http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/us/13florida.html
June 12, 2010

By DAMIEN CAVE

KEY LARGO, Fla. — When rigs first started drilling for oil off Louisiana’s coast in the 1940s, Floridians scanned their shoreline, with its resorts and talcum-white beaches, and said, No thanks. Go ahead and drill, they told other Gulf Coast states; we’ll stick with tourism.

Floridians worry that tourists like Jessie Weidner, 10, of Columbus, Ohio, will stop coming.

Now that invisible wall separating Florida from its neighbors has been breached. The spreading BP oil spill has already reached the Panhandle, and if it rides currents to the renowned reefs and fishing holes on both Florida coasts, the Sunshine State could become a vacation destination with the rules of a museum: Look, but don’t touch.

All because other states decided to rely on oil and gas, angry Floridians say; all because, in the water, there are no borders — only currents that can carry catastrophes hundreds of miles.

“There’s nothing we can do,” said Mike McLaughlin, 42, while stretching tanned shark skin on a dock here in the Keys. “We’re just sitting here, waiting for it all to disappear.”
Many Floridians, of course, say they are heartbroken for Louisiana, and they still reserve their most caustic criticism for BP and government regulators.

But with oil continuing to gush from a well off Louisiana, Florida has grown angrier at its oil-friendly neighbors. Gov. Charlie Crist said in an interview last week that “there’s a certain level of frustration” with the fact that Florida gets little if any financial benefit from offshore drilling, even though it shares the environmental risks.

On docks and beaches, many Floridians are less measured, and compare Louisiana to a neighbor with a bonfire that has set their block ablaze.

To some extent, it is a conflict set up by history. Louisiana and Florida may share the Gulf of Mexico, but they are essentially oil opposites.

Ever since World War II, when tar balls washed ashore across the gulf after German U-boats sank Allied oil tankers, Florida officials have held drilling at bay with state laws and lobbying in Washington to protect their state’s bustling tourism industry.

Louisiana, meanwhile, is an oil state through and through that discovered its first commercial deposits in 1901 and started drilling offshore in 1947.

State officials have never looked back, and the resulting divide between the two states is now economic as well as cultural: oil and gas contribute about $65 billion a year to the Louisiana economy, according to the state’s oil and gas association, while in Florida, tourism accounts for about $60 billion.

The difference, Floridians now note, is that a crowded bar in Miami has no impact on New Orleans. Oil spills are a different story.

Sean Snaith, an economist at the University of Central Florida, recently completed astudy showing that Florida’s gulf coast could lose 195,000 jobs and $11 billion this year alone if the spill cuts tourism in half.
With oil drilling — as with Wall Street — “there will be significant rethinking about who benefits and who bears the cost,” Mr. Snaith predicted.
Florida has a lot to lose, even beyond tourism and fishing. Housing has become increasingly concentrated along the state’s 8,436 miles of shoreline. With property values already down by a third in many areas and unemployment around 12 percent, the state could see its economy darkened for a decade by the spill.

Also vulnerable is the third-largest reef system in the world, which sits just offshore in the likely path of the loop current that, according to oceanographers,has already sent small blots of oil around Florida’s tip.

Residents worry about losing not just their livelihood, but also their way of life.

Fishermen motor out every day from docks all over the Keys searching for mahi mahi or lobster when the season opens in August, leaving early in the morning for that blissful moment when the sun rises over an open sea.
Boat-dwellers like Paul Peterson, 57, who piloted his 21-foot sailboat here from Massachusetts nine years ago, can hardly imagine being told that the water is off limits, or that the fish are too toxic to eat.

Mr. Peterson has been fighting Stage 4 lymphoma for years. He wears a gold necklace with a coin pulled from a local shipwreck, and he says the memories of diving — especially a few years back “with a great gal from Colorado” — have kept him going.

“It’s a hard fight,” said Mr. Peterson, referring to his cancer with the dropped r’s of New England. “And this place is so beautiful that it would be a sin. I don’t even want to say it or think about it.”
Many of his neighbors are still angry about how the cable news networks publicized the appearance of tar balls in Key West on May 17, tar balls that were not actually from the spill, leading some experts to surmise that they may have come from a ship.

Indeed, Florida is already learning that perception can define reality. Key Largo hosted a “reef fest” for divers last week, but after an extensive advertising campaign estimated to have reached 1.5 million people, only six divers showed up. Jackie Harder, president of the local chamber of commerce, said she had expected 300.
Charter boat captains and diving instructors are also struggling. In previous years, they would usually have had bookings for much of July by now. But next month is wide open for old-timers like Skip Bradeen, 67, who said he had never seen it this bad in his 40 years of taking amateurs out to land the big one.

What really worries most fishermen and environmental scientists are the long-term consequences if oil is carried around the coast of Florida, with plumes underwater and slicks onshore.

“It’s untold billions of babies of fish and lobsters and crabs,” said Douglas N. Rader, chief ocean scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund, an advocacy group. “A wide array of seafood that is in the surface layers of the sea are transferred through the superhighway of the loop current and are depending on the habitats affected by the oil.”
Gary Sands, a third-generation fisherman who works just past the Pilot House bar here in Key Largo, took a break on a hot morning of hammering together lobster traps to explain exactly what that means.

Sitting a few dozen yards from where Mr. McLaughlin stretched his shark skins, Mr. Sands pointed to a pair of blond teenagers, the sons of a fellow fisherman.
“I’m 68, but these boys, they’ve got 30 years,” he said. “If it doesn’t come back for these boys, what’s going to happen?”
Albert Pflueger, 50, another fisherman, whose family once owned the largest taxidermy company in South Florida, pondered the question. Across the docks sat a boat named What Next. Removing his sunglasses, Mr. Pflueger said he could imagine the Keys emptying out like an abandoned mining town.
“The whole Keys makes its living on the water,” he said. “If there is no water, there is no Keys.”
DuWayne Escobedo contributed reporting from Pensacola, and Gary Fineout from Tallahassee.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

 
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/opinion/13sun1.html

June 11, 2010
If ever there was a test of President Obama’s vision of government — one that cannot solve all problems, but does what people cannot do for themselves – it is this nerve-racking early summer of 2010, with oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico and far too many Americans out of work for far too long.
The country is frustrated and apprehensive and still waiting for Mr. Obama to put his vision into action.

The president cannot plug the leak or magically clean up the fouled Gulf of Mexico. But he and his administration need to do a lot more to show they are on top of this mess, and not perpetually behind the curve.

It is well within Mr. Obama’s power to keep his administration and Congressional Democrats focused on what the economy needs: jobs and stimulus. Voters are anxious about the deficit. But the president needs to tell them the truth that without more spending the economy could remain weak for a very long time.
Unless Mr. Obama says it, no other politician will. Just the other day, the House passed an unemployment benefits extension from which Democrats, not Republicans, had stripped vital measures that would have helped lots of Americans, but did not close a tax loophole for billionaires.

Americans need to know that Mr. Obama, whose coolness can seem like detachment, is engaged. This is not a mere question of presentation or stagecraft, although the White House could do better at both. (We cringed when he told the “Today” show that he had spent important time figuring out “whose ass to kick” about the spill. Everyone knew that answer on Day 2.)
Any assessment of the 44th president has to start with the fact that he took office under an extraordinary burden of problems created by President George W. Bush’s ineptness and blind ideology. He has faced a stone wall of Republican opposition. And Mr. Obama has had real successes. He won a stimulus bill that helped avert a depression; he got a historic health care reform through Congress; the bitter memory of Mr. Bush’s presidency is fading around the world.
But a year and a half into this presidency, the contemplative nature that was so appealing in a candidate can seem indecisive in a president. His promise of bipartisanship seems naïve. His inclination to hold back, then ride to the rescue, has sometimes made problems worse.

It certainly should not have taken days for Mr. Obama to get publicly involved in the oil spill, or even longer for his administration to start putting the heat on BP for its inadequate response and failure to inform the public about the size of the spill. (Each day, it seems, brings new revelations about the scope of the disaster.) It took too long for Mr. Obama to say that the Coast Guard and not BP was in charge of operations in the gulf and it’s still not clear that is true.
He should not have hesitated to suspend the expanded oil drilling program and he should have moved a lot faster to begin political and criminal investigations of the spill. If BP was withholding information, failing to cooperate or not providing the ships needed to process the oil now flowing to the surface, he should have told the American people and the world.

These are matters of competence and leadership. This is a time for Mr. Obama to decisively show both.

 Special thanks to Richard Charter.

Elana Schor, E&E reporter

On the growing list of unknowns that surround the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster — How many barrels are spilling? When will the leak be capped? — belongs another, less-discussed mystery: How will the chemical soup of gushing crude and dispersants affect the health of cleanup workers, fishermen and others working along the coast?

Testing data released so far by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and BP PLC raised more questions than they answered for scientists and industrial medicine specialists consulted by Greenwire. Meanwhile, the chorus of lawmakers raising alarms about the health hazards of chemical exposure in the Gulf was joined yesterday by House Education and Labor Chairman George Miller (D-Calif.), who warned BP CEO Tony Hayward that a failure to request full worker monitoring “is irresponsible.”

“The magnitude of the Deepwater Horizon disaster is unparalleled and the potential health risks for cleanup workers remains largely unknown,” Miller wrote to Hayward, urging BP to expand its existing request for a National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) hazard evaluation of a portion of Louisiana coastal workers.

NIOSH, a division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that provides scientific advice to OSHA, sent two teams of hygienists to the Gulf this week to test for chemical exposures of workers burning off collected oil and placing booms to help contain the spill.

As that work begins, BP has released limited test results aimed at tamping down public worries about the number of cleanup workers already reporting adverse symptoms. “It is important to recognise that the risks to the health of people from the chemicals associated with both the crude oil from the leak and the dispersants used to clean up the oil are very low,” the company states in a preface to its testing data.

That declaration was not sufficient for Gina Solomon, senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council and a member of U.S. EPA’s Science Advisory Board.

“Even in the data BP has posted, there are quite a large number of samples over NIOSH recommended exposure limits and some samples over a limit BP had previously identified as over a level of concern for hydrocarbons,” Solomon said.

Noting the lack of details on where BP’s worker testing is occurring and what equipment is used, Solomon pointed to a section of the company’s government-approved chemical monitoring plan that classifies smaller boats in the Gulf as “reduced priority.”

A BP spokesman defended the level of its chemical exposure tests, stating via e-mail that the company has “a team of around 100 industrial hygienists and technicians” in the Gulf. “All results to date are within safe exposure limits” set by OSHA, the spokesman added, including levels for volatile organic compounds (VOCs), a broad class of chemicals found in crude oil, pesticides and common solvents such as turpentine.

Yet OSHA does not set specific VOC exposure standards — and even existing OSHA standards for chemicals likely to linger in the Gulf do not provide an assurance of safety, occupational hygiene experts said.

“I wouldn’t use OSHA standards here as the sole measure for decisionmaking for protection of workers,” said Steven Markowitz, an environmental science professor at the City University of New York who directed a clinic that treated response workers following the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

“[Gulf] workers will likely have exposure to mixtures of substances which OSHA standards don’t address,” he added. “One of the things we learned from the World Trade Center is, when you’re unsure, err on the side of protection. Don’t err on the side of false reassurance.”

Benzene exposure

BP’s tests also show some workers have been exposed to the carcinogen benzene, which came as an unwelcome surprise to an occupational health expert and veteran of the 1989 Exxon Valdez cleanup who agreed to speak candidly on the condition of anonymity.
“They’re trying to say it’s not that bad, but I’m looking at it and saying, wow — that would be enough for me to say there’s [notable] exposure,” this source said, adding that the number of air samples BP has taken is “shockingly low … you would expect a lot more sampling data, but it can be difficult to take a lot of these samples.”

NIOSH sets significantly lower exposure limits than OSHA for several chemicals being monitored in spill cleanup workers, including benzene and 2-butoxyethanol, an ingredient in a dispersant that is no longer used in the Gulf. In addition, several sources noted that OSHA exposure limits are calculated based on an eight-hour day, even though many responders near the leaking well are working much longer shifts.

Hunter College toxicology professor Franklin Mirer said that using OSHA limits to assess chemical exposure in the Gulf “is less than helpful for understanding the health effects being reported” by the workers who have already sought medical treatment.

“If the message here is that OSHA standards are being complied with and large numbers of people are getting sick, that’s a lesson about the value of OSHA standards and about the protective measures that ought to be employed,” Mirer added, likening the occupational health risks of the oil disaster to those at the World Trade Center after Sept. 11.

BP announced yesterday that it would start burning as much as 10,000 barrels of collected oil per day next week, potentially altering the mix of hydrocarbons and other hazardous chemicals entering the air. Given that the Gulf game plan is changing so rapidly, longtime industrial health official Eileen Senn said worker protection is a more sensitive concern than testing.

“This whole sampling thing, it’s just barking up the wrong tree,” said Senn, who has more than four decades of experience in occupational hygiene. “I don’t feel like workers are being told the risks they’re being exposed to.”

OSHA has released worker education documents that outline the health risks posed by crude oil contact and dispersant use, and agency officials have publicly pressed BP to release the maximum amount of monitoring data while conducting their own local tests.

But one day after Reps. James Oberstar (D-Minn.) and Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) called on OSHA to ensure that cleanup workers received respirators, the agency said they were not needed “unless a toxic chemical threat is identified.”

A Nadler spokesman called the existing worker-protection responses “all nonsense,” adding that the congressman “is continuing to push [OSHA and BP] to do the right thing and avert a public health crisis.”

Another potential stumbling block for OSHA’s efforts is its lack of jurisdiction beyond 3 miles offshore, where much of the most direct worker exposure to hydrocarbons likely is occurring. OSHA Deputy Assistant Secretary Jordan Barab told lawmakers yesterday that the agency has no plans to press for broader sway offshore.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://dailydeadbirds.com/

BP Oil Spill: Daily Dead Wildlife Tally 
Chad Nelsen
Surfrider Foundation
949.492.8170×408
cnelsen@surfrider.org
PO Box 6010, San Clemente, CA 92674

McClatchy Newspapers
Posted on Sat, Jun. 12, 2010

Coast Guard rejects BP oil leak plan as too little, too late

Mark Seibel
McClatchy Newspapers
 
WASHINGTON – The Coast Guard has told oil giant BP that its proposed plan for containing the runaway Deepwater Horizon well does not take into account new higher estimates of how much oil is gushing into the Gulf of Mexico and demanded that the company provide a more aggressive plan within 48 hours.
In a letter dated Friday and released Saturday, Coast Guard Rear Adm. James A. Watson also said that BP was taking too much time to ready ships to capture oil spewing from the well.
 
“You indicate that some of the systems you have planned to deploy may take a month or more to bring online,” Watson, who is the federal on-scene coordinator for the Deepwater Horizon disaster, wrote Doug Suttles, BP’s chief operating officer. “Every effort must be expended to speed up the process.”
 
The 48-hour deadline is the second the Coast Guard has given BP in the past week and indicates a growing recognition on the part of the Coast Guard that both BP and the Obama administration underestimated for weeks the amount of oil pouring from the well, which began leaking when an April 20 explosion shattered the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, killing 11 workers. The rig sank two days later, taking a mile of well pipeline with it.
 
For weeks, the Obama administration and BP said the spill was leaking 5,000 barrels a day – about 210,000 gallons. On May 27, a government task force of scientists revised that estimate to a minimum of 12,000 to 25,000 barrels a day, and possibly much more. Then on Thursday, the government doubled those estimates to between 20,000 and 50,000 barrels a day, saying those, too, may understate the size of the leak because a decision to shear off the well’s riser pipe to add a “top hat” containment device may have unleashed more oil.
 
Watson said the new estimates were the reason for the new deadline, saying the plan Suttles outlined was only “consistent with previous flow rate estimates.”
 
“Because those estimates have now been revised . . . it is clear that additional capacity is urgently needed,” he said.
 
BP said it would respond to Watson’s letter “as soon as possible.”
 
BP and Coast Guard representatives have been meeting throughout the week, Coast Guard officials have said, to refine the plan, which Suttles outlined in a letter to Watson dated Wednesday – before the new flow rate estimates were released. In his letter, Suttles said the plan had been outlined on Tuesday to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Energy Secretary Steven Chu. “No objections were raised,” he wrote.
 
Under that proposal, BP outlined two phases – a temporary one involving three recovery ships and a jerry-rigged system combining the “top hat” containment device with hoses already in place from the “top kill” procedure that failed to stanch the well last month, and a more permanent one that involves construction of two new risers from the well that would be serviced by two large recovery ships that are en route to the site now.
 
BP said that the temporary phase would bring the amount of oil captured to 20,000 to 28,000 barrels a day by the end of next week. Most of that oil would be recovered by the Discoverer Enterprise drilling ship, which has been collecting around its stated 15,000-barrels-per-day capacity through the “top hat” but that Coast Guard officials believe can be pushed to 18,000 barrels a day. The remaining 5,000 to 10,000 barrels per day would be taken up by a second vessel, the Q4000 drilling platform, which would burn the oil in a rarely used, if not unprecedented, procedure. BP vice president Kent Wells said Friday that burning could begin as soon as Monday.
 
The burning idea has provoked some experts to raise questions about the health and environmental effects of the process.
 
Containment capacity would be pushed further during the temporary phase by the addition of a third vessel, the drill ship Discoverer Clear Leader, which would take on an additional 5,000 to 10,000 barrels a day when it is operational in mid July, Suttle wrote.
 
In the second, more permanent phase, Suttles said BP was building two permanent floating risers to provide oil to the Taisa Pisces and the Helix Producer recovery ships. Each riser takes about a month to complete, Suttles said. One is expected to be finished next week. Work on the second began Monday, June 7. Once operational, the new risers and ships would have capacity to receive between 40,000 and 50,000 barrels per day, BP said.
 
The plan foresees both the Q4000 and the Discoverer Clear Leader discontinuing operations once the new floating risers are operational, but says the Discoverer Enterprise would remain on site and could provide additional capacity, if needed.
 
In offering an estimate of the total capacity of the temporary phase, BP’s plan is more cautious than numbers Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen used in press briefings with reporters. On Friday, Allen said capacity would reach 38,000 barrels a day once the Discoverer Clear Leader is operational.
 
BP’s numbers may be more realistic, however. While Allen has said that the Discoverer Enterprise could be pushed to receive 18,000 barrels per day, the actual amount it’s recovered has declined by a few hundred barrels since it peaked at 15,800 barrels on Wednesday. On Thursday, the ship recovered 15,400 barrels and on Friday, it recovered 15,500 barrels, BP reported Saturday.
 
How much oil will flow to the Q4000 and the Discoverer Clear Leader is also uncertain. Neither vessel will be “pumping” the oil up from the sea, but instead will rely on the oil’s natural pressure to push it up through hoses that were originally used to push drilling mud into the well’s dysfunctional blowout preventer during the “top kill” effort. Based on the size of the hoses, the maximum amount likely to flow through to those ships would be 10,000 barrels per day, but could be less, depending on the oil reservoir’s pressure.
 
Both Suttles and Wells warned that there could be additional delays in the plans because of adverse weather and conditions at the drill site, which officials describe as crowded with dozens of ships.
 
© 2010 Miami Herald Media Company. http://www.miamiherald.com
 
Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/06/12/v-print/1677002/coast-guard-rejects-bp-oil-leak.html#ixzz0qfvaDv4s
 
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Coast Guard to BP: Speed it up, stop the spill

Published: Saturday, June 12, 2010, 4:06 PM     Updated: Saturday, June 12, 2010, 4:11 PM

The Associated Press

ORANGE BEACH, Ala. — The Coast Guard has demanded that BP step up its efforts to contain the oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico by the end of the weekend, telling the British oil giant that its slow pace in stopping the spill is becoming increasingly alarming as the disaster fouled the coastline in ugly new ways today.
The Coast Guard sent a testy letter to BP’s chief operating officer that said the company urgently needs to pick up the pace and present a better plan to contain the spill by the time President Barack Obama arrives on Monday for his fourth visit to the beleaguered coast. The letter, released Saturday, follows nearly two months of tense relations between BP and the government and reflects the growing frustration over the company’s inability to stop the largest environmental disaster in U.S. history.
 
The dispute escalated on the same day that ominous new signs of the tragedy emerged on the beaches of Alabama. Waves of unsightly brown surf hit the shores in Orange Beach, leaving stinking, dark piles of oil that dried in the hot sun and extended up to 12 feet from the water’s edge for as far as the eye could see.
 
It was the worst hit yet to Alabama beaches. Tar-like globs have washed up periodically throughout the disaster, but Saturday’s pollution was significantly worse.
 
“This is awful,” said Shelley Booker of Shreveport, La., who was staying in a condominium with her teenage daughter and her friends near the deserted beach about 100 miles from the site of the spill.
 
Scientists have estimated that anywhere between about 40 million gallons to 109 million gallons of oil have spewed into the Gulf since a drilling rig exploded April 20, killing 11 workers. The latest cap installed on the blown-out well is capturing about 650,000 gallons of oil a day, but large quantities are still spilling into the sea.
 
The Coast Guard initially sent a letter to BP on Wednesday asking for more details on its plans to contain the oil. BP responded, saying a new system to trap much more oil should be complete by mid-July. That system’s new design is meant to better withstand the force of hurricanes and could capture about 2 million gallons of oil daily when finished, the company said.
 
But Coast Guard Rear Adm. James A. Watson said in a follow-up letter Friday he was concerned that BP’s plans were inadequate, especially in light of revised estimates this week that indicated the size of the spill could be up to twice as large as previously thought.
 
“BP must identify in the next 48 hours additional leak containment capacity that could be operationalized and expedited to avoid the continued discharge of oil … Recognizing the complexity of this challenge, every effort must be expended to speed up the process,” Watson said in the letter addressed to chief operating officer Doug Suttles.
 
Suttles said the company will respond to the letter by Sunday night.
 
“We’ve got a team of people looking to see, can we accelerate some items that are in that plan and is it possible to do more,” Suttles said as he spoke to workers at a command center where he thanked BP employees and contractors for their work in cleaning up the spill. “There are some real challenges to do that, including safety.”
 
The letter and deadline come just before Obama is set to visit the Gulf Coast on Monday and Tuesday. On Saturday, Obama reassured British Prime Minister David Cameron that his frustration over the oil spill in the Gulf was not an attack on Britain.
 
The two leaders spoke by phone for 30 minutes Saturday to soothe trans-Atlantic tensions over the spill. Cameron also has been under pressure to get Obama to tone down the criticism, fearing it will hurt the millions of British retirees holding BP stock that has taken a beating in recent weeks.
 
Cameron’s office said the prime minister told Obama of his sadness at the disaster, while Obama said he recognized that BP was a multinational company and that his frustration “had nothing to do with national identity.”
 
BP is hard at work trying to find new ways to capture more oil, but officials say the only way to permanently stop the spill is a relief well that will drill sideways into the broken well and plug it with cement.
 
Right now, a containment cap sitting over a well pipe is siphoning off around 653,100 gallons of oil to a ship the ocean surface. That oil is then unloaded to tankers and taken ashore.
 
To boost its capacity, BP also plans to trap oil using lines that earlier shot heavy drilling mud deep into the well during a failed attempt to stop the flow. This time, those lines will work in reverse. Oil and gas from the well will flow up to a semi-submersible drilling rig where it will be burned in a specialized boom that BP estimates can vaporize a maximum 420,000 gallons of oil daily. Another ship should be in place by mid-July to process even more oil.
 
News that the federal government had given BP until the end of the weekend to speed up the oil containment was met with raised eyebrows and long sighs as locals gathered to barbecue, drink Budweiser and listen to classic rock at a fishing benefit in Pointe a la Hache, La.
 
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” said Dominic Bazile, a firefighter.
 
Meanwhile, Gulf states affected by the disaster are putting the squeeze on BP, seeking to protect their interests amid talk of the possibility that BP may eventually file for bankruptcy.
 
The attorney general in Florida and the state treasurer in Louisiana want BP to put a total of $7.5 billion in escrow accounts to compensate the states and their residents for damages now and in the future. Alabama doesn’t plan to take such action, while Mississippi and Texas haven’t said what they will do.
 
As of the end of March, BP had only $6.8 billion in cash and cash equivalents available.
 
© 2010 al.com.
 

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McClatchy Washington Bureau
Posted on Fri, Jun. 11, 2010

Obama overlooked key points in giving OK to offshore drilling

Steven Thomma | McClatchy Newspapers

last updated: June 11, 2010 07:47:56 PM
 
WASHINGTON – Weeks before the world had ever heard of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, President Barack Obama stood in the Roosevelt Room of the White House poring over maps of oil drilling sites in the Gulf of Mexico, Alaska and elsewhere.
 
Satisfied that he knew all he needed to know and confident that it was safe, he decided to propose expanded offshore drilling.
 
“This is not a decision that I’ve made lightly,” he said when he unveiled his proposal on March 31.
 
“Oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills,” he added two days later. “They are technologically very advanced. Even during Katrina, the spills didn’t come from the oil rigs, they came from the refineries onshore.”
 
On April 20, the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded, setting off the largest oil spill in U.S. history. It drove Obama to freeze the proposal he’d just made.
 
An in-depth review by McClatchy reveals how Obama reached that initial decision to expand offshore drilling _ and why he failed to get information that might have led him instead to delay or oppose it and perhaps even raise questions about the deepwater drilling that was already under way.
 
Obama did roll back some of the offshore drilling that the George W. Bush administration had approved on Bush’s last day in office. However, Obama never challenged the Bush era’s fundamental faith in the oil industry or its ability to clean up a massive spill. Instead, he embraced expanded offshore drilling, in part to win Republican support for broader legislation to curb climate change.
 
“He deserved to be more skeptical,” said Stephen Hess, a veteran of four White Houses back to the Eisenhower administration and an expert on how presidents do their job.
 
“They hadn’t thought through the various ramifications. They should have, obviously. But it didn’t seem obvious at the time.”
 
“Not well thought through,” said Rick Steiner, a retired University of Alaska marine scientist. “If they had really done their job, they would have understood there was high risk here.”
 
Indeed, Obama and his team overlooked some important points as they prepared to give the green light to more offshore oil drilling. Expanding the drilling was something he’d promised to do during his campaign, when gas prices topped $4 a gallon, and it was a lure he planned to use to win Republican votes for legislation aimed at curbing climate change.
 
Among their oversights:
 
Obama thought that funneling information through White House “czars” such as energy and environment adviser Carol Browner would get him all the data he needed.
 
He failed to drill into the government bureaucracy to test that information. He didn’t, for example, ask about the Interior Department’s Minerals Management Service, which had prepared a report in 2000 on the dangers of deepwater drilling that proved to be eerily predictive of what happened in the Gulf. The MMS regulates offshore drilling.
 
He never talked to the Coast Guard about its 2002 oil-spill drill in the Gulf or to the man who ran it, Adm. Thad Allen, who later would oversee the response to the Deepwater Horizon spill.
 
He didn’t reach out to outside experts, such as the National Academy of Engineering, to question claims that deepwater drilling technology was dependable.
Top Obama administration officials say that they did an exhaustive job marshaling information for more than a year, and that the president asked what he needed to ask when it arrived at his desk. Anyone, they said, would grow complacent about the safety of offshore drilling after decades without a major spill.
 
“It’s really important to understand you have decades of nothing going wrong,” said one senior administration official, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity as a matter of White House policy.
 
“The last time you saw a spill of this magnitude in the Gulf, it was off the coast of Mexico in 1979,” a second senior administration official said. “If something doesn’t happen since 1979, you begin to take your eye off of that thing.”
 
Obama’s management of the March 31 oil decision is important not simply because the April 20 disaster turned a global spotlight on the entire subject. The governing style of Obama, a new president with no prior executive experience, has been subject to constant second-guessing.
 
How he makes decisions when no one is watching is arguably as illuminating – perhaps more so – as how he decides when the whole world is watching, such as his long deliberation last fall over whether to send more troops to Afghanistan.
 
Then, he held three months of meetings, publicized with White House photos released to the media and documented with briefings to reporters backed by notes taken during the sessions.
 
This time, he met twice with the top administration officials on the oil drilling question. Aides couldn’t recall details of the deliberations, such as the date of the last meeting with the president or the length of the memo they gave him on oil drilling.
 
“I had never had an inquiry about how we made that decision,” one top aide said, until after “one of them blew up in the Gulf.”
 
For Obama, a former campaign adviser said, the decision to expand offshore drilling was born in the 2008 campaign, when gasoline prices were soaring and Republican rival Sen. John McCain of Arizona was scoring with his promise of more production – drill, baby, drill – to drive down prices.
 
Obama also warmed to new offshore drilling as part of a bipartisan proposal in Congress, led by Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., to allow expanded drilling while pushing higher fuel efficiency.
 
The president and his political aides looked at proposing expanded drilling as a way to win Republican support for a broader energy bill aimed at climate change.
 
“Involving offshore drilling way back in the campaign, and then in March, has been part of a series of bank shots all intended to address other issues, as opposed to being a free-standing priority,” said an environmental activist who’s close to the White House, who asked not to be identified because he was criticizing the administration.
 
“It was not a full-blown policy proposal,” the activist said. “It was bait in the water.”
 
“Absolutely not true,” Browner said in an interview. “There was a lot of time and energy spent on this … trying to determine what was the appropriate thing to do.”
 
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar gathered information about oil drilling for a year, including public hearings in Alaska, California, Louisiana and New Jersey. More than 530,000 comments were collected.
 
Browner was the West Wing aide responsible for taking Salazar’s recommendations and all viewpoints to Obama. She’s the assistant to the president for energy and climate change, with a deep background in environmental work. She was an aide to Al Gore, the director of the Florida Department of Environmental Protection and the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency in the Clinton administration.
 
She said she didn’t advocate choices inside the White House.
 
“My job is to be an honest broker … on behalf of the Cabinet agencies,” she said, “to ensure that they are able to present their best recommendations to the president and that he has all of the information he needs to make a decision.”
 
Despite the brouhaha over Obama’s reliance on White House aides dubbed “czars” to oversee areas of policy, all modern presidents rely on top aides to funnel information to them, particularly when it comes from more than one department.
 
Bush, for example, insisted that one presidential assistant “own” any given issue so the president would know whom to go to and who could be held accountable, according to Bradley H. Patterson, the author of an authoritative book on White House management, “To Serve the President.”
 
After being updated periodically by Browner on the discussions that were under way, Obama received the final summary of recommendations first in a memo – aides couldn’t recall how many pages it was – then in a meeting for a final decision.
 
In the Roosevelt Room, Obama met with Browner, Salazar and others, including Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, Deputy Chief of Staff Mona Sutphen and Budget Director Peter Orszag.
 
DISSENT
 
Administration officials said they heard dissent and changed the proposal in response. They banned drilling in Alaska’s Bristol Bay and refused to propose new drilling leases for Alaska’s Beaufort Sea.
 
“There were people who argued that certain areas should be protected, so, for example, the Beaufort Sea got protected,” Browner said.
 
However, the March 31 decision left in place plans to allow Shell Oil to start drilling five exploratory wells already leased in the Beaufort Sea, plans that weren’t frozen until May 27, five weeks after Deepwater Horizon exploded.
 
Obama never reached out himself to prominent dissenters such as marine scientist Steiner, who’d argued to Interior against expanding offshore drilling. Steiner had worked on oil spill responses from the Exxon Valdez in 1989 through today’s Gulf spill.
 
“He didn’t talk to me,” Steiner said.
 
DIGGING INTO HIS GOVERNMENT
 
As he reviewed the pending decision, Obama didn’t ask for more information about the Minerals Management Service. Now infamous but little-known then, the MMS is the primary agency that oversees oil drilling. In 2000, it prepared a report that warned of the possibility of a major spill that could start with a fire atop a rig, noting that “retaining well control in deep water may be a problem,” and said that spreading oil could both remain underwater and rush ashore.
 
That report was shelved during the Bush years as the government bowed to the claimed technological infallibility of the oil industry. In fact, the agency became known for cozy relationships between regulators and the oil industry, something Salazar set out to fix when he took office last year.
 
Obama recently conceded that he was wrong to trust the oil companies.
 
“Where I was wrong was in my belief that the oil companies had their act together when it came to worst-case scenarios,” he said. “Now, that wasn’t based on just my blind acceptance of their statements. Oil drilling has been going on in the Gulf, including deep water, for quite some time. And the record of accidents like this we hadn’t seen before.”
 
He also laid some blame on the MMS.
 
“Prior to this accident happening, I think there was a lack of anticipating what the worst-case scenarios would be. And that’s a problem,” he said. “And part of that problem was lodged in MMS and the way that that agency was structured. That was the agency in charge of providing permitting and making decisions in terms of where drilling could take place, but also in charge of enforcing the safety provisions.”
 
Yet Obama didn’t ask about the MMS when he was weighing whether to expand drilling on the Outer Continental Shelf.
 
“In making OCS decisions, you wouldn’t have necessarily needed to ask about sort of what information MMS has,” the first senior administration official said. “In making the OCS decisions, the focus was not based on MMS information per se.”
 
The official said that the president “was aware that Ken Salazar had been making changes in terms of the ethics issues that had been quite significant in the prior administration” and the president was satisfied that Salazar “had taken important steps.”
 
While not asking about the MMS is potentially embarrassing in hindsight, presidential expert Hess said it was unrealistic to expect a president to know much about an otherwise obscure agency.
 
“MMS is probably an agency that never crops up on the White House radar. It’s in the bowels of the bureaucracy,” Hess said. “No president pays equal attention to every piece of the bureaucracy.”
 
COAST GUARD
 
Obama also didn’t personally quiz the Coast Guard or Adm. Thad Allen, who’d run an oil spill exercise off Louisiana in 2002 and who’d be the national commander of any federal oil spill response.
 
“Not that I’m aware of,” the first senior official said.
 
“The president understood that there are safety plans associated with each lease. What are they called? Contingency response plans, something like that. … That’s part of the safety checks and balances in the system.”
 
The administration officials also noted that Obama’s drilling proposal would require further studies and permits before any drilling started.
 
GOING OUTSIDE
 
Some presidents like to reach outside official channels for unfiltered advice. Bill Clinton, for example, loved to call people late into the night.
 
Obama did, too, when he was seeking the office. For example, he reached out to private-sector experts – such as Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers – discussing energy with them in his campaign headquarters for three hours straight one Monday in June 2008.
 
“That was the beginning, I think, of the thought process” leading to expanded offshore oil drilling, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said.
 
The president also has expressed a desire to seek outside expertise since the oil spill.
 
“We’re relying on experts who’ve actually dealt with oil spills from across the globe,” Obama said at a news conference, adding that he and his administration would talk to the National Academy of Engineering, the National Laboratories and experts in academia.
 
He didn’t seek such outside expertise until the spill, however, at least not to ask about oil drilling technology in deep water or oil-spill response plans.
 
“Beyond routine meetings with ‘green group’ environmental organization CEOs and policy staff, I don’t think the administration reached out,” said Dianne Saenz, the communications director for Oceana, one of the environmental groups. “We did not know the specifics of the March 31 announcement on expanded offshore drilling areas before it was made.”
 
Browner said Obama did reach out.
 
“He’s met several times with representatives of the environmental community who would have raised this issue,” she said. “He also has met with various groups of business leaders who were interested in energy reform, some of whom would have raised this issue.
 
“They were not brought in specifically on this issue; they were brought in on energy more broadly.” Asked why Obama didn’t ask for outside opinions as he did in his campaign, she said that he now had staff do that.
 
“You have all these advisers; their job is to go out and do those sorts of things,” she said. “Our job is to synthesize this information and bring it back to him.”
 
Inside the White House, aides say that they and their president did the best they could, given the context before the unprecedented accident.
 
“The best piece of evidence we had was that there hadn’t been a problem for decades,” Browner said. “There are very few industries where you can probably look back over a several-decade period and not have a large-scale problem.”
 
“Nobody expected the damned thing to blow up,” said Hess, the presidential scholar. “A lot of things don’t get that presidential attention because the president is busy and historically, statistically, it’s not apt to happen very often.
 
“If somebody tells you something happens in Kandahar, you better challenge it if lives are at stake. But most things in the bureaucracy, you have some faith in the people you’ve asked to gather the information.”
 
Ultimately, it’s up to Obama to decide whether he’s satisfied with how he reached his decision to propose more offshore drilling.
 
A president’s decisions are only as good as the information that generates them. That point was driven home in early 1961, when an inexperienced President John F. Kennedy blindly signed off on what would become the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.
 
Kennedy learned. Afterward he personally questioned experts skeptically, including his own generals. Eighteen months later, facing the Cuban Missile Crisis, he developed an advisory system that remains a model of executive decision-making, one that helped the world escape its closest brush with nuclear war.
 
McClatchy Newspapers 2010
 

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Breaking News / World
http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/breakingnews/world/view/20100613-275340/Obama-insists-anger-at-BP-not-directed-at-Britain
 
Obama insists anger at BP not directed at Britain
 
Agence France-Presse
 
Posted date: June 13, 2010
 
NEW ORLEANS–President Barack Obama said his sharp criticism of BP was not aimed at Britain Saturday as the US Coast Guard increased pressure on BP to contain the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
Obama, who had been referring to BP by its former full name “British Petroleum,” told Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron that “frustrations about the oil spill had nothing to do with national identity,” a spokeswoman for the prime minister’s Downing Street office said.
 
Obama has summoned BP Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg to meet with him in Washington next Wednesday, criticized chief executive Tony Hayward, fired a warning over shareholder payouts and said he wants to know “whose ass to kick” over the catastrophe.
 
British newspapers in turn have demanded that Cameron — who has defended the need for a “financially strong BP” — stand up to Obama amid fears that his rhetoric was stoking an anti-British backlash.
 
“The prime minister stressed the economic importance of BP to the UK, US and other countries,” the Downing Street spokeswoman said. “The president made clear that he had no interest in undermining BP’s value.”
 
The White House said the pair, who spoke by phone, “discussed the impact of tragic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, reiterating that BP must do all it can to respond effectively to the situation.”
 
Separately, the US Coast Guard ordered BP to improve its plans to contain the spill within 48 hours given new US government data this week that suggested the flow was as much as double previous estimates.
 
“Because those estimates have now been revised and estimate a substantially higher flow of oil from the Macado 252 well, it is clear that additional capacity is urgently needed,” it said in a letter dated June 11 and released Saturday.
 
US government data on Thursday suggested the flow of the leak — before a containment system was put in place last week — was between 25,000 and 30,000 barrels a day and could be upwards of 40,000 barrels a day.
 
But the containment system BP is using is only capturing around 28,000 barrels a day, and the company’s operation to boost that rate to between 40,000 to 50,000 barrels is not currently scheduled to be ready until July.
 
There will be no permanent solution until the first of two relief wells is completed, in August at the earliest, allowing the leak to be plugged with cement.
 
“I am concerned that your current plans do not provide for maximum mobilization of resources to provide the needed collection capacity consistent with revised flow estimates,” US Coast Guard Rear Admiral James Watson told BP in the letter.
 
“I am also concerned that your plan does not go far enough to mobilize redundant resources in the event of an equipment failure with one of the vessels or some other unforeseen problem,” he added.
 
“BP must identify in the next 48 hours additional leak containment capacity that could be operationalized and expedited to avoid the continued discharge of oil.”
 
BP meanwhile has indicated it may finally bow to US pressure and suspend its dividend payment due July 27.
 
Suspending the dividend is “an option that’s up for discussion,” a BP spokesman told AFP.
 
“No decision has been made on it, we are looking at options,” said the spokesman. “There’s a board meeting on Monday but they are not necessarily going to take a decision on it then.”
 
Britain’s Times newspaper said BP was preparing to place the second-quarter dividend money — an expected 1.7 billion dollars — in an escrow account in an attempt to ease political pressure on the firm.
 
Top US lawmaker Nancy Pelosi has urged BP not to pay dividends and echoed pleas from Obama not to shortchange those hit by the disaster.
 
The final price tag for BP is still unknown because it is unclear how much oil is flowing from the well, how long the spill will last, and how far the oil will travel.
 
Analysts estimate that BP’s total liability for the environmental catastrophe, including the cleanup, compensation claims, government penalties, and a host of civil lawsuits, could reach 30 to 100 billion dollars.
 
The firm’s share price has fallen more than 40 percent since the Deepwater Horizon rig it leased exploded on April 20, prompting speculation about bankruptcy and a takeover bid.
 
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