For Immediate Release: Friday, April 20, 2012
Contact: Clean Ocean Action, 732-872-0111

Public Hearing set for Friday, April 27th, 2012 at 1pm at Atlantic City Convention Center

Sandy Hook, NJ – On Friday, April 27th, in Atlantic City, the United States Bureau of Ocean and Energy Management (BOEM), is holding the last in a series of East Coast hearings on their recent proposal to blast airgun arrays from Florida to the Delaware Bay searching for offshore oil to drill. The hearing will be held at 1pm in room 301 of the Atlantic City Convention Center.

These “seismic surveys” involve towing airgun arrays behind survey ships, regularly and repeatedly blasting sound waves through the ocean and deep into the ocean floor to pinpoint locations of sub-seabed oil and gas deposits. While the industry term “airgun” suggests an innocuous impact, these surveys generate intense marine noise pollution that propagates over vast areas of the ocean potentially causing significant damage to marine life and marine ecosystems. In addition to the exploratory tactic’s danger to marine life, it is the first step toward oil drilling in the Atlantic Ocean – which threatens our clean ocean economy and community.

Sandy Hook-based ocean advocacy organization Clean Ocean Action (COA) is calling on New Jersey’s citizens to attend the public hearing (which is the only one scheduled for New Jersey), on April 27th at 1pm, in room 301 of the Atlantic City Convention Center to voice their opposition to these proposed seismic surveys. COA is a coalition of environmental, fishing, civic, and community based organizations that come together to combat ocean pollution and ocean industrialization. The groups have been working with a national coalition to keep the Atlantic Ocean oil-drilling-free.

“For the first time in over 25 years, the Atlantic Ocean is under the gun,” said Cindy Zipf, Clean Ocean Action’s Executive Director. “We must not sacrifice the region’s vibrant, clean ocean economy as the mainstay of the Atlantic seaboard-it’s killing the goose that lays the golden egg. The Administration is searching for oil in all the wrong places under the pretense of reducing gasoline prices”

Federal studies show if oil was found, it would take decades for oil production to come online, and even then would reduce gas prices by only $0.03 per gallon. However, there is no requirement that oil and gas found in the U.S. must stay here, and could be exported overseas.

“Noise pollution caused by exploration and development would negatively impact fisheries and marine life,” said Sean Dixon, Clean Ocean Action’s Coastal Policy Attorney. “The BP Oil Disaster shows how devastating blow-outs and spills can be to tourism and fishing industries.”

“The sonic airgun testing for oil and gas reserves is a proven destroyer of marine life, causing serious ecosystem problems to all marine life within hundreds of miles of the testing. Marine mammals are especially prone to damage due to their sensitive sonar and face serious permanent harm and outright death from this testing. The endangered right whale’s migratory route runs the whole of the US east coast causing outright fishing bans at times and vessel speed restrictions, yet BOEM wants to blow out their eardrums. Nothing good can come from this testing or the oil and gas drilling that will surely follow,” added Jim Lovgren of Fishermen’s Dock Co-op in Point Pleasant. Fishing catch rates in some cases have been shown to decrease by 40-80% over thousands of square kilometers around a single airgun array.

“The draft Environment Impact Analyses fails to address a number of biological concerns affecting marine fishes as well as potential conflicts with scheduled sportfishing tournaments involving hundreds of recreational vessels,” stated Bruce Freeman, marine fisheries biologist. “In addition, potential conflicts with divers and associated safety concerns have not been recognized.”

“I am totally against offshore seismic exploration because of the dangers it poses sea creatures. The blasts will disorient fish, and have been linked to marine mammal strandings,” said Jeff Hoffberger, from the Surfrider Foundation, and a certified volunteer with the Marine Mammal Stranding Center in Brigantine. Proposed seismic surveys could interfere with the endangered and vulnerable North Atlantic Right Whale’s migration route through the Mid-Atlantic and calving off the Southeast coast.

Clean Ocean Action is urging people to attend and sign up and testify on April 27th at 1pm, in room 301 of the Atlantic City Convention Center.

To request to speak at the public hearing, you can email Mr. Gary Goeke, Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, at GGEIS@boem.gov or call at (504) 736-3233. For more information or to plan on attending, call 732-872-0111 or visit www.cleanoceanaction.org.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.miamiherald.com/oilspill/

INTERACTIVE GRAPHICS
* Gulf coast habitats
* Methods to contain leaks
* How slick might spread
* Oil political money
* Understanding effects

Experts: Another BP-style Gulf blowout all too possible
Much more needs to be done to lower the risks of another offshore oil disaster like the BP blowout two years ago in the Gulf of Mexico, the presidential commission that investigated the disaster reported Tuesday in its first progress update. – 5:10 AM ET

Senate approves plan to send BP fines to Gulf restoration
The Senate approved a highway bill Wednesday that includes a long-sought provision for the Gulf Coast: A guarantee that 80 percent of the fines collected from the April 2010 BP oil spill – an amount that could reach $20 billion – would be distributed for coastal restoration to the five states along the Gulf of Mexico: Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida, Texas and Alabama.

Restore Act measure to boost BP cleanup could receive vote today
The House is expected to vote later today on an amendment pushed by Gulf State lawmakers to dedicate 80 percent of the fines collected from the BP oil spill to a trust fund for coastal restoration of Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Louisiana and Texas.

Restore Act measure to boost BP cleanup passes House
The House approved an amendment Thursday pushed by Gulf State lawmakers to dedicate 80 percent of the fines collected from the BP oil spill to a trust fund for coastal restoration of Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Louisiana and Texas.

Cuba shows U.S. its response plans in case of oil spill
As Cuba prepares to embark on a new round of exploratory offshore drilling, U.S. officials are slightly more enlightened about the island nation’s plans in the event of a catastrophic oil spill on the scale of last year’s Deepwater Horizon explosion.
NOAA: BP oil spill may have contributed high mortality rate of dolphins
NOAA officials called a national media briefing Thursday and said that the BP oil spill could have played a role in the high number of dolphin deaths in the northern Gulf since 2010.

Oil spill fund chief says he welcomes oversight
The administrator of a $20 billion fund to compensate victims of last year’s Gulf of Mexico oil spill said he welcomes an independent audit of how much money has been paid out and what calculations were made to arrive at those payouts.
Following complaints from Gulf, Congress seeks audit of BP oil spill fund
Republican Sens. Roger Wicker of Mississippi and Marco Rubio of Florida, unhappy with the handling of the $20 billion fund set up by BP to compensate victims of the 2010 Gulf oil spill, won Senate approval Friday for an independent audit of the organization.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/oilspill/#storylink=cpy

Special thanks to Richard Charter

Published on Thursday, April 19, 2012
by Robert C. Koehler

The AP story on military maneuvers in the Arctic reads like the gleeful report of a mugging.

“To the world’s military leaders, the debate over climate change is long over. They are preparing for a new kind of Cold War in the Arctic, anticipating that rising temperatures there will open up a treasure trove of resources, long-dreamed-of sea lanes and a slew of potential conflicts.”

Wow, what fun – a new playground, with maybe 90 billion barrels waiting for corporate exploitation beneath the melting ice cap, 30 percent of the world’s untapped natural gas, and all sorts of minerals, diamonds, gold, copper, zinc and so much more. And the world’s armed forces get to play war games. Boys will be boys!

The first insanity here is that this is how major news is reported, as the sophomoric reduction of a terrifying global wound to a spectacle of pop culture, with military leaders portrayed as independent actors, taking it on themselves to prepare for inevitable war in or over the Arctic Circle, which is, thanks to global warming, now open for business.

There’s not the least pause in the breathless verbiage to reflect on the possible implications of climate change. There’s no attempt to widen the perspective of the story beyond the military-industrial competitive frenzy to exploit suddenly available resources. There’s no feint toward the future – just more of the same, nationalism and capitalism, flowing mindlessly to the Arctic like chemicals in a Petri dish. The message here seems to be: This is the final phase of human evolution, folks, so let’s make the most of it.

We haven’t developed a popular media yet that’s interested in or capable of reaching toward the bigger story in its global reportage. It’s stuck in the futility of zero-sum geopolitics. But it strikes me that now may be the time to expand our horizons.

For instance, a report issued two years ago by the Arctic Governance Project, notes: “Climate change is a reality rather than a future prospect in the Arctic. Serious impacts are occurring already; more are expected. These impacts take such diverse forms as the thinning and receding of sea ice; melting of glaciers, ice sheets and permafrost; altering of snow conditions; intensifying storm surges and coastal erosion; and declining populations of migratory animals.

The Associated Press is still writing about our perfect adolescent selfishness, but as the global systems in which we live change in utterly unpredictable ways, we have no choice but to expand our thinking to embrace the unfathomable . . . and this is what love is, though the word itself is inadequate to describe the opening in our psyches that must occur, and is occurring.

“Some adaptive measures will take place entirely within the confines of national jurisdictions and be handled through domestic programs,” the report continues, then makes this small and obvious, yet stunning, observation: “But political and legal boundaries do not shape the impacts of climate change.”

What’s happening to our planet – to the womb and sustainer of all life, including our own – is bigger than the organizational structure we have thus far managed to achieve, and the first, if not the worst, mistake we can commit in response to the environmental crisis now unmistakably manifesting around us in so many ways is to stay trapped within our self-created boundaries. Enough small thought! “Political and legal boundaries do not shape the impacts of climate change.”

We have to begin thinking and organizing ourselves beyond the arbitrary constraints of nations and beyond our current, resource-devouring economic system. We have to imagine a global culture that doesn’t pit humanity against nature or itself, that transcends the diminished goal of individual or national dominance and sees success only as something measurable if there’s a loser.

You might say it’s time to grow up.

“So far, we humans have been children in relationship to earth,” writes Charles Eisenstein in his remarkable book Sacred Economics. He traces our growth process over the millennia, culminating in modern times:

“We had our adolescent growth spurt with industry, and on the mental plane entered through Cartesian science the extreme of separation, the fully developed ego and hyperrationality of the young teenager who, like humanity in the Age of Science, completes the stage of cognitive development known as ‘formal operations,’ consisting of the manipulation of abstractions. But as the extreme of yang contains the birth of yin, so does the extreme of separation contain the seed of what comes next: reunion.

“In adolescence,” Eisenstein writes, “we fall in love, and our world of perfect reason and perfect selfishness falls apart as the self expands to include the beloved within its bounds.”

The Associated Press is still writing about our perfect adolescent selfishness, but as the global systems in which we live change in utterly unpredictable ways, we have no choice but to expand our thinking to embrace the unfathomable . . . and this is what love is, though the word itself is inadequate to describe the opening in our psyches that must occur, and is occurring.

We must fall in love with the Earth – the living, sacred planet, this “dynamic system,” in the words of the Bolivian legislation acknowledging its rights, “made up of the undivided community of all living beings, who are all interconnected, interdependent and complementary, sharing a common destiny.”

This is the future – the only future we have.

Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His new book, Courage Grows Strong at the Wound is now available. Contact him at koehlercw@gmail.com or visit his website at commonwonders.com.

Special thanks to Richard Charter and Common Dreams

http://www.nature.com/news/deep-water-drilling-remains-a-risky-business-1.10464

Donald Boesch argues that the lessons learned from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill should be enshrined in legislation before they fade from memory.
17 April 2012

Two years after the blowout of the BP oil well drilled by the Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico, the United States is largely failing to act on the lessons learned from that experience to ensure that deep-water drilling and production is safe and environmentally compatible. In particular, the US Congress has not enacted any legislation to improve safety and protect the environment. Meanwhile, high oil prices are stimulating the expansion of drilling into ever deeper waters in the Gulf of Mexico, as well as off Brazil, Africa and Europe. Drilling is also proceeding in shallower, but ice-prone, regions of the Arctic, including the Beaufort and Chukchi seas off Alaska.

I am one of two scientists who served on the US president’s commission that produced the report Deep Water: The Gulf Oil Disaster and the Future of Offshore Drilling – the other was Cherry Murray of Harvard University. The commission concluded that the root causes of the blowout and explosion were deficiencies in regulatory oversight and multiple poor decisions made in the absence of a comprehensive risk-management system. Other investigations into the disaster essentially agreed.

We were impressed by the technologies developed to produce hydrocarbons from ever deeper, more highly pressured formations, but surprised by the lack of sophistication in techniques for detecting and controlling risk, containing the flow of hydrocarbons, collecting spilled oil and protecting vulnerable resources. For example, ‘down-hole’ events – those taking place deep below the seabed – are often inferred from indirect measurements of pressure and volume rather than measured with state-of-the-art in situ sensors of the type used in geophysical research and other industries.

Cement formulation, testing and placement – major factors in the blowout – seem to be more of an art than a science. Cementing is also central to debates on the increased recovery of hydrocarbons by hydro-fracturing, because it is critical both to limiting fugitive emissions of methane and to preventing contamination of shallower aquifers.

The 2010 accident showed that no operating company in the world had the capacity to rapidly contain a deep-water blowout. It took months of seat-of-the-pants engineering to build and deploy a capping stack that provided effective containment. Confusion reigned over the fate of the oil and gas released 1,500 metres below the surface, largely because of a lack of understanding of the operating environment, including the direction and speed of water currents, and the behaviour of hydrocarbons released at depth.

“Root causes of the blowout were deficiencies in regulatory oversight and multiple poor decisions.”

There have been some positive responses to the Deepwater Horizon experience. The US Department of the Interior (DOI) temporarily suspended deep-water drilling in the Gulf until new safeguards, including a demonstrated capacity to contain blowouts, were put into place. The DOI also reformed its management and oversight of offshore oil and gas development, separating safety regulation from developmental decision-making, and has established a new safety and environmental management system.

The oil industry, in addition to developing the needed containment capacity, has improved its safety processes. The American Petroleum Institute, the industry body, has created a Center for Offshore Safety and named Charlie Williams, a seasoned and respected scientist from Royal Dutch Shell, to head it. We shall see whether this new centre can develop the planned third-party audit process and if the industry, working with the DOI, will advance cutting-edge research and development (R&D) of safety technology.

BP has funded an independently managed Gulf Research Initiative to support longer-term research on the impacts of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Through this, and the natural resources damage assessment being conducted by state and federal agencies, we will learn much about the fate and the effects of the hydrocarbons released during the blowout.

And a task force established by President Barack Obama has developed the first phase of a Gulf of Mexico Regional Ecosystem Restoration Strategy to address the long-term degradation of Gulf ecosystems, some of it due to the 60-year history of oil and gas development in the region.

Unfortunately, the US Congress – caught up in partisan rancour, including debates about expanding offshore oil drilling – has failed to adopt legislation to address the lessons learned and the recommendations of the oil-spill commission and others. Such legislation should codify the executive reforms mentioned earlier into law, increase liability limits, and dedicate sustained funding for oil-spill research and environmental assessment and monitoring.

Even in the current constrained fiscal circumstances, improved oversight and essential R&D could be supported by industry fees amounting to pennies per barrel, imperceptible within the daily fluctuations in price on the world market or at the pump.

New laws were passed within a year of the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska. If important lessons are not to be lost as the events of 2010 fade from memory, there is a pressing need tochange the law to make such accidents less likely, and our response more effective.

Nature 484, 289 (19 April 2012) doi:10.1038/484289a

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/04/17/yergin-gas-solar-wind/?iid=HP_LN%3Ehttp://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/04/17/yergin-gas-solar-wind/?iid=HP_LN

April 17, 2012: 5:00 AM ET

Energy expert Daniel Yergin talks about the impact fracking will have on renewables.
Interview by Brian Dumaine, senior editor-at-large

Daniel Yergin
FORTUNE — Daniel Yergin, author of the new bestseller The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World, is one of the planet’s foremost thinkers about energy and its implications. He received a Pulitzer Prize for his previous book, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power. Yergin is chairman and founder of IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates, is on the U.S. Secretary of Energy advisory board, and chaired the U.S. Department of Energy’s Task Force on Strategic Energy Research and Development. He talked recently with Brian Dumaine about the role natural gas will play in America’s energy future.

Fracking technology has given the U.S. a 100-year supply of cheap natural gas. What’s its impact on coal, nuclear, wind, and solar power?
Inexpensive natural gas is transforming the competitive economics of electric power generation in the U.S. Coal plants today generate more than 40% of our electricity. Yet coal plant construction is grinding to a halt: first, because of environmental reasons and second, because the economics of natural gas are so compelling. It is being championed by many environmentalists as a good substitute for coal because it is cleaner and emits about 50% less carbon dioxide.

Nuclear power now generates 20% of our electricity, but the plants are getting old and will need to be replaced. What will replace them?
Only a few nuclear plants are being built in the U.S. right now. The economics of building nuclear are challenging — it’s much more expensive than natural gas.

Isn’t the worry now that cheap natural gas might also crowd out wind and solar?
Yes. The debate is over whether natural gas is a bridge fuel to buy time while renewables develop or whether it will itself be a permanent, major source of electricity.

What do you think?
Over the past year the debate has moved beyond the idea of gas as a bridge fuel to what gas means to U.S. manufacturing and job creation and how it will make the U.S. more globally competitive as an energy exporter. The President’s State of the Union speech was remarkable in the way it wrapped the shale gas boom into his economic policies and job creation.

I believe natural gas in the years ahead is going to be the default fuel for new electrical generation. Power demand is going to go up 15% to 20% in the U.S. over this decade because of the increasing electrification of our society — everything from iPads to electric Nissan Leafs. Utilities will need a predictable source of fuel in volume to meet that demand, and natural gas best fits that description.

And that won’t make the environmental community happy?
Well, natural gas may be a relatively clean hydrocarbon, but it’s still a hydrocarbon.

So wind and solar will have a hard time competing?
Remember that wind and solar account for only 3% of our electric power, whereas natural gas is 23%, and its share will go up fast. Most of that 3% is wind. Natural gas has a new role as the partner of renewables, providing power when the wind is not blowing and the sun is not shining.

Chevron and solar startup BrightSource have partnered to build a solar thermal facility. Reflected sunlight is used to create energy to help recover oil at Chevron’s field in Coalinga, Calif.

Will solar scale?
Solar is still under 1% of U.S. electric generation, and even though its costs have come down dramatically, they must come down a lot more. Solar is generally much more expensive than coal and natural gas.

You have to remember that energy is a huge, capital-intensive business, and it takes a very long time for new technologies to scale. The euphoria that comes out of Silicon Valley when you see how quickly a Twitter or a YouTube can emerge doesn’t apply to the energy industry.

Globally solar and wind investments have been growing about 30% a year. What could slow the adoption of wind and solar?
Well, there’s policy uncertainty. In the U.S., tax credits for wind expire at the end of this year, and it is unclear whether they will be renewed. Also, the current economic austerity in the developed nations will also slow adoption. Spain and Italy, which were early adopters in renewables, got hit by the eurozone crisis and have cut back.

Hasn’t the Fukushima disaster made some countries rethink nuclear? That’s good news for renewables, right?
Germany has decided to mothball its nuclear power plants and is making a big bet on its entire economy on how fast renewables, in particular offshore wind, can develop. In Japan, 53 of its 54 nuclear reactors are shut down, and the nation is debating the feasibility of renewables.

The good news is that the basic starting point for the electric power industry is diversification. You don’t know what the future will hold, what prices will change, what policies will change, so the smart thing is to have a diversified portfolio that includes wind and solar. Some in the U.S. are skeptical about natural gas because historically we’ve seen wild price swings. Many experts think it’s different this time, but those of us who have lived through volatile price cycles know prices will change.

What about China? It’s on track to install an impressive five gigawatts of solar power this year.
The growing power needs of developing nations like China and India will give a boost to renewables. China needs as much power as it can get. In the past five years China has in effect created a second China — it has doubled its power infrastructure. It’s unheard-of. State Grid, the country’s main utility, is investing $50 billion a year. China needs coal, nuclear, solar, and wind. China truly has an all-of-the-above strategy, because energy is so crucial to its growth.

So you’re cautiously optimistic about renewables?
Yes. Though their share is small, renewables have over the last decade turned into a big global business, and it will be much bigger by decade’s end.

This story is from the April 30, 2012 issue of Fortune. Special thanks to Richard Charter, as always!