By Robert F. Kennedy Jr.- Huffington Post:
A common spin in the right wing coverage of BP's oil spill is a gleeful suggestion that the gulf blowout is Obama's Katrina.
In truth, culpability for the disaster can more accurately be laid at the Bush Administration's doorstep. For eight years, George Bush's presidency infected the oil industry's oversight agency, the Minerals Management Service, with a septic culture of corruption from which it has yet to recover. Oil patch alumnae in the White House encouraged agency personnel to engineer weakened safeguards that directly contributed to the gulf catastrophe.
The absence of an acoustical regulator -- a remotely triggered dead man's switch that might have closed off BP's gushing pipe at its sea floor wellhead when the manual switch failed (the fire and explosion on the drilling platform may have prevented the dying workers from pushing the button) -- was directly attributable to industry pandering by the Bush team. Acoustic switches are required by law for all offshore rigs off Brazil and in Norway's North Sea operations. BP uses the device voluntarily in Britain's North Sea and elsewhere in the world as do other big players like Holland's Shell and France's Total. In 2000, the Minerals Management Service while weighing a comprehensive rulemaking for drilling safety, deemed the acoustic mechanism "essential" and proposed to mandate the mechanism on all gulf rigs.
Then, between January and March of 2001, incoming Vice President Dick Cheney conducted secret meetings with over 100 oil industry officials allowing them to draft a wish list of industry demands to be implemented by the oil friendly administration. Cheney also used that time to re-staff the Minerals Management Service with oil industry toadies including a cabal of his Wyoming carbon cronies. In 2003, newly reconstituted Minerals Management Service genuflected to the oil cartel by recommending the removal of the proposed requirement for acoustic switches. The Minerals Management Service's 2003 study concluded that "acoustic systems are not recommended because they tend to be very costly."
The acoustic trigger costs about $500,000. Estimated costs of the oil spill to Gulf Coast residents are now upward of $14 billion to gulf state communities. Bush's 2005 energy bill officially dropped the requirement for the acoustic switch off devices explaining that the industry's existing practices are "failsafe."
Bending over for Big Oil became the ideological posture of the Bush White House, and, under Cheney's cruel whip, the practice trickled down through the regulatory bureaucracy. The Minerals Management Service -- the poster child for "agency capture phenomena" -- hopped into bed with the regulated industry -- literally. A 2009 investigation of the Minerals Management Service found that agency officials "frequently consumed alcohol at industry functions, had used cocaine and marijuana and had sexual relationships with oil and gas company representatives." Three reports by the Inspector General describe an open bazaar of payoffs, bribes and kickbacks spiced with scenes of female employees providing sexual favors to industry big wigs who in turn rewarded government workers with illegal contracts. In one incident reported by the Inspector General, agency employees got so drunk at a Shell sponsored golf event that they could not drive home and had to sleep in hotel rooms paid for by Shell.
Pervasive intercourse also characterized their financial relations. Industry lobbyists underwrote lavish parties and showered agency employees with illegal gifts, and lucrative personal contracts and treated them to regular golf, ski, and paintball outings, trips to rock concerts and professional sports events. The Inspector General characterized this orgy of wheeling and dealing as "a culture of ethical failure" that cost taxpayers millions in royalty fees and produced reams of bad science to justify unregulated deep water drilling in the gulf.
It is charitable to characterize the ethics of these government officials as "elastic." They seemed not to have existed at all. The Inspector General reported with some astonishment that Bush's crew at the MMS, when confronted with the laundry list of bribery, public theft and sexual and financial favors to and from industry "showed no remorse."
BP's confidence in lax government oversight by a badly compromised agency still staffed with Bush era holdovers may have prompted the company to take two other dangerous shortcuts. First, BP failed to install a deep hole shut off valve -- another fail-safe that might have averted the spill. And second, BP's reported willingness to violate the law by drilling to depths of 22,000-25,000 feet instead of the 18,000 feet maximum depth allowed by its permit may have contributed to this catastrophe.
And wherever there's a national tragedy involving oil, Cheney's offshore company Halliburton is never far afield. In fact, stay tuned; Halliburton may emerge as the primary villain in this caper. The blow out occurred shortly after Halliburton completed an operation to reinforce drilling hole casing with concrete slurry. This is a sensitive process that, according to government experts, can trigger catastrophic blowouts if not performed attentively. According to the Minerals Management Service, 18 of 39 blowouts in the Gulf of Mexico since 1996 were attributed to poor workmanship injecting cement around the metal pipe. Halliburton is currently under investigation by the Australian government for a massive blowout in the Timor Sea in 2005 caused by its faulty application of concrete casing.
The Obama administration has assigned nearly 2,000 federal personnel from the Coast Guard, the Corps of Engineers, the Department of Defense, the Department of Commerce, EPA, NOAA and Department of Interior to deal with the spill -- an impressive response. Still, the current White House is not without fault -- the government should, for example, be requiring a far greater deployment of absorbent booms. But the real culprit in this villainy is a negligent industry, the festering ethics of the Bush Administration and poor oversight by an agency corrupted by eight years of grotesque subservience to Big Oil.
Saturday, May 15, 2010
Friday, May 14, 2010
Jellyfish and Oil Don't Mix
Photos by Carolyn Cole from the LATimes.com
Dead jellyfish float in the waters off the Chandeleur Islands.
Oil surrounds parts of Louisiana's Chandeleur Islands in the Gulf of Mexico.
A boat makes its way along the edge of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico near the Chandeleur Islands.
Jellyfish can survive and even thrive with a lot of crap that civilization throws their way. But not oil.
Dead jellyfish float in the waters off the Chandeleur Islands.
Oil surrounds parts of Louisiana's Chandeleur Islands in the Gulf of Mexico.
A boat makes its way along the edge of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico near the Chandeleur Islands.
Jellyfish can survive and even thrive with a lot of crap that civilization throws their way. But not oil.
Gulf Oil Disaster 5 times / 10 times larger than 1st Estimate
NPR says the spill is at least 10 times larger that the BP first suggested. Other sources say 5 times.
The amount of oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico is at least 10 times the size of official estimates, according to an exclusive NPR analysis.
At NPR's request, experts examined video that BP released Wednesday. Their findings suggest the BP spill is already far larger than the 1989 Exxon Valdez accident in Alaska, which spilled at least 250,000 barrels of oil.
NPR's Richard Harris talks to Michele Norris on All Things Considered
[3 min 45 sec]
BP has said repeatedly that there is no reliable way to measure the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico by looking at the oil gushing out of the pipe. But scientists say there are actually many proven techniques for doing just that.
Steven Wereley, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University, analyzed videotape of the seafloor gusher using a technique called particle image velocimetry.
A computer program simply tracks particles and calculates how fast they are moving. Wereley put the BP video of the gusher into his computer. He made a few simple calculations and came up with an astonishing value for the rate of the oil spill: 70,000 barrels a day — much higher than the official estimate of 5,000 barrels a day.
The method is accurate to a degree of plus or minus 20 percent.
Given that uncertainty, the amount of material spewing from the pipe could range from 56,000 barrels to 84,000 barrels a day. It is important to note that it's not all oil. The short video BP released starts out with a shot of methane, but at the end it seems to be mostly oil.
"There's potentially some fluctuation back and forth between methane and oil," Wereley said.
But assuming that the lion's share of the material coming out of the pipe is oil, Wereley's calculations show that the official estimates are too low.
"We're talking more than a factor-of-10 difference between what I calculate and the number that's being thrown around," he said.
At least two other calculations support him.
Timothy Crone, an associate research scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, used another well-accepted method to calculate fluid flows. Crone arrived at a similar figure, but he said he'd like better video from BP before drawing a firm conclusion.
Eugene Chiang, a professor of astrophysics at the University of California, Berkeley, also got a similar answer, using just pencil and paper.
Without even having a sense of scale from the BP video, he correctly deduced that the diameter of the pipe was about 20 inches. And though his calculation is less precise than Wereley's, it is in the same ballpark.
"I would peg it at around 20,000 to 100,000 barrels per day," he said.
Chiang called the current estimate of 5,000 barrels a day "almost certainly incorrect."
Given this flow rate, it seems this is a spill of unprecedented proportions in U.S. waters.
"It would just take a few days, at most a week, for it to exceed the Exxon Valdez's record," Chiang said...
This new, much larger number suggests that capturing — and cleaning up — this oil may be a much bigger challenge than anyone has let on.
The amount of oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico is at least 10 times the size of official estimates, according to an exclusive NPR analysis.
At NPR's request, experts examined video that BP released Wednesday. Their findings suggest the BP spill is already far larger than the 1989 Exxon Valdez accident in Alaska, which spilled at least 250,000 barrels of oil.
NPR's Richard Harris talks to Michele Norris on All Things Considered
[3 min 45 sec]
BP has said repeatedly that there is no reliable way to measure the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico by looking at the oil gushing out of the pipe. But scientists say there are actually many proven techniques for doing just that.
Steven Wereley, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue University, analyzed videotape of the seafloor gusher using a technique called particle image velocimetry.
A computer program simply tracks particles and calculates how fast they are moving. Wereley put the BP video of the gusher into his computer. He made a few simple calculations and came up with an astonishing value for the rate of the oil spill: 70,000 barrels a day — much higher than the official estimate of 5,000 barrels a day.
The method is accurate to a degree of plus or minus 20 percent.
Given that uncertainty, the amount of material spewing from the pipe could range from 56,000 barrels to 84,000 barrels a day. It is important to note that it's not all oil. The short video BP released starts out with a shot of methane, but at the end it seems to be mostly oil.
"There's potentially some fluctuation back and forth between methane and oil," Wereley said.
But assuming that the lion's share of the material coming out of the pipe is oil, Wereley's calculations show that the official estimates are too low.
"We're talking more than a factor-of-10 difference between what I calculate and the number that's being thrown around," he said.
At least two other calculations support him.
Timothy Crone, an associate research scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, used another well-accepted method to calculate fluid flows. Crone arrived at a similar figure, but he said he'd like better video from BP before drawing a firm conclusion.
Eugene Chiang, a professor of astrophysics at the University of California, Berkeley, also got a similar answer, using just pencil and paper.
Without even having a sense of scale from the BP video, he correctly deduced that the diameter of the pipe was about 20 inches. And though his calculation is less precise than Wereley's, it is in the same ballpark.
"I would peg it at around 20,000 to 100,000 barrels per day," he said.
Chiang called the current estimate of 5,000 barrels a day "almost certainly incorrect."
Given this flow rate, it seems this is a spill of unprecedented proportions in U.S. waters.
"It would just take a few days, at most a week, for it to exceed the Exxon Valdez's record," Chiang said...
This new, much larger number suggests that capturing — and cleaning up — this oil may be a much bigger challenge than anyone has let on.
Thursday, May 13, 2010
With Obama, Regulations Are Back in Fashion
What some (ie Chief Justice Roberts) may call Paternalism or the "Nanny State" - I think of as Law and Order. Reasonable regulations so that our shared commons are not destroyed and to protect the health of workers and citizens.
By Eric Lipton - New York Times:
In a burst of rule-making, federal agencies have toughened or proposed new standards to protect Americans from tainted eggs, safeguard construction workers from crane accidents, prevent injuries from baby walkers and even protect polar bears from extinction.
Over the last year, the Obama administration has pressed forward on hundreds of new mandates, while also stepping up enforcement of rules by increasing the ranks of inspectors and imposing higher fines for violations.
A new age of regulation is well under way in Washington, a fact somewhat obscured by the high-profile debates over the health care overhaul and financial oversight system and by fresh calls for greater federal vigilance spurred by the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the deaths of coal miners in West Virginia.
The surge in rule-making has resulted from an unusual confluence of factors, from repeated outbreaks of food-borne illnesses to workplace disasters. Some industry groups, wanting foreign competitors to adhere to the same standards they must meet, have backed new federal mandates. The push for some of the measures began at the end of the Bush administration, a tacit acknowledgment that its deregulatory agenda had gone too far.
Still, the new aggressiveness reflects the new cops on the beat, and the contrast with the Bush administration is an intentionally sharp one. While the Bush administration mostly favored voluntary compliance by industry, senior Obama administration officials argue that carefully crafted regulation can be a positive force.
“We start from the perspective that we all want a cleaner environment, longer lives, improved safety,” said Peter R. Orszag, director of the Office of Management and Budget, which reviews major regulations. “Smart regulation can make people’s lives better off.”
But complaints from industry leaders are intensifying. Manufacturers, home builders, toymakers and others say that Washington has been overzealous about imposing new requirements, and they warn of serious consequences for businesses and consumers.
“I am all for clean water, but this really isn’t helping,” said Bobby Bowling IV, president of the Tropicana Building Corporation in El Paso, who objects to rules adopted by the Environmental Protection Agency last year requiring larger construction sites to prevent turbid storm-water runoff. “All this is one more obstacle to development,” Mr. Bowling said.
The National Association of Manufacturers made a similar complaint about the cost of many of the new proposed mandates. “Dollars spent on compliance with cumbersome regulations are dollars not spent on hiring new employees,” said Erin Streeter, a spokeswoman for the group.
Obama administration officials reject the criticism, saying that the benefits associated with the dozens of major rules adopted between President Obama’s inauguration and the end of 2009 outweigh the costs by an estimated $3.1 billion, a savings they assert is greater than that attributed to new regulations in the first years of the Clinton and Bush administrations.
They arrived at that figure by factoring in upfront costs — like the price of stronger brake systems being mandated in new tractor-trailers — with the estimated long-term savings — like reduced property damage and an estimated 227 fewer highway deaths each year.
“I don’t want to put anyone out of business,” said Inez Tenenbaum, chairwoman of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, who was appointed by Mr. Obama. “But if anything will help the marketplace, it is to make sure that people have confidence in the products that they buy.”
The Environmental Protection Agency is perhaps the most aggressive advocate of the new regulatory philosophy in Washington. It has moved quickly to reverse or strengthen Bush administration policies on power plant pollution, lead paint and toxic chemical discharges.
Last month, along with the Transportation Department, the agency mandated that automakers significantly cut greenhouse-gas emissions while increasing fuel economy standards, an issue the Bush administration had put on hold, citing the industry’s weakened financial condition. The car companies pronounced themselves happy with the result because it eliminated the possibility of even stricter regulation by California and about a dozen other states.
The agency’s administrator, Lisa P. Jackson, has made clear that she would prefer to have Congress tackle climate change through broad legislation in what would be one of the largest regulatory actions in American history. But if Congress fails to pass a law, she has already started the process of mandating standards on her own.
The shift is also evident at major agencies charged with policing worker safety, health and consumer products. Many of the rules those agencies have adopted or are now pushing to impose — including a requirement that farmers refrigerate eggs and kill rodents to combat salmonella contamination on eggshells, which sickens 79,000 people a year — languished during previous administrations.
Now, a newly muscular Food and Drug Administration will have more authority, money and staff for greater scrutiny of products. Since bottoming out at 1,309 inspectors in the 2007 fiscal year, the agency now has 1,800 inspectors with 150 more on the way. Inspections rose 5 percent in 2009 after years of declines and are expected to increase steadily in coming years.
David Michaels, who became head of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in December, has asked Congress to allow the agency to impose much larger fines and criminal penalties on employers that knowingly leave their workers at risk. The agency also is adding dozens of inspectors.
“Fourteen workers die every day in preventable events all across the country,” Dr. Michaels said. “We have to turn up the volume to make it very clear that OSHA is on the job.”
.....Other conservative critics have assailed the administration as creating a big-government nanny state that threatens the nation’s global competitiveness. James L. Gattuso, an expert on regulatory policy at the Heritage Foundation, said the Obama administration was most likely inflating the cost savings and other benefits associated with many of its rule changes, disguising the negative impact they are having on the economy.....
By Eric Lipton - New York Times:
In a burst of rule-making, federal agencies have toughened or proposed new standards to protect Americans from tainted eggs, safeguard construction workers from crane accidents, prevent injuries from baby walkers and even protect polar bears from extinction.
Over the last year, the Obama administration has pressed forward on hundreds of new mandates, while also stepping up enforcement of rules by increasing the ranks of inspectors and imposing higher fines for violations.
A new age of regulation is well under way in Washington, a fact somewhat obscured by the high-profile debates over the health care overhaul and financial oversight system and by fresh calls for greater federal vigilance spurred by the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the deaths of coal miners in West Virginia.
The surge in rule-making has resulted from an unusual confluence of factors, from repeated outbreaks of food-borne illnesses to workplace disasters. Some industry groups, wanting foreign competitors to adhere to the same standards they must meet, have backed new federal mandates. The push for some of the measures began at the end of the Bush administration, a tacit acknowledgment that its deregulatory agenda had gone too far.
Still, the new aggressiveness reflects the new cops on the beat, and the contrast with the Bush administration is an intentionally sharp one. While the Bush administration mostly favored voluntary compliance by industry, senior Obama administration officials argue that carefully crafted regulation can be a positive force.
“We start from the perspective that we all want a cleaner environment, longer lives, improved safety,” said Peter R. Orszag, director of the Office of Management and Budget, which reviews major regulations. “Smart regulation can make people’s lives better off.”
But complaints from industry leaders are intensifying. Manufacturers, home builders, toymakers and others say that Washington has been overzealous about imposing new requirements, and they warn of serious consequences for businesses and consumers.
“I am all for clean water, but this really isn’t helping,” said Bobby Bowling IV, president of the Tropicana Building Corporation in El Paso, who objects to rules adopted by the Environmental Protection Agency last year requiring larger construction sites to prevent turbid storm-water runoff. “All this is one more obstacle to development,” Mr. Bowling said.
The National Association of Manufacturers made a similar complaint about the cost of many of the new proposed mandates. “Dollars spent on compliance with cumbersome regulations are dollars not spent on hiring new employees,” said Erin Streeter, a spokeswoman for the group.
Obama administration officials reject the criticism, saying that the benefits associated with the dozens of major rules adopted between President Obama’s inauguration and the end of 2009 outweigh the costs by an estimated $3.1 billion, a savings they assert is greater than that attributed to new regulations in the first years of the Clinton and Bush administrations.
They arrived at that figure by factoring in upfront costs — like the price of stronger brake systems being mandated in new tractor-trailers — with the estimated long-term savings — like reduced property damage and an estimated 227 fewer highway deaths each year.
“I don’t want to put anyone out of business,” said Inez Tenenbaum, chairwoman of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, who was appointed by Mr. Obama. “But if anything will help the marketplace, it is to make sure that people have confidence in the products that they buy.”
The Environmental Protection Agency is perhaps the most aggressive advocate of the new regulatory philosophy in Washington. It has moved quickly to reverse or strengthen Bush administration policies on power plant pollution, lead paint and toxic chemical discharges.
Last month, along with the Transportation Department, the agency mandated that automakers significantly cut greenhouse-gas emissions while increasing fuel economy standards, an issue the Bush administration had put on hold, citing the industry’s weakened financial condition. The car companies pronounced themselves happy with the result because it eliminated the possibility of even stricter regulation by California and about a dozen other states.
The agency’s administrator, Lisa P. Jackson, has made clear that she would prefer to have Congress tackle climate change through broad legislation in what would be one of the largest regulatory actions in American history. But if Congress fails to pass a law, she has already started the process of mandating standards on her own.
The shift is also evident at major agencies charged with policing worker safety, health and consumer products. Many of the rules those agencies have adopted or are now pushing to impose — including a requirement that farmers refrigerate eggs and kill rodents to combat salmonella contamination on eggshells, which sickens 79,000 people a year — languished during previous administrations.
Now, a newly muscular Food and Drug Administration will have more authority, money and staff for greater scrutiny of products. Since bottoming out at 1,309 inspectors in the 2007 fiscal year, the agency now has 1,800 inspectors with 150 more on the way. Inspections rose 5 percent in 2009 after years of declines and are expected to increase steadily in coming years.
David Michaels, who became head of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in December, has asked Congress to allow the agency to impose much larger fines and criminal penalties on employers that knowingly leave their workers at risk. The agency also is adding dozens of inspectors.
“Fourteen workers die every day in preventable events all across the country,” Dr. Michaels said. “We have to turn up the volume to make it very clear that OSHA is on the job.”
.....Other conservative critics have assailed the administration as creating a big-government nanny state that threatens the nation’s global competitiveness. James L. Gattuso, an expert on regulatory policy at the Heritage Foundation, said the Obama administration was most likely inflating the cost savings and other benefits associated with many of its rule changes, disguising the negative impact they are having on the economy.....
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
"Sex & Drugs & the Spill"
By Paul Krugman- New York Times:
...There is a common thread running through Katrina and the gulf spill — namely, the collapse in government competence and effectiveness that took place during the Bush years.
The full story of the Deepwater Horizon blowout is still emerging. But it’s already obvious both that BP failed to take adequate precautions, and that federal regulators made no effort to ensure that such precautions were taken.
For years, the Minerals Management Service, the arm of the Interior Department that oversees drilling in the gulf, minimized the environmental risks of drilling. It failed to require a backup shutdown system that is standard in much of the rest of the world, even though its own staff declared such a system necessary. It exempted many offshore drillers from the requirement that they file plans to deal with major oil spills. And it specifically allowed BP to drill Deepwater Horizon without a detailed environmental analysis.
Surely, however, none of this — except, possibly, that last exemption, granted early in the Obama administration — surprises anyone who followed the history of the Interior Department during the Bush years.
For the Bush administration was, to a large degree, run by and for the extractive industries — and I’m not just talking about Dick Cheney’s energy task force. Crucially, management of Interior was turned over to lobbyists, most notably J. Steven Griles, a coal-industry lobbyist who became deputy secretary and effectively ran the department. (In 2007 Mr. Griles pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about his ties to Jack Abramoff.)
Given this history, it’s not surprising that the Minerals Management Service became subservient to the oil industry — although what actually happened is almost too lurid to believe. According to reports by Interior’s inspector general, abuses at the agency went beyond undue influence: there was “a culture of substance abuse and promiscuity” — cocaine, sexual relationships with industry representatives, and more. Protecting the environment was presumably the last thing on these government employees’ minds.
Now, President Obama isn’t completely innocent of blame in the current spill. As I said, BP received an environmental waiver for Deepwater Horizon after Mr. Obama took office. It’s true that he’d only been in the White House for two and half months, and the Senate wouldn’t confirm the new head of the Minerals Management Service until four months later. But the fact that the administration hadn’t yet had time to put its stamp on the agency should have led to extra caution about giving the go-ahead to projects with possible environmental risks.
And it’s worth noting that environmentalists were bitterly disappointed when Mr. Obama chose Ken Salazar as secretary of the interior. They feared that he would be too friendly to mineral and agricultural interests, that his appointment meant that there wouldn’t be a sharp break with Bush-era policies — and in this one instance at least, they seem to have been right...
What really needs to change is our whole attitude toward government. For the troubles at Interior weren’t unique: they were part of a broader pattern that includes the failure of banking regulation and the transformation of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, a much-admired organization during the Clinton years, into a cruel joke. And the common theme in all these stories is the degradation of effective government by antigovernment ideology.
Mr. Obama understands this: he gave an especially eloquent defense of government at the University of Michigan’s commencement, declaring among other things that “government is what ensures that mines adhere to safety standards and that oil spills are cleaned up by the companies that caused them.”
Yet antigovernment ideology remains all too prevalent, despite the havoc it has wrought. In fact, it has been making a comeback with the rise of the Tea Party movement. If there’s any silver lining to the disaster in the gulf, it is that it may serve as a wake-up call, a reminder that we need politicians who believe in good government, because there are some jobs only the government can do.
...There is a common thread running through Katrina and the gulf spill — namely, the collapse in government competence and effectiveness that took place during the Bush years.
The full story of the Deepwater Horizon blowout is still emerging. But it’s already obvious both that BP failed to take adequate precautions, and that federal regulators made no effort to ensure that such precautions were taken.
For years, the Minerals Management Service, the arm of the Interior Department that oversees drilling in the gulf, minimized the environmental risks of drilling. It failed to require a backup shutdown system that is standard in much of the rest of the world, even though its own staff declared such a system necessary. It exempted many offshore drillers from the requirement that they file plans to deal with major oil spills. And it specifically allowed BP to drill Deepwater Horizon without a detailed environmental analysis.
Surely, however, none of this — except, possibly, that last exemption, granted early in the Obama administration — surprises anyone who followed the history of the Interior Department during the Bush years.
For the Bush administration was, to a large degree, run by and for the extractive industries — and I’m not just talking about Dick Cheney’s energy task force. Crucially, management of Interior was turned over to lobbyists, most notably J. Steven Griles, a coal-industry lobbyist who became deputy secretary and effectively ran the department. (In 2007 Mr. Griles pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about his ties to Jack Abramoff.)
Given this history, it’s not surprising that the Minerals Management Service became subservient to the oil industry — although what actually happened is almost too lurid to believe. According to reports by Interior’s inspector general, abuses at the agency went beyond undue influence: there was “a culture of substance abuse and promiscuity” — cocaine, sexual relationships with industry representatives, and more. Protecting the environment was presumably the last thing on these government employees’ minds.
Now, President Obama isn’t completely innocent of blame in the current spill. As I said, BP received an environmental waiver for Deepwater Horizon after Mr. Obama took office. It’s true that he’d only been in the White House for two and half months, and the Senate wouldn’t confirm the new head of the Minerals Management Service until four months later. But the fact that the administration hadn’t yet had time to put its stamp on the agency should have led to extra caution about giving the go-ahead to projects with possible environmental risks.
And it’s worth noting that environmentalists were bitterly disappointed when Mr. Obama chose Ken Salazar as secretary of the interior. They feared that he would be too friendly to mineral and agricultural interests, that his appointment meant that there wouldn’t be a sharp break with Bush-era policies — and in this one instance at least, they seem to have been right...
What really needs to change is our whole attitude toward government. For the troubles at Interior weren’t unique: they were part of a broader pattern that includes the failure of banking regulation and the transformation of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, a much-admired organization during the Clinton years, into a cruel joke. And the common theme in all these stories is the degradation of effective government by antigovernment ideology.
Mr. Obama understands this: he gave an especially eloquent defense of government at the University of Michigan’s commencement, declaring among other things that “government is what ensures that mines adhere to safety standards and that oil spills are cleaned up by the companies that caused them.”
Yet antigovernment ideology remains all too prevalent, despite the havoc it has wrought. In fact, it has been making a comeback with the rise of the Tea Party movement. If there’s any silver lining to the disaster in the gulf, it is that it may serve as a wake-up call, a reminder that we need politicians who believe in good government, because there are some jobs only the government can do.
Saturday, May 08, 2010
"The Crisis Comes Ashore" by Al Gore
From the New Republic:
The continuing undersea gusher of oil 50 miles off the shores of Louisiana is not the only source of dangerous uncontrolled pollution spewing into the environment. Worldwide, the amount of man-made CO2 being spilled every three seconds into the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding the planet equals the highest current estimate of the amount of oil spilling from the Macondo well every day. Indeed, the average American coal-fired power generating plant gushes more than three times as much global-warming pollution into the atmosphere each day—and there are over 1,400 of them.
Just as the oil companies told us that deep-water drilling was safe, they tell us that it’s perfectly all right to dump 90 million tons of CO2 into the air of the world every 24 hours. Even as the oil spill continues to grow—even as BP warns that the flow could increase multi-fold, to 60,000 barrels per day, and that it may continue for months—the head of the American Petroleum Institute, Jack Gerard, says, "Nothing has changed. When we get back to the politics of energy, oil and natural gas are essential to the economy and our way of life." His reaction reminds me of the day Elvis Presley died. Upon hearing the tragic news, Presley’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker, said, “This changes nothing.”
However, both the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the CO2 spill into the global atmosphere are causing profound and harmful changes—directly and indirectly. The oil is having a direct impact on fish, shellfish, turtles, seabirds, coral reefs, marshes, and the entire web of life in the Gulf Coast. The indirect effects include the loss of jobs in the fishing and tourism industries; the destruction of the health, vitality, and rich culture of communities in the region; imminent bankruptcies; vast environmental damage expected to persist for decades; and the disruption of seafood markets nationwide.
And, of course, the consequences of our ravenous consumption of oil are even larger. Starting 40 years ago, when America's domestic oil production peaked, our dependence on foreign oil has steadily grown. We are now draining our economy of several hundred billion dollars a year in order to purchase foreign oil in a global market dominated by the huge reserves owned by sovereign states in the Persian Gulf. This enormous and increasing transfer of wealth contributes heavily to our trade and current-account deficits, and enriches regimes in the most unstable region of the world, helping to finance both terrorism and Iran’s relentless effort to build a nuclear arsenal.
The profound risk to our national and economic security posed by the prospect of the world’s sudden loss of access to Persian Gulf oil contributed greatly to the strategic miscalculations and public deceptions that led to our costly invasion of Iraq, including the reckless diversion of military and intelligence assets from Afghanistan before our mission there was accomplished.
I am far from the only one who believes that it is not too much of a stretch to link the ongoing wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and northwestern Pakistan—and even last week’s attempted bombing in Times Square—to a long chain of events triggered in part by our decision to allow ourselves to become so dependent on foreign oil.
Here at home, the illusion that we can meaningfully reduce our dependence on foreign oil by taking extraordinary risks to develop deep reserves in the Outer Continental Shelf is illuminated by the illustration below. The addition to oil company profits may be significant, but the benefits to our national security are trivial. Meanwhile, our increasing appetite for coal is also creating environmental and human catastrophes. The obscene practice known as “mountaintop mining,” for instance, is not only defacing the landscape of Appalachia but also destroying streams throughout the region and poisoning the drinking water of many communities.
The direct consequences of burning these vast and ever-growing amounts of oil and coal are a buildup of heat in the atmosphere worldwide and the increased acidity of the oceans. (Although the world has yet to focus on ocean acidification, the problem is terrifying. Thirty million of the 90 million tons of CO2 being spilled each day end up in the oceans as carbonic acid, changing the pH level by more than at any time in the last many millions of years, thus inflicting every form of life in the ocean that makes a shell or a reef with a kind of osteoporosis—interfering with their ability to transform calcium carbonate into the hard structures upon which their life depends—that threatens the survival of many species of zooplankton at the base of the ocean food chain.)..
Scientists are always careful in the way they describe the cause-and-effect relationship between global warming and such events (the flood in Nashville, TN): It is a mistake, they say, to attribute any single extreme weather event only to global warming, because there is large natural variability in weather—but the odds of extremely large downpours, scientists repeatedly insist, are steadily increasing with global warming, and such events are predicted to become far more common with each passing decade because when water evaporates from the warmer oceans, warmer air holds more of it. Average humidity worldwide has already increased by 4 percent since 1970, and each additional degree Fahrenheit increases it by another 3 percent-4 percent. The range of increases in global average temperature during this century is estimated at between 2˚ Fahrenheit to 11.5˚ Fahrenheit. The high end of this range would be utterly catastrophic, threatening the survival of civilization as we know it.
Even now, the hydrological cycle of the entire globe is being radically altered. The timing and predictability of rainfall is changing in ways that are already beginning to disrupt agriculture—particularly subsistence agriculture in developing countries. Crop failures and food insecurity are increasing ominously in many regions where farmers are no longer able to rely on the clockwork intervals of rainy seasons and dry seasons they learned from previous generations.
The record snowfalls last winter in the northeastern United States also fit into the same pattern. Indeed, the Northeast has long been included among the regions of the world predicted to experience the most dramatic increases in precipitation...
One important difference between the oil spill and the CO2 spill is that petroleum is visible on the surface of the sea and carries a distinctive odor now filling the nostrils of people on shore. Carbon dioxide, on the other hand, is invisible, odorless, tasteless, and has no price tag. It is all too easily put “out of sight and out of mind.” Because the impacts of global warming are distributed globally, they often masquerade as an abstraction. And because the length of time between causes and consequences is longer than we are used to dealing with, we are vulnerable to the illusion that we have the luxury of time before we begin to respond.
But neither assumption is correct. Most of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases is stored in the oceans and reemerges over time into the atmosphere. As a result, we are capable-–through inaction—of making truly disastrous consequences inevitable long before the worst impacts are manifested. Our perception of the dangers of the climate crisis therefore relies on our ability to understand and trust the conclusions reached by the most elaborate and impressive scientific assessment in the history of our civilization.
In other words, rather than relying on visceral responses, we have to draw upon our capacity for reasoning, communicating clearly with one another, forming a global consensus on the basis of science, and making a choice in favor of preventive action on a global scale...
This epic public contest between the broad public interest and a small but powerful special interest has taken place during a time when American democracy has grown sclerotic. The role of money in our politics has exploded to a dangerous level. Our democratic conversation is now dominated by expensive 30-second television commercials, which consume two-thirds of the campaign budgets of candidates in both political parties. The only reliable source of such large sums of campaign cash is business lobbies. Most members of the House and Senate facing competitive election contests are forced to spend several hours each day asking special interests for money to finance their campaigns. Instead of participating in committee hearings, floor debates, and Burkean reflection on the impact of the questions being considered, they spend their time as supplicants. Though many struggle to resist the influence their donors intend to have on their decision-making process, all too frequently human nature takes its course.
Their constituents now spend an average of five hours per day watching television—which is, of course, why campaigns in both political parties spend most of their money on TV advertising. Viewers also absorb political messages from the same special interests that are wining and dining and contributing to their elected officials. The largest carbon polluters have, for the last 17 years, sought to manipulate public opinion with a massive and continuing propaganda campaign, using TV advertisements and all other forms of mass persuasion. It is a game plan spelled out in one of their internal documents, which was leaked to an enterprising reporter, that stated: “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact.” In other words, they have mimicked the strategy pioneered by the tobacco industry, which undermined the scientific consensus linking the smoking of cigarettes with diseases of the lung and heart—successfully delaying appropriate health measures for almost 40 years after the landmark surgeon general’s report of 1964.
Meanwhile, many other countries—including China—have developed national strategies for leading the historic shift from oil and coal to renewable forms of energy, higher levels of efficiency, smart grids and fast trains, sustainable agriculture and forestry.
Here in the United States, the House of Representatives has passed a meaningful plan to move America in the same direction and reestablish our capacity to provide leadership in the world community on the most important issue facing the world today. The Senate, however, has struggled for the last 17 months to find enough votes to take up its own version of the same legislative plan. The unpleasant reality now spilling onto the shores of the Gulf Coast is creating public outrage and may also be generating a new opportunity to pass legislation, just as the oil spill 20 years ago from the Exxon Valdez created public momentum sufficient to overcome the anti-environment special interests. There is new hope that by the time the gusher from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico is capped, so will carbon emissions from the burning of oil and coal...
The continuing undersea gusher of oil 50 miles off the shores of Louisiana is not the only source of dangerous uncontrolled pollution spewing into the environment. Worldwide, the amount of man-made CO2 being spilled every three seconds into the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding the planet equals the highest current estimate of the amount of oil spilling from the Macondo well every day. Indeed, the average American coal-fired power generating plant gushes more than three times as much global-warming pollution into the atmosphere each day—and there are over 1,400 of them.
Just as the oil companies told us that deep-water drilling was safe, they tell us that it’s perfectly all right to dump 90 million tons of CO2 into the air of the world every 24 hours. Even as the oil spill continues to grow—even as BP warns that the flow could increase multi-fold, to 60,000 barrels per day, and that it may continue for months—the head of the American Petroleum Institute, Jack Gerard, says, "Nothing has changed. When we get back to the politics of energy, oil and natural gas are essential to the economy and our way of life." His reaction reminds me of the day Elvis Presley died. Upon hearing the tragic news, Presley’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker, said, “This changes nothing.”
However, both the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the CO2 spill into the global atmosphere are causing profound and harmful changes—directly and indirectly. The oil is having a direct impact on fish, shellfish, turtles, seabirds, coral reefs, marshes, and the entire web of life in the Gulf Coast. The indirect effects include the loss of jobs in the fishing and tourism industries; the destruction of the health, vitality, and rich culture of communities in the region; imminent bankruptcies; vast environmental damage expected to persist for decades; and the disruption of seafood markets nationwide.
And, of course, the consequences of our ravenous consumption of oil are even larger. Starting 40 years ago, when America's domestic oil production peaked, our dependence on foreign oil has steadily grown. We are now draining our economy of several hundred billion dollars a year in order to purchase foreign oil in a global market dominated by the huge reserves owned by sovereign states in the Persian Gulf. This enormous and increasing transfer of wealth contributes heavily to our trade and current-account deficits, and enriches regimes in the most unstable region of the world, helping to finance both terrorism and Iran’s relentless effort to build a nuclear arsenal.
The profound risk to our national and economic security posed by the prospect of the world’s sudden loss of access to Persian Gulf oil contributed greatly to the strategic miscalculations and public deceptions that led to our costly invasion of Iraq, including the reckless diversion of military and intelligence assets from Afghanistan before our mission there was accomplished.
I am far from the only one who believes that it is not too much of a stretch to link the ongoing wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and northwestern Pakistan—and even last week’s attempted bombing in Times Square—to a long chain of events triggered in part by our decision to allow ourselves to become so dependent on foreign oil.
Here at home, the illusion that we can meaningfully reduce our dependence on foreign oil by taking extraordinary risks to develop deep reserves in the Outer Continental Shelf is illuminated by the illustration below. The addition to oil company profits may be significant, but the benefits to our national security are trivial. Meanwhile, our increasing appetite for coal is also creating environmental and human catastrophes. The obscene practice known as “mountaintop mining,” for instance, is not only defacing the landscape of Appalachia but also destroying streams throughout the region and poisoning the drinking water of many communities.
The direct consequences of burning these vast and ever-growing amounts of oil and coal are a buildup of heat in the atmosphere worldwide and the increased acidity of the oceans. (Although the world has yet to focus on ocean acidification, the problem is terrifying. Thirty million of the 90 million tons of CO2 being spilled each day end up in the oceans as carbonic acid, changing the pH level by more than at any time in the last many millions of years, thus inflicting every form of life in the ocean that makes a shell or a reef with a kind of osteoporosis—interfering with their ability to transform calcium carbonate into the hard structures upon which their life depends—that threatens the survival of many species of zooplankton at the base of the ocean food chain.)..
Scientists are always careful in the way they describe the cause-and-effect relationship between global warming and such events (the flood in Nashville, TN): It is a mistake, they say, to attribute any single extreme weather event only to global warming, because there is large natural variability in weather—but the odds of extremely large downpours, scientists repeatedly insist, are steadily increasing with global warming, and such events are predicted to become far more common with each passing decade because when water evaporates from the warmer oceans, warmer air holds more of it. Average humidity worldwide has already increased by 4 percent since 1970, and each additional degree Fahrenheit increases it by another 3 percent-4 percent. The range of increases in global average temperature during this century is estimated at between 2˚ Fahrenheit to 11.5˚ Fahrenheit. The high end of this range would be utterly catastrophic, threatening the survival of civilization as we know it.
Even now, the hydrological cycle of the entire globe is being radically altered. The timing and predictability of rainfall is changing in ways that are already beginning to disrupt agriculture—particularly subsistence agriculture in developing countries. Crop failures and food insecurity are increasing ominously in many regions where farmers are no longer able to rely on the clockwork intervals of rainy seasons and dry seasons they learned from previous generations.
The record snowfalls last winter in the northeastern United States also fit into the same pattern. Indeed, the Northeast has long been included among the regions of the world predicted to experience the most dramatic increases in precipitation...
One important difference between the oil spill and the CO2 spill is that petroleum is visible on the surface of the sea and carries a distinctive odor now filling the nostrils of people on shore. Carbon dioxide, on the other hand, is invisible, odorless, tasteless, and has no price tag. It is all too easily put “out of sight and out of mind.” Because the impacts of global warming are distributed globally, they often masquerade as an abstraction. And because the length of time between causes and consequences is longer than we are used to dealing with, we are vulnerable to the illusion that we have the luxury of time before we begin to respond.
But neither assumption is correct. Most of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases is stored in the oceans and reemerges over time into the atmosphere. As a result, we are capable-–through inaction—of making truly disastrous consequences inevitable long before the worst impacts are manifested. Our perception of the dangers of the climate crisis therefore relies on our ability to understand and trust the conclusions reached by the most elaborate and impressive scientific assessment in the history of our civilization.
In other words, rather than relying on visceral responses, we have to draw upon our capacity for reasoning, communicating clearly with one another, forming a global consensus on the basis of science, and making a choice in favor of preventive action on a global scale...
This epic public contest between the broad public interest and a small but powerful special interest has taken place during a time when American democracy has grown sclerotic. The role of money in our politics has exploded to a dangerous level. Our democratic conversation is now dominated by expensive 30-second television commercials, which consume two-thirds of the campaign budgets of candidates in both political parties. The only reliable source of such large sums of campaign cash is business lobbies. Most members of the House and Senate facing competitive election contests are forced to spend several hours each day asking special interests for money to finance their campaigns. Instead of participating in committee hearings, floor debates, and Burkean reflection on the impact of the questions being considered, they spend their time as supplicants. Though many struggle to resist the influence their donors intend to have on their decision-making process, all too frequently human nature takes its course.
Their constituents now spend an average of five hours per day watching television—which is, of course, why campaigns in both political parties spend most of their money on TV advertising. Viewers also absorb political messages from the same special interests that are wining and dining and contributing to their elected officials. The largest carbon polluters have, for the last 17 years, sought to manipulate public opinion with a massive and continuing propaganda campaign, using TV advertisements and all other forms of mass persuasion. It is a game plan spelled out in one of their internal documents, which was leaked to an enterprising reporter, that stated: “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact.” In other words, they have mimicked the strategy pioneered by the tobacco industry, which undermined the scientific consensus linking the smoking of cigarettes with diseases of the lung and heart—successfully delaying appropriate health measures for almost 40 years after the landmark surgeon general’s report of 1964.
Meanwhile, many other countries—including China—have developed national strategies for leading the historic shift from oil and coal to renewable forms of energy, higher levels of efficiency, smart grids and fast trains, sustainable agriculture and forestry.
Here in the United States, the House of Representatives has passed a meaningful plan to move America in the same direction and reestablish our capacity to provide leadership in the world community on the most important issue facing the world today. The Senate, however, has struggled for the last 17 months to find enough votes to take up its own version of the same legislative plan. The unpleasant reality now spilling onto the shores of the Gulf Coast is creating public outrage and may also be generating a new opportunity to pass legislation, just as the oil spill 20 years ago from the Exxon Valdez created public momentum sufficient to overcome the anti-environment special interests. There is new hope that by the time the gusher from the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico is capped, so will carbon emissions from the burning of oil and coal...
Friday, May 07, 2010
"Britain's rarest wild flower gets special police protection"
From telegraph.co.uk:
The Lady's Slipper orchid at Silverdale Golf Course in Carnfoth, Lancashire, is the last remaining flowering plant in the country.
Although experts have tried to re-introduce the purple and yellow bloom in other areas, none of them have flowered.
Lancashire Police is now mounting a three-pronged defence of the flower amid concerns thieves may strike in May or June when the plant flowers.
Officers have been ordered to 'ensure the safety' of the orchid by including it in their routine foot patrols, meaning they will pass it every hour or so.
Police will also tag the 100-year-old orchid with a coded security mark so that anyone who tries to sell a cutting to wildflower collectors can be caught.
The force is also considering spending thousands of pounds on CCTV cameras to keep a 24-hour watch on the orchid, which is protected by the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981.
PC Tony Marsh, beat manager for the area, told Police Review: "We will be doing passing patrols, putting up deterrent notices, warning people about the offences and (asking them) to report any suspicious activity."
The orchid has been given a unique log number on the police computer system - which will alert the duty officer whenever a report concerning the flower is received.
Last June a thief took a cutting from the plant, leaving it with just six flowers, and in 2004 a collector tried to dig up the entire plant by its roots, but managed to get away with just a part of the plant.
PC Marsh added: "The biggest threat is collectors. When flowers were taken last year, we think purely just to press and put in a book, the value on the crime report was thousands of pounds."
PC Marsh has even circled the rare orchid with police crime scene tape in a bid to deter potential thieves.
PC Duncan Thomas, wildlife officer for Lancashire Constabulary, said the orchid - whose Latin name is Cypripedium calceolus - was "incredibly important".
He said: "The Lady Slipper orchid is an incredibly important plant, having survived for over a hundred years when all other plants were thought extinct. It is iconic to many people who enjoy wildlife in Britain.
"People travel from all ends of the country on what is almost a pilgrimage to view the plant in bloom and are often overcome with emotion at the sight.
"We have been monitoring this amazing plant for a number of years and you can't help being impressed by not only its rarity but the incredible display when flowering.
The Lady's Slipper orchid at Silverdale Golf Course in Carnfoth, Lancashire, is the last remaining flowering plant in the country.
Although experts have tried to re-introduce the purple and yellow bloom in other areas, none of them have flowered.
Lancashire Police is now mounting a three-pronged defence of the flower amid concerns thieves may strike in May or June when the plant flowers.
Officers have been ordered to 'ensure the safety' of the orchid by including it in their routine foot patrols, meaning they will pass it every hour or so.
Police will also tag the 100-year-old orchid with a coded security mark so that anyone who tries to sell a cutting to wildflower collectors can be caught.
The force is also considering spending thousands of pounds on CCTV cameras to keep a 24-hour watch on the orchid, which is protected by the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981.
PC Tony Marsh, beat manager for the area, told Police Review: "We will be doing passing patrols, putting up deterrent notices, warning people about the offences and (asking them) to report any suspicious activity."
The orchid has been given a unique log number on the police computer system - which will alert the duty officer whenever a report concerning the flower is received.
Last June a thief took a cutting from the plant, leaving it with just six flowers, and in 2004 a collector tried to dig up the entire plant by its roots, but managed to get away with just a part of the plant.
PC Marsh added: "The biggest threat is collectors. When flowers were taken last year, we think purely just to press and put in a book, the value on the crime report was thousands of pounds."
PC Marsh has even circled the rare orchid with police crime scene tape in a bid to deter potential thieves.
PC Duncan Thomas, wildlife officer for Lancashire Constabulary, said the orchid - whose Latin name is Cypripedium calceolus - was "incredibly important".
He said: "The Lady Slipper orchid is an incredibly important plant, having survived for over a hundred years when all other plants were thought extinct. It is iconic to many people who enjoy wildlife in Britain.
"People travel from all ends of the country on what is almost a pilgrimage to view the plant in bloom and are often overcome with emotion at the sight.
"We have been monitoring this amazing plant for a number of years and you can't help being impressed by not only its rarity but the incredible display when flowering.
"Climate change deniers accused of McCarthyism"
By Louise Gray at Telegraph.co.uk:
In a letter published in the journal Science, more than 250 members of the US National Academy of Sciences, including 11 Nobel Prize laureates, condemned the increase in "political assaults" on scientists who argue greenhouse gas emissions are warming the planet.
The 'climategate' scandal and mistakes by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have led to a surge in attacks on climate scientists around the world.
In the US politicians have called for a criminal investigation of climate scientists, while in the UK eminent professors have received hate mail and even death threats.
In a strongly worded letter, the group of scientists likened the situation to the 'McCarthy era' in the US where anyone suspected of communist links was threatened with persecution. The period in the 1950s was named after the anti-communist pursuits of Senator Joseph McCarthy.
"We call for an end to McCarthy-like threats of criminal prosecution against our colleagues based on innuendo and guilt by association, the harassment of scientists by politicians seeking distractions to avoid taking action, and the outright lies being spread about them," the letter read.
The defence of climate science comes after a number of scandals cast doubt on the theory of man-made global warming. Emails stolen from the University of East Anglia (UEA) appeared to show scientists were willing to exaggerate temperature change in a scandal known as 'climategate', although two separate inquiries have found no evidence of misconduct.
The scientists fear the scandals have led to a witch hunt against those involved.
James Inhofe, a US senator and long-standing climate sceptic, has called for a criminal investigation of climate scientists. Professor Phil Jones, the head of the Climatic Research Unit at the UEA, said he considered suicide after receiving hate mail and death threats.
Worst of all, they fear politicians and interest groups in industry are using doubt over climate science to prevent the world from acting to reduce the threat of global warming.
"Society has two choices: we can ignore the science and hide our heads in the sand and hope we are lucky, or we can act in the public interest to reduce the threat of global climate change quickly and substantively. The good news is that smart and effective actions are possible. But delay must not be an option."
The letter points out that there is uncertainty attached to theory of evolution and the Big Bang. But like these theories, climate change has been "overwhelmingly" accepted by scientists.
"There is compelling, comprehensive and consistent objective evidence that humans are changing the climate in ways that threaten our societies and the ecosystems on which we depend," they said.
"Many recent assaults on climate science and, more disturbingly, on climate scientists by climate change deniers, are typically driven by special interests or dogma, not by an honest effort to provide an alternative theory that credibly satisfies the evidence."
...But the planet would pay a much higher price in the long run than it could afford if it ignored the need for action to save the wildlife the world depended on, the organisation warned.
Speaking ahead of a meeting of the scientific advisory body for the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the IUCN said governments had failed to meet targets to halt biodiversity loss by 2010.
In a letter published in the journal Science, more than 250 members of the US National Academy of Sciences, including 11 Nobel Prize laureates, condemned the increase in "political assaults" on scientists who argue greenhouse gas emissions are warming the planet.
The 'climategate' scandal and mistakes by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have led to a surge in attacks on climate scientists around the world.
In the US politicians have called for a criminal investigation of climate scientists, while in the UK eminent professors have received hate mail and even death threats.
In a strongly worded letter, the group of scientists likened the situation to the 'McCarthy era' in the US where anyone suspected of communist links was threatened with persecution. The period in the 1950s was named after the anti-communist pursuits of Senator Joseph McCarthy.
"We call for an end to McCarthy-like threats of criminal prosecution against our colleagues based on innuendo and guilt by association, the harassment of scientists by politicians seeking distractions to avoid taking action, and the outright lies being spread about them," the letter read.
The defence of climate science comes after a number of scandals cast doubt on the theory of man-made global warming. Emails stolen from the University of East Anglia (UEA) appeared to show scientists were willing to exaggerate temperature change in a scandal known as 'climategate', although two separate inquiries have found no evidence of misconduct.
The scientists fear the scandals have led to a witch hunt against those involved.
James Inhofe, a US senator and long-standing climate sceptic, has called for a criminal investigation of climate scientists. Professor Phil Jones, the head of the Climatic Research Unit at the UEA, said he considered suicide after receiving hate mail and death threats.
Worst of all, they fear politicians and interest groups in industry are using doubt over climate science to prevent the world from acting to reduce the threat of global warming.
"Society has two choices: we can ignore the science and hide our heads in the sand and hope we are lucky, or we can act in the public interest to reduce the threat of global climate change quickly and substantively. The good news is that smart and effective actions are possible. But delay must not be an option."
The letter points out that there is uncertainty attached to theory of evolution and the Big Bang. But like these theories, climate change has been "overwhelmingly" accepted by scientists.
"There is compelling, comprehensive and consistent objective evidence that humans are changing the climate in ways that threaten our societies and the ecosystems on which we depend," they said.
"Many recent assaults on climate science and, more disturbingly, on climate scientists by climate change deniers, are typically driven by special interests or dogma, not by an honest effort to provide an alternative theory that credibly satisfies the evidence."
...But the planet would pay a much higher price in the long run than it could afford if it ignored the need for action to save the wildlife the world depended on, the organisation warned.
Speaking ahead of a meeting of the scientific advisory body for the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the IUCN said governments had failed to meet targets to halt biodiversity loss by 2010.
Thursday, May 06, 2010
"Republicans won't be nudged into cutting home energy"
From NewScientist.com:
It was hailed as a breakthrough in the fight to cut carbon emissions. In 2007, researchers found that heavy electricity users cut their consumption after being told that they used more energy than their neighbours. Almost a million US households have since received similar feedback and have cut electricity use by an average of 2.5 per cent.
But a new study has identified a wrinkle in the plan: the feedback only seems to work with liberals. Conservatives tend to ignore it. Some even respond by using more energy.
The findings come from a study of over 80,000 Californian households, just under half of which received feedback on energy use. Overall, the technique worked: households who got the feedback cut electricity by around 2 per cent, say Dora Costa and Matthew Kahn at the University of California, Los Angeles.
But important difference emerged when Costa and Kahn looked at the political leanings of those in the survey. Homeowners who identified themselves as Republicans cut energy use by just 0.4 per cent on average. And those Republicans who showed no practical interest in environmental causes – people who did not donate to environmental groups and did not choose to pay extra for renewable energy – even increased electricity use by 0.75 per cent.
Wesley Schultz at California State University in San Marcos, one of the researchers behind the 2007 finding, is not surprised by the result. He says that some Republicans have a negative view of the environmental movement and so might want to distance themselves from a green-themed campaign. Using more electricity could be an act of defiance, whether conscious or subconscious.
The result does not negate the usefulness of such psychological "nudges", adds Schultz. But it does suggest that feedback needs to be tailored to specific groups. "No one is immune to social pressure," says Schultz. "Even among those that increased electricity use there is a nudge that would work."
It is not clear what that nudge would be, however. It could be a focus on the financial savings that come with reduced electricity use, suggests Costa. Or it could be a pitch that equated less energy use with increased self-sufficiency, says Robert Gifford at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada.
But such nudges simply may not work in conservative parts of the US, Costa concludes. She says that other energy-saving schemes will need to implemented as well, such as tougher building codes. Unlike nudges, which do not place a financial burden on homeowners and buyers, these other approaches can drive up the price of homes and so are not always popular. "It may be that we have to do other politically difficult things," she warns.
It was hailed as a breakthrough in the fight to cut carbon emissions. In 2007, researchers found that heavy electricity users cut their consumption after being told that they used more energy than their neighbours. Almost a million US households have since received similar feedback and have cut electricity use by an average of 2.5 per cent.
But a new study has identified a wrinkle in the plan: the feedback only seems to work with liberals. Conservatives tend to ignore it. Some even respond by using more energy.
The findings come from a study of over 80,000 Californian households, just under half of which received feedback on energy use. Overall, the technique worked: households who got the feedback cut electricity by around 2 per cent, say Dora Costa and Matthew Kahn at the University of California, Los Angeles.
But important difference emerged when Costa and Kahn looked at the political leanings of those in the survey. Homeowners who identified themselves as Republicans cut energy use by just 0.4 per cent on average. And those Republicans who showed no practical interest in environmental causes – people who did not donate to environmental groups and did not choose to pay extra for renewable energy – even increased electricity use by 0.75 per cent.
Wesley Schultz at California State University in San Marcos, one of the researchers behind the 2007 finding, is not surprised by the result. He says that some Republicans have a negative view of the environmental movement and so might want to distance themselves from a green-themed campaign. Using more electricity could be an act of defiance, whether conscious or subconscious.
The result does not negate the usefulness of such psychological "nudges", adds Schultz. But it does suggest that feedback needs to be tailored to specific groups. "No one is immune to social pressure," says Schultz. "Even among those that increased electricity use there is a nudge that would work."
It is not clear what that nudge would be, however. It could be a focus on the financial savings that come with reduced electricity use, suggests Costa. Or it could be a pitch that equated less energy use with increased self-sufficiency, says Robert Gifford at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada.
But such nudges simply may not work in conservative parts of the US, Costa concludes. She says that other energy-saving schemes will need to implemented as well, such as tougher building codes. Unlike nudges, which do not place a financial burden on homeowners and buyers, these other approaches can drive up the price of homes and so are not always popular. "It may be that we have to do other politically difficult things," she warns.
Organic, Small Farmers Threatened by FDA Regulation
WASHINGTON - Small farmers in California who have led a national movement away from industrial agriculture face a looming crackdown on food safety that they say is geared to big corporate farms and will make it harder for them to survive.
The small growers, many of whom grow dozens of different kinds of vegetables and fruits, say the inherent benefits of their size, and their sensitivity to extra costs, are being ignored.
They are fighting to carve out a sanctuary in legislation that would bring farmers under the strict purview of the Food and Drug Administration, an agency more familiar with pharmaceuticals than food and local farms.
A bill before the Senate is riding a bipartisan groundswell created by recent outbreaks of E. coli, salmonella and other contamination in everything from fresh spinach to cookie dough.
And the small farmers face opponents in consumer groups, victims of food contamination, large growers and the Obama administration, who say no farm and no food should get a pass on safety.
An even tougher version of the legislation passed the House last summer. Now, a behind-the-scenes battle is raging in the Senate over how to regulate small and organic growers without ruining them - and still protect consumers.
If two versions of the overhaul pass, Congress would work to merge them.
The legislation would mandate a range of programs intended to bolster food safety. The FDA would gain greater authority to regulate how products are grown, stored, transported, inspected, traced from farm to table and recalled when needed.
But biologically diverse and organic growers argue that the problems that have plagued the food industry lie elsewhere.
They point to the sale of bagged vegetables, cut fruit and other processed food in which vast quantities of produce from different farms are mixed, sealed in containers and shipped long distances, creating a host for harmful bacteria.
The legislation does not address what some experts suspect is the source of E. coli contamination: the large, confined animal feeding operations that are breeding grounds for E. coli and are regulated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, not the FDA.
"It does not take on the industrial animal industry and the abuses going on," said Tom Willey of T&D Willey Farms in Madera, an organic grower of Mediterranean vegetables. "The really dangerous organisms we're dealing with out here, and trying to protect our produce and other foodstuffs from, are coming out the rear end of domestic animals."
No one in Congress or the administration has yielded in a bureaucratic turf battle between the Department of Agriculture, which regulates meat, poultry and eggs, and the FDA, which regulates all other food.
The controversy began with the spinach E. coli outbreak near San Juan Bautista in 2006 that left four people dead, 35 people with acute kidney failure and 103 hospitalized. The bacteria, known as E. coli O157:H7, first appeared in hamburger meat in the early 1980s and migrated to produce, mainly lettuce and other leafy greens that are cut, mixed and bagged for the convenience of shoppers.
Since then, there have been dozens of contamination cases, leading Congress to rewrite food safety laws by giving much more power to the FDA. But small growers worry that they, and consumers, will suffer in the sweep of reform.
"How do we trust that the FDA is going to know about things that the San Francisco Bay Area has been very progressive on - the field to fork, fresh, grow local, buy local - all of that?" said Rep. Sam Farr, D-Carmel. "The organic people are feeling that the regulations the FDA may promulgate will be so safety oriented, it'll put them out of business." .....
However, a UC Davis study last year by Shermain Hardesty and Yoko Kusunose found that the rules have put smaller growers at a disadvantage because their compliance costs are spread over fewer acres. Hardesty said costs may be as high as $100 an acre.
Large produce buyers such as Wal-Mart and McDonald's have gone much further than the industry standards. They have imposed rules of their own that have forced many California farmers who supply them to fence off waterways, poison wildlife to keep animals out of fields and destroy crop hedgerows that support beneficial insects.
Deputy Agriculture Secretary Kathleen Merrigan said Monday the administration is keeping a "close watch" on these so-called "super metrics," acknowledging that they have harmed the environment but said, "nobody gets a pass on food safety."
Increasing the danger
Willey, the Madera farmer, argued that many food safety rules tend "to push us to embrace a paradigm of sterility," which, in the long run, increases the danger.
"When you create microbial vacuums, they can be even more easily taken over by pathogenic organisms," he said. "In organic agriculture, we depend tremendously on a cooperative effort with beneficial microorganisms. My whole soil fertility system is based on that. Actually, soil fertility planetwide is based on that."
Efforts to modify proposed rules to make compliance easier for biologically diversified farms have been more successful in the Senate than in the House. New language that requires the FDA to consider farm size, crop diversity, organic requirements and other issues has been added.
"While none of these things in themselves solves the cause for concern, they certainly point strongly in the direction of the FDA needing to take into account these considerations," said Ferd Hoefner, policy director for the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition.
Hoefner called the House bill a one-size-fits-all approach that would be a "complete disaster" for small farms.
The small growers, many of whom grow dozens of different kinds of vegetables and fruits, say the inherent benefits of their size, and their sensitivity to extra costs, are being ignored.
They are fighting to carve out a sanctuary in legislation that would bring farmers under the strict purview of the Food and Drug Administration, an agency more familiar with pharmaceuticals than food and local farms.
A bill before the Senate is riding a bipartisan groundswell created by recent outbreaks of E. coli, salmonella and other contamination in everything from fresh spinach to cookie dough.
And the small farmers face opponents in consumer groups, victims of food contamination, large growers and the Obama administration, who say no farm and no food should get a pass on safety.
An even tougher version of the legislation passed the House last summer. Now, a behind-the-scenes battle is raging in the Senate over how to regulate small and organic growers without ruining them - and still protect consumers.
If two versions of the overhaul pass, Congress would work to merge them.
The legislation would mandate a range of programs intended to bolster food safety. The FDA would gain greater authority to regulate how products are grown, stored, transported, inspected, traced from farm to table and recalled when needed.
But biologically diverse and organic growers argue that the problems that have plagued the food industry lie elsewhere.
They point to the sale of bagged vegetables, cut fruit and other processed food in which vast quantities of produce from different farms are mixed, sealed in containers and shipped long distances, creating a host for harmful bacteria.
The legislation does not address what some experts suspect is the source of E. coli contamination: the large, confined animal feeding operations that are breeding grounds for E. coli and are regulated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, not the FDA.
"It does not take on the industrial animal industry and the abuses going on," said Tom Willey of T&D Willey Farms in Madera, an organic grower of Mediterranean vegetables. "The really dangerous organisms we're dealing with out here, and trying to protect our produce and other foodstuffs from, are coming out the rear end of domestic animals."
No one in Congress or the administration has yielded in a bureaucratic turf battle between the Department of Agriculture, which regulates meat, poultry and eggs, and the FDA, which regulates all other food.
The controversy began with the spinach E. coli outbreak near San Juan Bautista in 2006 that left four people dead, 35 people with acute kidney failure and 103 hospitalized. The bacteria, known as E. coli O157:H7, first appeared in hamburger meat in the early 1980s and migrated to produce, mainly lettuce and other leafy greens that are cut, mixed and bagged for the convenience of shoppers.
Since then, there have been dozens of contamination cases, leading Congress to rewrite food safety laws by giving much more power to the FDA. But small growers worry that they, and consumers, will suffer in the sweep of reform.
"How do we trust that the FDA is going to know about things that the San Francisco Bay Area has been very progressive on - the field to fork, fresh, grow local, buy local - all of that?" said Rep. Sam Farr, D-Carmel. "The organic people are feeling that the regulations the FDA may promulgate will be so safety oriented, it'll put them out of business." .....
However, a UC Davis study last year by Shermain Hardesty and Yoko Kusunose found that the rules have put smaller growers at a disadvantage because their compliance costs are spread over fewer acres. Hardesty said costs may be as high as $100 an acre.
Large produce buyers such as Wal-Mart and McDonald's have gone much further than the industry standards. They have imposed rules of their own that have forced many California farmers who supply them to fence off waterways, poison wildlife to keep animals out of fields and destroy crop hedgerows that support beneficial insects.
Deputy Agriculture Secretary Kathleen Merrigan said Monday the administration is keeping a "close watch" on these so-called "super metrics," acknowledging that they have harmed the environment but said, "nobody gets a pass on food safety."
Increasing the danger
Willey, the Madera farmer, argued that many food safety rules tend "to push us to embrace a paradigm of sterility," which, in the long run, increases the danger.
"When you create microbial vacuums, they can be even more easily taken over by pathogenic organisms," he said. "In organic agriculture, we depend tremendously on a cooperative effort with beneficial microorganisms. My whole soil fertility system is based on that. Actually, soil fertility planetwide is based on that."
Efforts to modify proposed rules to make compliance easier for biologically diversified farms have been more successful in the Senate than in the House. New language that requires the FDA to consider farm size, crop diversity, organic requirements and other issues has been added.
"While none of these things in themselves solves the cause for concern, they certainly point strongly in the direction of the FDA needing to take into account these considerations," said Ferd Hoefner, policy director for the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition.
Hoefner called the House bill a one-size-fits-all approach that would be a "complete disaster" for small farms.
"New Alarm Bells About Chemicals and Cancer"
By N.D.Kristof in the New York Times:
The President’s Cancer Panel is the Mount Everest of the medical mainstream, so it is astonishing to learn that it is poised to join ranks with the organic food movement and declare: chemicals threaten our bodies.
The cancer panel is releasing a landmark 200-page report on Thursday, warning that our lackadaisical approach to regulation may have far-reaching consequences for our health.
I’ve read an advance copy of the report, and it’s an extraordinary document. It calls on America to rethink the way we confront cancer, including much more rigorous regulation of chemicals.
Traditionally, we reduce cancer risks through regular doctor visits, self-examinations and screenings such as mammograms. The President’s Cancer Panel suggests other eye-opening steps as well, such as giving preference to organic food, checking radon levels in the home and microwaving food in glass containers rather than plastic.
In particular, the report warns about exposures to chemicals during pregnancy, when risk of damage seems to be greatest. Noting that 300 contaminants have been detected in umbilical cord blood of newborn babies, the study warns that: “to a disturbing extent, babies are born ‘pre-polluted.’ ”
It’s striking that this report emerges not from the fringe but from the mission control of mainstream scientific and medical thinking, the President’s Cancer Panel. Established in 1971, this is a group of three distinguished experts who review America’s cancer program and report directly to the president.
One of the seats is now vacant, but the panel members who joined in this report are Dr. LaSalle Leffall Jr., an oncologist and professor of surgery at Howard University, and Dr. Margaret Kripke, an immunologist at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Both were originally appointed to the panel by former President George W. Bush.
“We wanted to let people know that we’re concerned, and that they should be concerned,” Professor Leffall told me.
The report blames weak laws, lax enforcement and fragmented authority, as well as the existing regulatory presumption that chemicals are safe unless strong evidence emerges to the contrary.
“Only a few hundred of the more than 80,000 chemicals in use in the United States have been tested for safety,” the report says. It adds: “Many known or suspected carcinogens are completely unregulated.”
Industry may howl. The food industry has already been fighting legislation in the Senate backed by Dianne Feinstein of California that would ban bisphenol-A, commonly found in plastics and better known as BPA, from food and beverage containers.
Studies of BPA have raised alarm bells for decades, and the evidence is still complex and open to debate. That’s life: In the real world, regulatory decisions usually must be made with ambiguous and conflicting data. The panel’s point is that we should be prudent in such situations, rather than recklessly approving chemicals of uncertain effect.
The President’s Cancer Panel report will give a boost to Senator Feinstein’s efforts. It may also help the prospects of the Safe Chemicals Act, backed by Senator Frank Lautenberg and several colleagues, to improve the safety of chemicals on the market.
Some 41 percent of Americans will be diagnosed with cancer at some point in their lives, and they include Democrats and Republicans alike. Protecting ourselves and our children from toxins should be an effort that both parties can get behind — if enough members of Congress are willing to put the public interest ahead of corporate interests.
One reason for concern is that some cancers are becoming more common, particularly in children. We don’t know why that is, but the proliferation of chemicals in water, foods, air and household products is widely suspected as a factor. I’m hoping the President’s Cancer Panel report will shine a stronger spotlight on environmental causes of health problems — not only cancer, but perhaps also diabetes, obesity and autism.
This is not to say that chemicals are evil, and in many cases the evidence against a particular substance is balanced by other studies that are exonerating. To help people manage the uncertainty prudently, the report has a section of recommendations for individuals:
¶Particularly when pregnant and when children are small, choose foods, toys and garden products with fewer endocrine disruptors or other toxins. (Information about products is at www.cosmeticsdatabase.com or www.healthystuff.org.)
¶For those whose jobs may expose them to chemicals, remove shoes when entering the house and wash work clothes separately from the rest of the laundry.
¶Filter drinking water.
¶Store water in glass or stainless steel containers, or in plastics that don’t contain BPA or phthalates (chemicals used to soften plastics). Microwave food in ceramic or glass containers.
¶Give preference to food grown without pesticides, chemical fertilizers and growth hormones. Avoid meats that are cooked well-done.
¶Check radon levels in your home. Radon is a natural source of radiation linked to cancer.
The President’s Cancer Panel is the Mount Everest of the medical mainstream, so it is astonishing to learn that it is poised to join ranks with the organic food movement and declare: chemicals threaten our bodies.
The cancer panel is releasing a landmark 200-page report on Thursday, warning that our lackadaisical approach to regulation may have far-reaching consequences for our health.
I’ve read an advance copy of the report, and it’s an extraordinary document. It calls on America to rethink the way we confront cancer, including much more rigorous regulation of chemicals.
Traditionally, we reduce cancer risks through regular doctor visits, self-examinations and screenings such as mammograms. The President’s Cancer Panel suggests other eye-opening steps as well, such as giving preference to organic food, checking radon levels in the home and microwaving food in glass containers rather than plastic.
In particular, the report warns about exposures to chemicals during pregnancy, when risk of damage seems to be greatest. Noting that 300 contaminants have been detected in umbilical cord blood of newborn babies, the study warns that: “to a disturbing extent, babies are born ‘pre-polluted.’ ”
It’s striking that this report emerges not from the fringe but from the mission control of mainstream scientific and medical thinking, the President’s Cancer Panel. Established in 1971, this is a group of three distinguished experts who review America’s cancer program and report directly to the president.
One of the seats is now vacant, but the panel members who joined in this report are Dr. LaSalle Leffall Jr., an oncologist and professor of surgery at Howard University, and Dr. Margaret Kripke, an immunologist at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Both were originally appointed to the panel by former President George W. Bush.
“We wanted to let people know that we’re concerned, and that they should be concerned,” Professor Leffall told me.
The report blames weak laws, lax enforcement and fragmented authority, as well as the existing regulatory presumption that chemicals are safe unless strong evidence emerges to the contrary.
“Only a few hundred of the more than 80,000 chemicals in use in the United States have been tested for safety,” the report says. It adds: “Many known or suspected carcinogens are completely unregulated.”
Industry may howl. The food industry has already been fighting legislation in the Senate backed by Dianne Feinstein of California that would ban bisphenol-A, commonly found in plastics and better known as BPA, from food and beverage containers.
Studies of BPA have raised alarm bells for decades, and the evidence is still complex and open to debate. That’s life: In the real world, regulatory decisions usually must be made with ambiguous and conflicting data. The panel’s point is that we should be prudent in such situations, rather than recklessly approving chemicals of uncertain effect.
The President’s Cancer Panel report will give a boost to Senator Feinstein’s efforts. It may also help the prospects of the Safe Chemicals Act, backed by Senator Frank Lautenberg and several colleagues, to improve the safety of chemicals on the market.
Some 41 percent of Americans will be diagnosed with cancer at some point in their lives, and they include Democrats and Republicans alike. Protecting ourselves and our children from toxins should be an effort that both parties can get behind — if enough members of Congress are willing to put the public interest ahead of corporate interests.
One reason for concern is that some cancers are becoming more common, particularly in children. We don’t know why that is, but the proliferation of chemicals in water, foods, air and household products is widely suspected as a factor. I’m hoping the President’s Cancer Panel report will shine a stronger spotlight on environmental causes of health problems — not only cancer, but perhaps also diabetes, obesity and autism.
This is not to say that chemicals are evil, and in many cases the evidence against a particular substance is balanced by other studies that are exonerating. To help people manage the uncertainty prudently, the report has a section of recommendations for individuals:
¶Particularly when pregnant and when children are small, choose foods, toys and garden products with fewer endocrine disruptors or other toxins. (Information about products is at www.cosmeticsdatabase.com or www.healthystuff.org.)
¶For those whose jobs may expose them to chemicals, remove shoes when entering the house and wash work clothes separately from the rest of the laundry.
¶Filter drinking water.
¶Store water in glass or stainless steel containers, or in plastics that don’t contain BPA or phthalates (chemicals used to soften plastics). Microwave food in ceramic or glass containers.
¶Give preference to food grown without pesticides, chemical fertilizers and growth hormones. Avoid meats that are cooked well-done.
¶Check radon levels in your home. Radon is a natural source of radiation linked to cancer.
Wednesday, May 05, 2010
Drilling, Disaster, Denial
By Paul Krugman / New York Times:
It took futuristic technology to achieve one of the worst ecological disasters on record. Without such technology, after all, BP couldn’t have drilled the Deepwater Horizon well in the first place. Yet for those who remember their environmental history, the catastrophe in the gulf has a strangely old-fashioned feel, reminiscent of the events that led to the first Earth Day, four decades ago.
And maybe, just maybe, the disaster will help reverse environmentalism’s long political slide — a slide largely caused by our very success in alleviating highly visible pollution. If so, there may be a small silver lining to a very dark cloud.
Environmentalism began as a response to pollution that everyone could see. The spill in the gulf recalls the 1969 blowout that coated the beaches of Santa Barbara in oil. But 1969 was also the year the Cuyahoga River, which flows through Cleveland, caught fire. Meanwhile, Lake Erie was widely declared “dead,” its waters contaminated by algal blooms. And major U.S. cities — especially, but by no means only, Los Angeles — were often cloaked in thick, acrid smog.
It wasn’t that hard, under the circumstances, to mobilize political support for action. The Environmental Protection Agency was founded, the Clean Water Act was enacted, and America began making headway against its most visible environmental problems. Air quality improved: smog alerts in Los Angeles, which used to have more than 100 a year, have become rare. Rivers stopped burning, and some became swimmable again. And Lake Erie has come back to life, in part thanks to a ban on laundry detergents containing phosphates.
Yet there was a downside to this success story.
For one thing, as visible pollution has diminished, so has public concern over environmental issues. According to a recent Gallup survey, “Americans are now less worried about a series of environmental problems than at any time in the past 20 years.”
This decline in concern would be fine if visible pollution were all that mattered — but it isn’t, of course. In particular, greenhouse gases pose a greater threat than smog or burning rivers ever did. But it’s hard to get the public focused on a form of pollution that’s invisible, and whose effects unfold over decades rather than days.
Nor was a loss of public interest the only negative consequence of the decline in visible pollution. As the photogenic crises of the 1960s and 1970s faded from memory, conservatives began pushing back against environmental regulation.
Much of the pushback took the form of demands that environmental restrictions be weakened. But there was also an attempt to construct a narrative in which advocates of strong environmental protection were either extremists — “eco-Nazis,” according to Rush Limbaugh — or effete liberal snobs trying to impose their aesthetic preferences on ordinary Americans. (I’m sorry to say that the long effort to block construction of a wind farm off Cape Cod — which may finally be over thanks to the Obama administration — played right into that caricature.)
And let’s admit it: by and large, the anti-environmentalists have been winning the argument, at least as far as public opinion is concerned.
Then came the gulf disaster. Suddenly, environmental destruction was photogenic again.
For the most part, anti-environmentalists have been silent about the catastrophe. True, Mr. Limbaugh — arguably the Republican Party’s de facto leader — promptly suggested that environmentalists might have blown up the rig to head off further offshore drilling. But that remark probably reflected desperation: Mr. Limbaugh knows that his narrative has just taken a big hit.
For the gulf blowout is a pointed reminder that the environment won’t take care of itself, that unless carefully watched and regulated, modern technology and industry can all too easily inflict horrific damage on the planet.
Will America take heed? It depends a lot on leadership. In particular, President Obama needs to seize the moment; he needs to take on the “Drill, baby, drill” crowd, telling America that courting irreversible environmental disaster for the sake of a few barrels of oil, an amount that will hardly affect our dependence on imports, is a terrible bargain.
It’s true that Mr. Obama isn’t as well positioned to make this a teachable moment as he should be: just a month ago he announced a plan to open much of the Atlantic coast to oil exploration, a move that shocked many of his supporters and makes it hard for him to claim the moral high ground now.
But he needs to get beyond that. The catastrophe in the gulf offers an opportunity, a chance to recapture some of the spirit of the original Earth Day. And if that happens, some good may yet come of this ecological nightmare.
It took futuristic technology to achieve one of the worst ecological disasters on record. Without such technology, after all, BP couldn’t have drilled the Deepwater Horizon well in the first place. Yet for those who remember their environmental history, the catastrophe in the gulf has a strangely old-fashioned feel, reminiscent of the events that led to the first Earth Day, four decades ago.
And maybe, just maybe, the disaster will help reverse environmentalism’s long political slide — a slide largely caused by our very success in alleviating highly visible pollution. If so, there may be a small silver lining to a very dark cloud.
Environmentalism began as a response to pollution that everyone could see. The spill in the gulf recalls the 1969 blowout that coated the beaches of Santa Barbara in oil. But 1969 was also the year the Cuyahoga River, which flows through Cleveland, caught fire. Meanwhile, Lake Erie was widely declared “dead,” its waters contaminated by algal blooms. And major U.S. cities — especially, but by no means only, Los Angeles — were often cloaked in thick, acrid smog.
It wasn’t that hard, under the circumstances, to mobilize political support for action. The Environmental Protection Agency was founded, the Clean Water Act was enacted, and America began making headway against its most visible environmental problems. Air quality improved: smog alerts in Los Angeles, which used to have more than 100 a year, have become rare. Rivers stopped burning, and some became swimmable again. And Lake Erie has come back to life, in part thanks to a ban on laundry detergents containing phosphates.
Yet there was a downside to this success story.
For one thing, as visible pollution has diminished, so has public concern over environmental issues. According to a recent Gallup survey, “Americans are now less worried about a series of environmental problems than at any time in the past 20 years.”
This decline in concern would be fine if visible pollution were all that mattered — but it isn’t, of course. In particular, greenhouse gases pose a greater threat than smog or burning rivers ever did. But it’s hard to get the public focused on a form of pollution that’s invisible, and whose effects unfold over decades rather than days.
Nor was a loss of public interest the only negative consequence of the decline in visible pollution. As the photogenic crises of the 1960s and 1970s faded from memory, conservatives began pushing back against environmental regulation.
Much of the pushback took the form of demands that environmental restrictions be weakened. But there was also an attempt to construct a narrative in which advocates of strong environmental protection were either extremists — “eco-Nazis,” according to Rush Limbaugh — or effete liberal snobs trying to impose their aesthetic preferences on ordinary Americans. (I’m sorry to say that the long effort to block construction of a wind farm off Cape Cod — which may finally be over thanks to the Obama administration — played right into that caricature.)
And let’s admit it: by and large, the anti-environmentalists have been winning the argument, at least as far as public opinion is concerned.
Then came the gulf disaster. Suddenly, environmental destruction was photogenic again.
For the most part, anti-environmentalists have been silent about the catastrophe. True, Mr. Limbaugh — arguably the Republican Party’s de facto leader — promptly suggested that environmentalists might have blown up the rig to head off further offshore drilling. But that remark probably reflected desperation: Mr. Limbaugh knows that his narrative has just taken a big hit.
For the gulf blowout is a pointed reminder that the environment won’t take care of itself, that unless carefully watched and regulated, modern technology and industry can all too easily inflict horrific damage on the planet.
Will America take heed? It depends a lot on leadership. In particular, President Obama needs to seize the moment; he needs to take on the “Drill, baby, drill” crowd, telling America that courting irreversible environmental disaster for the sake of a few barrels of oil, an amount that will hardly affect our dependence on imports, is a terrible bargain.
It’s true that Mr. Obama isn’t as well positioned to make this a teachable moment as he should be: just a month ago he announced a plan to open much of the Atlantic coast to oil exploration, a move that shocked many of his supporters and makes it hard for him to claim the moral high ground now.
But he needs to get beyond that. The catastrophe in the gulf offers an opportunity, a chance to recapture some of the spirit of the original Earth Day. And if that happens, some good may yet come of this ecological nightmare.
Sam's Club Installs On-Site Micro-Wind Farm
Good for them (not that everything is good about Sam's/Walmart, of course, but this is...)
From EnergyBoom.com:
Retailers Sam’s Club and parent company Walmart (NYSE:WMT), are adding wind energy to help power two stores in the United States.
17 micro-wind turbines were recently installed at the Sam’s Club store in sunny Palmdale, California. The Skystream turbines, from Massachusetts-based DeerPath Energy Inc., are expected to generate about 76,000 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of energy annually or up to 5 percent of the store’s energy needs.
Taking advantage of the windy location, the turbines sit atop the 48-foot-tall streetlamps located in the store’s parking lot.
According to the company press release, the installation marks the first time a U.S. retailer has installed a major number of small wind turbines on parking lot light poles to help support the energy needs of the store.
This is not the first green effort by Sam’s Club. In 2008, nine stores in California were converted to include Home Efficient Centers, showcasing energy efficient products for homes and businesses.
The green products, such as outdoor solar lighting, high-efficiency toilets, water-saving showerheads, CFL bulbs and LED lighting, proved so successful, they were rolled out to all nationwide Sam’s Club stores last year.
Sam’s Club, serving more than 47 million members, is the ninth largest retailer in the U.S.
Similar micro-wind turbines will also be installed at a new Walmart store in Worcester, Massachusetts. Completion of this project is expected in early May. Other store locations are also being considered as well. Besides lowering operational costs which are then passed down to customers, wind turbines do not create pollution or greenhouse gas emissions.
The wind turbines are part of the company’s commitment to be completely powered by renewable energy. 28 solar systems and several fuel cell installations are located at various Sam’s and Walmart locations in California.
Other green goals by the retail giant include creating zero waste and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. In 2006, the superstore’s goal was to sell 100 million compact fluorescent bulbs in just 12 months. Despite costing more than traditional incandescent bulbs, Walmart sold 137 million CFLs in just one year.
In 2009, the store announced an initiative to track the life cycle of the products it sold. The project measured water use, greenhouse gas emissions, and fair labor practices.
An electronic recycling and trade-in program, more organic food and apparel choices, and a goal to reduce packaging by 5 percent globally by 2013 are also part of the company’s sustainable efforts...
From EnergyBoom.com:
Retailers Sam’s Club and parent company Walmart (NYSE:WMT), are adding wind energy to help power two stores in the United States.
17 micro-wind turbines were recently installed at the Sam’s Club store in sunny Palmdale, California. The Skystream turbines, from Massachusetts-based DeerPath Energy Inc., are expected to generate about 76,000 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of energy annually or up to 5 percent of the store’s energy needs.
Taking advantage of the windy location, the turbines sit atop the 48-foot-tall streetlamps located in the store’s parking lot.
According to the company press release, the installation marks the first time a U.S. retailer has installed a major number of small wind turbines on parking lot light poles to help support the energy needs of the store.
This is not the first green effort by Sam’s Club. In 2008, nine stores in California were converted to include Home Efficient Centers, showcasing energy efficient products for homes and businesses.
The green products, such as outdoor solar lighting, high-efficiency toilets, water-saving showerheads, CFL bulbs and LED lighting, proved so successful, they were rolled out to all nationwide Sam’s Club stores last year.
Sam’s Club, serving more than 47 million members, is the ninth largest retailer in the U.S.
Similar micro-wind turbines will also be installed at a new Walmart store in Worcester, Massachusetts. Completion of this project is expected in early May. Other store locations are also being considered as well. Besides lowering operational costs which are then passed down to customers, wind turbines do not create pollution or greenhouse gas emissions.
The wind turbines are part of the company’s commitment to be completely powered by renewable energy. 28 solar systems and several fuel cell installations are located at various Sam’s and Walmart locations in California.
Other green goals by the retail giant include creating zero waste and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. In 2006, the superstore’s goal was to sell 100 million compact fluorescent bulbs in just 12 months. Despite costing more than traditional incandescent bulbs, Walmart sold 137 million CFLs in just one year.
In 2009, the store announced an initiative to track the life cycle of the products it sold. The project measured water use, greenhouse gas emissions, and fair labor practices.
An electronic recycling and trade-in program, more organic food and apparel choices, and a goal to reduce packaging by 5 percent globally by 2013 are also part of the company’s sustainable efforts...
Farmers Cope With Roundup-Resistant Weeds
From the New York Times:
DYERSBURG, Tenn. — For 15 years, Eddie Anderson, a farmer, has been a strict adherent of no-till agriculture, an environmentally friendly technique that all but eliminates plowing to curb erosion and the harmful runoff of fertilizers and pesticides.
But not this year.
On a recent afternoon here, Mr. Anderson watched as tractors crisscrossed a rolling field — plowing and mixing herbicides into the soil to kill weeds where soybeans will soon be planted.
Just as the heavy use of antibiotics contributed to the rise of drug-resistant supergerms, American farmers’ near-ubiquitous use of the weedkiller Roundup has led to the rapid growth of tenacious new superweeds.
To fight them, Mr. Anderson and farmers throughout the East, Midwest and South are being forced to spray fields with more toxic herbicides, pull weeds by hand and return to more labor-intensive methods like regular plowing.
“We’re back to where we were 20 years ago,” said Mr. Anderson, who will plow about one-third of his 3,000 acres of soybean fields this spring, more than he has in years. “We’re trying to find out what works.”
Farm experts say that such efforts could lead to higher food prices, lower crop yields, rising farm costs and more pollution of land and water.
“It is the single largest threat to production agriculture that we have ever seen,” said Andrew Wargo III, the president of the Arkansas Association of Conservation Districts.
The first resistant species to pose a serious threat to agriculture was spotted in a Delaware soybean field in 2000. Since then, the problem has spread, with 10 resistant species in at least 22 states infesting millions of acres, predominantly soybeans, cotton and corn.
The superweeds could temper American agriculture’s enthusiasm for some genetically modified crops. Soybeans, corn and cotton that are engineered to survive spraying with Roundup have become standard in American fields. However, if Roundup doesn’t kill the weeds, farmers have little incentive to spend the extra money for the special seeds.
Roundup — originally made by Monsanto but now also sold by others under the generic name glyphosate — has been little short of a miracle chemical for farmers. It kills a broad spectrum of weeds, is easy and safe to work with, and breaks down quickly, reducing its environmental impact.
Sales took off in the late 1990s, after Monsanto created its brand of Roundup Ready crops that were genetically modified to tolerate the chemical, allowing farmers to spray their fields to kill the weeds while leaving the crop unharmed. Today, Roundup Ready crops account for about 90 percent of the soybeans and 70 percent of the corn and cotton grown in the United States.
But farmers sprayed so much Roundup that weeds quickly evolved to survive it. “What we’re talking about here is Darwinian evolution in fast-forward,” Mike Owen, a weed scientist at Iowa State University, said.
Now, Roundup-resistant weeds like horseweed and giant ragweed are forcing farmers to go back to more expensive techniques that they had long ago abandoned.
Mr. Anderson, the farmer, is wrestling with a particularly tenacious species of glyphosate-resistant pest called Palmer amaranth, or pigweed, whose resistant form began seriously infesting farms in western Tennessee only last year.
Pigweed can grow three inches a day and reach seven feet or more, choking out crops; it is so sturdy that it can damage harvesting equipment. In an attempt to kill the pest before it becomes that big, Mr. Anderson and his neighbors are plowing their fields and mixing herbicides into the soil.
That threatens to reverse one of the agricultural advances bolstered by the Roundup revolution: minimum-till farming. By combining Roundup and Roundup Ready crops, farmers did not have to plow under the weeds to control them. That reduced erosion, the runoff of chemicals into waterways and the use of fuel for tractors.
If frequent plowing becomes necessary again, “that is certainly a major concern for our environment,” Ken Smith, a weed scientist at the University of Arkansas, said. In addition, some critics of genetically engineered crops say that the use of extra herbicides, including some old ones that are less environmentally tolerable than Roundup, belies the claims made by the biotechnology industry that its crops would be better for the environment.
“The biotech industry is taking us into a more pesticide-dependent agriculture when they’ve always promised, and we need to be going in, the opposite direction,” said Bill Freese, a science policy analyst for the Center for Food Safety in Washington.
So far, weed scientists estimate that the total amount of United States farmland afflicted by Roundup-resistant weeds is relatively small — seven million to 10 million acres, according to Ian Heap, director of the International Survey of Herbicide Resistant Weeds, which is financed by the agricultural chemical industry. There are roughly 170 million acres planted with corn, soybeans and cotton, the crops most affected.
Roundup-resistant weeds are also found in several other countries, including Australia, China and Brazil, according to the survey.
Monsanto, which once argued that resistance would not become a major problem, now cautions against exaggerating its impact. “It’s a serious issue, but it’s manageable,” said Rick Cole, who manages weed resistance issues in the United States for the company.
Of course, Monsanto stands to lose a lot of business if farmers use less Roundup and Roundup Ready seeds.
DYERSBURG, Tenn. — For 15 years, Eddie Anderson, a farmer, has been a strict adherent of no-till agriculture, an environmentally friendly technique that all but eliminates plowing to curb erosion and the harmful runoff of fertilizers and pesticides.
But not this year.
On a recent afternoon here, Mr. Anderson watched as tractors crisscrossed a rolling field — plowing and mixing herbicides into the soil to kill weeds where soybeans will soon be planted.
Just as the heavy use of antibiotics contributed to the rise of drug-resistant supergerms, American farmers’ near-ubiquitous use of the weedkiller Roundup has led to the rapid growth of tenacious new superweeds.
To fight them, Mr. Anderson and farmers throughout the East, Midwest and South are being forced to spray fields with more toxic herbicides, pull weeds by hand and return to more labor-intensive methods like regular plowing.
“We’re back to where we were 20 years ago,” said Mr. Anderson, who will plow about one-third of his 3,000 acres of soybean fields this spring, more than he has in years. “We’re trying to find out what works.”
Farm experts say that such efforts could lead to higher food prices, lower crop yields, rising farm costs and more pollution of land and water.
“It is the single largest threat to production agriculture that we have ever seen,” said Andrew Wargo III, the president of the Arkansas Association of Conservation Districts.
The first resistant species to pose a serious threat to agriculture was spotted in a Delaware soybean field in 2000. Since then, the problem has spread, with 10 resistant species in at least 22 states infesting millions of acres, predominantly soybeans, cotton and corn.
The superweeds could temper American agriculture’s enthusiasm for some genetically modified crops. Soybeans, corn and cotton that are engineered to survive spraying with Roundup have become standard in American fields. However, if Roundup doesn’t kill the weeds, farmers have little incentive to spend the extra money for the special seeds.
Roundup — originally made by Monsanto but now also sold by others under the generic name glyphosate — has been little short of a miracle chemical for farmers. It kills a broad spectrum of weeds, is easy and safe to work with, and breaks down quickly, reducing its environmental impact.
Sales took off in the late 1990s, after Monsanto created its brand of Roundup Ready crops that were genetically modified to tolerate the chemical, allowing farmers to spray their fields to kill the weeds while leaving the crop unharmed. Today, Roundup Ready crops account for about 90 percent of the soybeans and 70 percent of the corn and cotton grown in the United States.
But farmers sprayed so much Roundup that weeds quickly evolved to survive it. “What we’re talking about here is Darwinian evolution in fast-forward,” Mike Owen, a weed scientist at Iowa State University, said.
Now, Roundup-resistant weeds like horseweed and giant ragweed are forcing farmers to go back to more expensive techniques that they had long ago abandoned.
Mr. Anderson, the farmer, is wrestling with a particularly tenacious species of glyphosate-resistant pest called Palmer amaranth, or pigweed, whose resistant form began seriously infesting farms in western Tennessee only last year.
Pigweed can grow three inches a day and reach seven feet or more, choking out crops; it is so sturdy that it can damage harvesting equipment. In an attempt to kill the pest before it becomes that big, Mr. Anderson and his neighbors are plowing their fields and mixing herbicides into the soil.
That threatens to reverse one of the agricultural advances bolstered by the Roundup revolution: minimum-till farming. By combining Roundup and Roundup Ready crops, farmers did not have to plow under the weeds to control them. That reduced erosion, the runoff of chemicals into waterways and the use of fuel for tractors.
If frequent plowing becomes necessary again, “that is certainly a major concern for our environment,” Ken Smith, a weed scientist at the University of Arkansas, said. In addition, some critics of genetically engineered crops say that the use of extra herbicides, including some old ones that are less environmentally tolerable than Roundup, belies the claims made by the biotechnology industry that its crops would be better for the environment.
“The biotech industry is taking us into a more pesticide-dependent agriculture when they’ve always promised, and we need to be going in, the opposite direction,” said Bill Freese, a science policy analyst for the Center for Food Safety in Washington.
So far, weed scientists estimate that the total amount of United States farmland afflicted by Roundup-resistant weeds is relatively small — seven million to 10 million acres, according to Ian Heap, director of the International Survey of Herbicide Resistant Weeds, which is financed by the agricultural chemical industry. There are roughly 170 million acres planted with corn, soybeans and cotton, the crops most affected.
Roundup-resistant weeds are also found in several other countries, including Australia, China and Brazil, according to the survey.
Monsanto, which once argued that resistance would not become a major problem, now cautions against exaggerating its impact. “It’s a serious issue, but it’s manageable,” said Rick Cole, who manages weed resistance issues in the United States for the company.
Of course, Monsanto stands to lose a lot of business if farmers use less Roundup and Roundup Ready seeds.
Saturday, May 01, 2010
The Gulf Oil Spill Disaster
Gulf Coast oil spill could eclipse Exxon Valdez (AP - April 29, 2010)
VENICE, La. – An oil spill that threatened to eclipse even the Exxon Valdez disaster spread out of control and drifted inexorably toward the Gulf Coast on Thursday as fishermen rushed to scoop up shrimp and crews spread floating barriers around marshes.
The spill was both bigger and closer than imagined — five times larger than first estimated, with the leading edge just three miles from the Louisiana shore. Authorities said it could reach the Mississippi River delta by Thursday night.
"It is of grave concern," David Kennedy of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told The Associated Press. "I am frightened. This is a very, very big thing. And the efforts that are going to be required to do anything about it, especially if it continues on, are just mind-boggling."
The oil slick could become the nation's worst environmental disaster in decades, threatening hundreds of species of fish, birds and other wildlife along the Gulf Coast, one of the world's richest seafood grounds, teeming with shrimp, oysters and other marine life.
The leak from the ocean floor proved to be far bigger than initially reported, contributing to a growing sense among many in Louisiana that the government failed them again, just as it did during Hurricane Katrina. President Barack Obama dispatched Cabinet officials to deal with the crisis.
Cade Thomas, a fishing guide in Venice, worried that his livelihood will be destroyed. He said he did not know whether to blame the Coast Guard, the federal government or oil company BP PLC...
The Coast Guard worked with BP, which operated the oil rig that exploded and sank last week, to deploy floating booms, skimmers and chemical dispersants, and set controlled fires to burn the oil off the water's surface.
The Coast Guard urged the company to formally request more resources from the Defense Department. A BP executive said the corporation would "take help from anyone."
Government officials said the blown-out well 40 miles offshore is spewing five times as much oil into the water as originally estimated — about 5,000 barrels, or 200,000 gallons, a day.
At that rate, the spill could easily eclipse the worst oil spill in U.S. history — the 11 million gallons that leaked from the grounded tanker Exxon Valdez in Alaska's Prince William Sound in 1989 — in the three months it could take to drill a relief well and plug the gushing well 5,000 feet underwater on the sea floor.
Ultimately, the spill could grow much larger than the Valdez because Gulf of Mexico wells typically hold many times more oil than a single tanker...
An emergency shrimping season was opened to allow shrimpers to scoop up their catch before it is fouled by oil. Cannons were to be used to scare off birds. And shrimpers were being lined up to use their boats as makeshift skimmers in the shallows.
This murky water and the oysters in it have provided a livelihood for three generations of Frank and Mitch Jurisich's family in Empire, La.
Now, on the open water just beyond the marshes, they can smell the oil that threatens everything they know and love.
"Just smelling it, it puts more of a sense of urgency, a sense of fear," Frank Jurisich said.
The brothers hope to get all the oysters they can sell before the oil washes ashore. They filled more than 100 burlap sacks Thursday and stopped to eat some oysters. "This might be our last day," Mitch Jurisich said.
Without the fishing industry, Frank Jurisich said the family "would be lost. This is who we are and what we do."
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal declared a state of emergency Thursday so officials could begin preparing for the oil's impact. He said at least 10 wildlife management areas and refuges in his state and neighboring Mississippi are in the oil plume's path....
In Buras, La., where Hurricane Katrina made landfall in 2005, the owner of the Black Velvet Oyster Bar & Grill couldn't keep his eyes off the television. News and weather shows were making projections that oil would soon inundate the coastal wetlands where his family has worked since the 1860s.
It was as though a hurricane was approaching, maybe worse.
"A hurricane is like closing your bank account for a few days, but this here has the capacity to destroy our bank accounts," said Byron Marinovitch, 47.
"We're really disgusted," he added. "We don't believe anything coming out of BP's mouth."
Document: BP didn't plan for major oil spill
MOUTH OF THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER – British Petroleum once downplayed the possibility of a catastrophic accident at an offshore rig that exploded, causing the worst U.S. oil spill in decades along the Gulf Coast and endangering shoreline habitat.
In its 2009 exploration plan and environmental impact analysis for the well, BP suggested it was unlikely, or virtually impossible, for an accident to occur that would lead to a giant crude oil spill and serious damage to beaches, fish and mammals.
At least 1.6 million gallons of oil have spilled so far since the April 20 explosion that killed 11 workers, according to Coast Guard estimates. One expert said Friday that the volume of oil leaking from the well nearly 5,000 feet below the surface could actually be much higher, and that even more may escape if the drilling equipment continues to erode.
"The sort of occurrence that we've seen on the Deepwater Horizon is clearly unprecedented," BP spokesman David Nicholas told The Associated Press on Friday. "It's something that we have not experienced before ... a blowout at this depth."
Amid increased fingerpointing Friday, efforts sputtered to hold back the giant oil spill seeping into Louisiana's rich fishing grounds and nesting areas, while the government desperately cast about for new ideas for dealing with the growing environmental crisis. President Barack Obama halted any new offshore drilling projects unless rigs have new safeguards to prevent another disaster.
The seas were too rough and the winds too strong to burn off the oil, suck it up effectively with skimmer vessels, or hold it in check with the miles of orange and yellow inflatable booms strung along the coast.
The floating barriers broke loose in the choppy water, and waves sent oily water lapping over them.
"It just can't take the wave action," said Billy Nungesser, president of Louisiana's Plaquemines Parish.
The spill — a slick more than 130 miles long and 70 miles wide — threatens hundreds of species of wildlife, including birds, dolphins and the fish, shrimp, oysters and crabs that make the Gulf Coast one of the nation's most abundant sources of seafood. Louisiana closed some fishing grounds and oyster beds because of the risk of oil contamination.
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