’t always the case,” he said.

“There’s this 30% of evangelicals for whom science is almost the enemy.”

Rupali Limaye, director of behavioral and implementation science at the International Vaccine Access Center based at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, has made similar findings as it relates to the difficulty of squaring public health realities with differences in political opinions.

“There is a really stark divide between states that have more heavily Democratic-leaning leadership versus those that have more heavily leaning Republican leadership,” she said.

Limaye said that particularly among Republicans, the idea of freedom — a core tenet of the American ideal — has given people a basis on which to pin anti-science rhetoric.

“This idea of liberty and autonomy — this comes up a lot as those underlying values of individuals that feel as though we don’t really need to be mandating vaccines,” she said,

“I don’t think it’s an issue that they hate vaccines themselves. They hate the idea that vaccines are essentially forcing them into doing something they don’t want to do. Vaccines are just sort of the casualty of all this.”

The political split in polling

Niambi Carter, an associate professor of political science and Woodrow Wilson fellow at Howard University, said that Republican politicians have been exploiting the political expediency of vaccine hesitancy to advance their own political goals, an argument the White House has made as well.

“Unfortunately we have politicians who will participate in this kind of nonsense because it serves them politically, not necessarily because they believe it,” Carter said, referencing the lawmakers’ own vaccination status. “They’re telling us to gamble our lives, but they’re not willing to take that same gamble with theirs. And I think that is what is the most galling about this.”

Opposition to vaccine mandates may even be growing among Republicans.

While Americans overall are generally favorable of Biden’s new vaccine mandates for federal workers, Republicans specifically are not.

Polling by the British market research firm YouGov published on Oct. 13 shows that fewer than half of Republicans — just 46% — support mandatory vaccines for children. That’s a 13-percentage-point decline since August 2020, before the current fight over the coronavirus vaccine erupted.

And when asked about the COVID-19 vaccine specifically, the difference is even more clear. An overwhelming majority of Democrats, 79%, are in favor of mandatory childhood vaccines against the virus and just 9% are opposed. This compared to just a quarter of Republicans who would support such a mandate, versus 63% who oppose it.

President Biden had promised to halve U.S. greenhouse gas emissions from 2005 levels by 2030, but an essential tool the administration planned to use to achieve that goal now appears out of reach.

The New York Times reported Friday that Sen. Joe Manchin, a conservative West Virginia Democrat, has indicated to the White House that he opposes the key climate measure in Biden’s multitrillion-dollar climate and social programs package.

The president needs the support of all 50 Democratic senators in order to pass the measure through a process known as reconciliation.

The program in question is the $150 billion Clean Electricity Performance Program, which would financially reward utilities that transition to renewable energy and penalize those which do not. Experts say that the program would sharply reduce greenhouse gas pollution tied to electricity generation — which today accounts for roughly a quarter of U.S. emissions.

Manchin is at odds with his Democratic colleagues

Manchin, who leads the Senate’s Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said during an appearance on CNN in September that energy companies are already transitioning to clean energy.

“Now they’re wanting to pay companies to do what they’re already doing,” he said. “Makes no sense to me at all for us to take billions of dollars and pay utilities for what they’re going to do as the market transitions.”

Manchin’s office did not immediately return a request for comment Saturday.

Sen. Tina Smith, a Minnesota Democrat and champion of the clean energy measures, said in an interview with the Star Tribune newspaper that Manchin’s characterization is “just not right.”

“In fact, what we’re doing is we’re providing utilities with support, so that they can rapidly add clean power without raising utility rates,” Smith said.

Ties to the fossil fuel industry

Coal is a dominant industry in Manchin’s home state of West Virginia.

As of 2019, the state is the second-largest U.S. coal producer and relies on the fuel for 91% of its energy needs. The energy sector accounts for 6% of the state’s employment, compared with a national average of roughly 2%.

The senator also has personal financial ties to the fossil fuel industry.

Last year, according to his public financial disclosure, Manchin received about $492,000 in dividends on stock from Enersystems, Inc., the coal business he founded in 1988, which is now controlled by his son Joseph. According to OpenSecrets, which tracks political fundraising, Manchin is the top recipient of donations from the oil and gas and coal mining industries this election cycle.

After news broke of Manchin’s reported opposition to the clean energy program, Smith issued a warning to the White House on Twitter.

“Let’s be clear: the Build Back Better budget must meaningfully address climate change,” Smith said, using the administration’s branding for the legislative package.

“I’m open to different approaches, but I cannot support a bill that won’t get us where we need to be on emissions,” Smith said. “There are 50 Democratic senators. Every one of us is needed get this passed.”

Smith told NPR this month that she and Manchin have been in regular contact about Manchin’s concerns.

U.S. credibility is on the line

In two weeks, world leaders will meet in Scotland for a major United Nations conference on climate change, COP26.

President Biden and John Kerry, his climate envoy, have been working to build U.S. credibility on climate issues after years of inaction and climate change denialism.

In an interview this week with The Associated Press, Kerry said that the administration’s trouble passing its own climate policies hurts the effort to spur climate action abroad.

“I’m not going to pretend it’s the best way to send the best message. I mean, we need to do these things,” Kerry said. He said that if Congress fails to pass significant climate change legislation, “it would be like President Trump pulling out of the Paris agreement, again.”

A crucial moment for the health of the planet

Kerry also indicated that the conference talks are likely to fall short of securing the pledges that would be necessary, if met, to limit global warming to under 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, from pre-industrial levels.

Under current worldwide commitments, global emissions are expected to rise by about 16% in 2030, compared to 2010. That would put the planet on track for more than 4 degrees Fahrenheit of warming by 2100.

At that point, rising sea levels would inundate coastlines, extreme heat waves would be significantly more common and more intense floods and droughts would potentially displace tens of millions of people.

Lauren Sommer contributed reporting.