http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/01/15-5

Published on Tuesday, January 15, 2013
Letter issued Tuesday from 18 leading scientists urges Obama to show “climate convictions”
– Andrea Germanos, staff writer

Some of the nation’s leading climate scientists on Tuesday are urging President Obama to show his “climate convictions” and reject the tar sands-carrying Keystone XL pipeline.

(Photo: Emma Cassidy / Tar Sands Action) In an open letter, the 18 scientists, including noted climate scientist James Hansen, Ralph Keeling of Scripps CO2 Program Scripps Institution of Oceanography and James Box of the Byrd Polar Research Center, write that rejecting the pipeline would be a “relatively easy” step to take to address the planet’s rising temperature.

The letter reads, in part:

“As you may know, the U.S. has just recorded the hottest year in its history, beating the old mark by a full degree; the same year that saw the deep Midwest drought, and the fury of Hurricane Sandy, also witnessed the rapid and unprecedented melt of the Arctic ice pack. ” […]

“Eighteen months ago some of us wrote you about the proposed Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, explaining why in our opinion its construction ran counter to both national and planetary interests. Nothing that has happened since has changed that evaluation; indeed, the year of review that you asked for on the project made it clear exactly how pressing the climate issue really is.”

The Keystone XL, which would carry tar sands crude out of Alberta into the US, has met fierce resistance by climate activists and members of communities in the pipeline’s path.

In a call for civil disobedience at the White House in Aug. of 2011, Hansen, author Naomi Klein and 350.org’s Bill McKibben were among those who called the Keystone XL “a fifteen hundred mile fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the continent, a way to make it easier and faster to trigger the final overheating of our planet, the one place to which we are all indigenous. ”

To make sure “the fuse to the biggest carbon bomb” is put out, climate activists are mobilizing for another mass action in DC on the February 17. Organizers write:

Just over a year ago, 15,000 people surrounded the White House — and President Obama listened, delaying the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. This is our best chance to show the President how strong this movement has become since then — sign up today.

The application for the pipeline by its company, TransCanada, is under review from the State Department with a decision likely by the end of the first quarter of 2013.

http://blog.skytruth.org/2013/01/shells-grounded-drill-rig-seen-from.html
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Lots of folks lately, us included, have chronicled Shell’s confidence-shaking series of missteps, bad decisions and outright failures associated with their years-long, multi-billion-dollar campaign (technical and political) to drill for oil in the Arctic Ocean off the coast of Alaska. Shell has decided to downplay their latest mishap — losing control of their multimillion dollar drill rig, the Kulluk, while it was being towed to Seattle from the drilling site in the Chukchi Sea — as no big deal since the rig wasn’t actually drilling at the time.

Uhhh…so we’re supposed to feel better? Because they can’t get the simple stuff right? Understand that nothing is “simple” in these often wild waters, but in the scheme of things, if you can’t even move your equipment around without mishap, then how can you be trusted with the relatively complex and challenging processes of drilling and completing offshore oil wells in these waters? Or mounting a swift and effective oil spill response in ice-choked seas?
High-resolution satellite image showing the drill rig Kulluk aground off the coast of Alaska on January 4, 2013. Image courtesy DigitalGlobe. Subscribe to their WorldView report to see more great images.
It’s not just technology failures that lead to major disasters. Bad / risky decisionmaking plays a major part too. This November 9 news report said the Kulluk had been scheduled to spend the winter downtime in Dutch Harbor. So why was it being moved? Ostensibly for maintenance work that couldn’t be done in Dutch, but Shell admitted they were towing the Kulluk into the teeth of a major winter storm system in part to avoid paying taxes to the sate of Alaska. Shell said the storm was unexpected. This analysis of the forecasts for the area by meteorologist Cliff Mass suggests otherwise, raising the possibility that Shell risked personnel and very pricey hardware to dodge a $6 million tax bill; about 1/10th of 1 percent of the total project investment. And guess who came to the rescue of the crew and the stranded Kulluk? The US Coast Guard, courtesy of US taxpayers. What a deal.

Shell was allowed to start shallow “tophole” work on two of their planned wells in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas last summer, but they still need to secure Federal approval to continue drilling these wells to their full target depths. This disturbing pattern of technical and decisionmaking failures suggests the kind of corporate culture that investigators have implicated as the underlying cause of the catastrophic BP oil spill in the Gulf in 2010.

That approval needs to be withheld until investigators, regulators and the public have enough information to confidently make the correct decision. There’s no rush. The oil ain’t going anywhere. And after all, down here in the Lower 48, Shell is producing so much oil they want permission to export it to Canada.

Let’s slow down and make sure we get this right.

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Posted By John Amos to SkyTruth at 1/11/2013 12:27:00 PM
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Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://sarasota.patch.com/articles/mote-study-bp-oil-spill-cleaning-chemical-kills-coral?ncid=newsltuspatc00000001

Dr. Ritchie is right on target with this analysis. Dispersants and especially Corexit should be banned in fragile coral reef ecosystems. DV

SarasotaPatch
Sarasota, Florida

A Mote Marine Laboratory study of the cleaning agent Corexit 9500 showed that the cleaning agent in BP oil spill disaster also caused great harm to coral.

By Charles Schelle
January 9, 2013

A new report from Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota released Wednesday reports that cleanup efforts from the Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster could be causing a real threat to fragile coral reefs.

The study focused on studying coral larvae and seeing how a dispersant that is used to cling to oil slicks and diffuse it from reaching shores could actually be just as toxic. The findings are published in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS ONE.

The 2010 BP disaster spilled more than 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico and responders used these dispersants, one called Corexit 9500, to prevent the oil from reaching beaches.

“Overall, these findings indicate that exposure of coral larvae to the dispersant Corexit 9500 is toxic and will result in loss of coral recruitment,” the study states.
It turns out that the dispersant is just as harmful to certain marine life as the oil itself.

“Dispersant, and the mixture of oil and dispersant, may be highly toxic to coral larvae and prevent them from building new parts of the reef,” said Dr. Kim Ritchie, principal investigator on the emergency Protect Our Reefs grant supporting this study and manager of the Marine Microbiology Program at Mote. “In addition, our results support the growing knowledge that certain coral species may fare worse than others during oil spills.”

Mote scientists looked to study the effects of two Florida Keys coral species-mustard hill coral and mountainous star coral-and placing larvae of these corals in different sets of solutions.

The test solutions include saltwater plus Dissolved Deepwater Horizon oil from the rig, weathered oil, Corexit 9500 and a final one with the oil and the Corexit 9500. The coral larvae was placed in various concentrations of solutions for 72 hours while the mountainous star coral larvae was tested in slowly diluted solutions during a 96-hour period, according to Mote.

As expected, the larvae exposed to oil died sooner than ones only in seawater, and the mountainous star coral had a lower chance of surviving in the lowest oil concentration tested of .49 parts per million diluted over that 96-hour window, according to the study.
Even worse was the Corexit 9500-the very chemical that many hoped would clean up the oil and save marine life.

No mountainous star coral larvae settled or survived at the medium and high concentrations of 50 and 100 parts per million and no mustard hill coral larvae settled or survived at 100 parts per million.

The study says that most of the mountainous star coral didn’t even survive the lowest concentration test of .86 parts per million.

What do these scientific measurements mean to the naked eye?

“Depending on the concentration, the higher the concentration of oil and dispersant, the more opaque it becomes. With the dispersant only (Corexit 9500), there was little cloudiness and with the water soluble oil mixture (WAF) it was perfectly clear,” said Dr. Dana Wetzel, manager of Mote’s Environmental Laboratory for Forensics. So it’s not exactly water that humans would be fond of interacting with either.

The water soluble oil mixture is the chemicals from the oil that are able to dissolve in water; oil has many different chemical components, Wetzel continued to explained.
Fresh oil from Deepwater Horizon also started killing the larvae within the first 24 hours, according to the study.

Ritchie led the investigation along with Wetzel, Dr. Gretchen Goodbody-Gringley, former Mote postdoctoral researcher who is now an instructor at Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences, and were conducted both in Sarasota and at the Mote Tropical Research Laboratory on Summerland Key.

“The decision to use dispersant chemicals poses trade-offs for oil spill responders. While a dispersed surface oil slick is rendered less likely to reach the shore, treatment of major oil spills with dispersant chemicals has been shown to result in significant environmental degradation as a result of increased hydrocarbon dissolution and surfactant toxicity,” the team wrote in their study.

Wetzel said what this study does is provide information on how oil and dispersants effect coral larvae because that wasn’t available before. Scientists have known how fish and shellfish were damaged though.

The Florida Keys coral were not directly affected by Deepwater Horizon, according to the study, but these types of coral are also found in the Northwestern Gulf closer to the oil rig, but those coral were not directly affected either, according to the study.

Scientists believe, however, that oil exploration near Cuba could pose further harm.

“To understand how oil and dispersant could affect wild corals, more research is needed on their complex natural life cycles,” Ritchie said. “Coral larvae seem to settle with help from landing pads called ‘biofilms’ that are formed by microbes like marine bacteria. This delicate natural process might be interrupted by dispersant and its mixture with oil, so it’s important to know how it works in detail.”

BP settled in November with the federal government in for $4.5 billion for its role in the spill. Sarasota County hopes it can claim $5.25 million from the case.

The owner of the rig itself, Transocean Ltd., was due in New Orleans federal court Wednesday to pay a $400 million settlement with the Justice Department for violating the Clean Water Act, the Associated Press reported.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.nola.com/news/gulf-oil-spill/index.ssf/2013/01/federal_appeals_court_in_new_o.html#incart_m-rpt-2

Times-Picayune

Fireboats try to extinguish the blaze on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig south of Venice after an explosion on Wednesday, April 21, 2010. The explosion killed 11 workers on the rig. (Photo by Michael DeMocker, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune)
By Mark Schleifstein, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune
on January 09, 2013 at 8:01 PM, updated January 10, 2013 at 7:31 AM

BP and its partners in the Macondo well that released an estimated 4.9 million gallons of oil over three months beginning in April 2010 should be required to inform state officials — and the public — of the toxic materials included in the spill, and the potential health effects of those materials, a three-judge appellate panel ruled in New Orleans on Wednesday. In winning the unanimous decision, the Center for Biological Diversity environmental group scored a rare partial victory before the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in its attempts to pry more compliance with federal environmental laws out of BP in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

The federal appeals court agreed with U.S. District Court Judge Carl Barbier that most of the center’s efforts to require BP to pay additional fines or otherwise be penalized for violations of the Clean Water Act; Comprehensive Environmental Response,
Compensation and Liability Act; and Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act (EPCRA) under provisions of those laws allowing individuals to enforce them became moot when federal officials declared BP’s Macondo well to be capped on July 15, 2010, and effectively “killed” on Sept. 19, 2010, by cementing its wellhole after being intercepted by a relief well.

“It’s a very important victory that BP could be finally forced to publicly disclose all the toxic components it spilled into the waters, but we’re disappointed by the dismissal of our Clean Water Act claims,” said Miyoko Sakashita, oceans director for the center.
“Throughout it all, we’ve insisted that those responsible for one of the worst environmental disasters in America’s history should be held fully accountable for the profound damage they caused. The Gulf needs to be fully restored, both for the sake of its wildlife and for the people who depend on it for survival. We’re certainly not there yet.”

BP and other companies responsible for the spill still face a civil court proceeding over environmental fines and other actions required under the federal environmental laws, as part of the complex combination of lawsuits that have the federal government and attorneys representing private plaintiffs opposing them in court on Feb. 25.

But the court also ruled that Barbier incorrectly found to be moot a provision of the Right-to-Know Act that required BP to report what hazardous substances were released during the spill to state and local government authorities, including local emergency planning committees, with the information then made available to the public.

In opposing the appeal, BP attorneys argued that such information was being made available in the aftermath of the spill at various government web sites, but the three-judge panel was not persuaded by that argument.

“Our review of those web sites reveals a voluminous amount of information about the spill and the government’s response, but the specific information required by EPCRA is not immediately apparent.”

The ruling could require BP to reveal the hazardous materials involved in the spill and their health effects, and make the information public.

They found that the Right-to-Know Act specifically required the company to include “the name and estimated quantity of any substance involved in the release, the medium or media into which the release occurred, any known or anticipated acute or chronic health risks associated with the release, and the precautions to take as a result of the release.”

Those notices are required to be maintained by the state’s emergency response commission and must be made available to the public, they said.

In its suit, the center provided affidavits from members saying they’d been exposed to substances from the disaster, either through direct physical contact in the Gulf of Mexico or onshore, or through contact with fish and other wildlife.

“Those members averred that they were concerned about breathing air or ingesting water exposed to the substances and wanted to know what types of substances were involved in the Deepwater Horizon release so that they could assess the possible health effects of exposure,” said the ruling.

“Here, however, BP has never claimed that it has at any time complied with EPCRA’s reporting requirements for a written notice,” the ruling said, and the company’s failure to do so was a continuing violation of the law.

“An order from the district court that the defendants comply with EPCRA’s reporting requirement for that release could therefore redress the center’s claimed informational injury.”

The ruling, written by Judge Carolyn Dineen King of Houston, Texas, and agreed to by Chief Judge Carl Stewart of Shreveport and Priscilla Owen of Austin, Texas, sends the case back to Barbier for further action. King was appointed by President Jimmy Carter, Stewart by President Bill Clinton, and Owen by President George W. Bush.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://SanctuaryExpansion.org

Check out this link; it explains how the expansion of our National Marine Sanctuaries will grant permanent protection from offshore drilling to one of California’s most iconic stretches of coastline, the dates and locations of the fast-approaching public hearings, and contains links for submitting written comments by the March 1, 2013 deadline.

Thanks very much.