http://www.bnd.com/2010/06/05/1282619/oil-drilling-a-defining-issue.html

Saturday, Jun. 05, 2010

By WILLIAM E. GIBSON – Sun Sentinel

 WASHINGTON — While oil washing up on Florida Panhandle beaches from the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico poses the most immediate danger to the state, marine scientists warn that the most frightening threat to much of Florida is a future disaster if offshore drilling spreads farther south.

The spill has turned a long-standing national debate over the hazards and rewards of offshore drilling into a hot-button campaign issue, starting with Florida’s nationally watched Senate race.
Just three weeks before the spill, President Barack Obama proposed opening a vast tract to energy exploration directly in the path of a powerful loop current that carries water from the Gulf of Mexico to the East Coast.

Since the spill, Obama has put that plan on hold by suspending for six months new energy exploration in deep waters along the nation’s coastline. Obama’s future policy may be swayed by the findings of a special commission co-chaired by former Florida Senator Bob Graham.

Yet once the nation’s largest spill is contained, pressures to drill are bound to resume as the energy industry and its allies in Congress press to meet the rising demand for oil and natural gas. Florida’s next senator likely will play a prominent role in that debate.

Marco Rubio, a Republican candidate, reflects those who want to learn from this disaster, take safety precautions and move ahead to tap coastal waters. He is intent on making the United States less dependent on foreign oil, especially from nations like Venezuela that have strained relations with this country.

The energy industry has reinforced Rubio’s position with $44,400 of campaign contributions, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a watchdog group.

Democrat Kendrick Meek sees the spill as a warning of worse disasters to come if drilling is allowed to spread. He is touting his long-standing opposition to near-shore drilling, hoping voter revulsion to the spill will carry him to the Senate.

Meek has received just $5,900 from oil and gas interests during the 2009-2010 campaign.

Gov. Charlie Crist, an independent Senate candidate, reflects Floridians who once welcomed the prospect of jobs and revenue from a growing energy industry but have become disillusioned by the spill and its impact on tourism. Crist has received $13,600 from the energy industry.

Crist has gone from receptiveness to drilling near Florida to trying to ban it forever. He has called for a constitutional ban on drilling in state waters, which extend 10 miles from the Gulf shore.

The current spill defeated the notion that drilling comes without risk, but it leaves the political question of whether the need and reward are so great that the risk is worth taking.

Scientists say they hope political leaders in Washington and Tallahassee take into account the ocean currents when they determine where drilling will be allowed.

“It’s going to be hard to wean ourselves from oil,” acknowledged Frank Muller-Karger, an oceanographer and expert on Gulf currents at the University of South Florida. “People want cheap gas and don’t want to import from other nations.”

“But we need to better understand the risks,” Muller-Karger said. “If there’s a spill and it enters the loop current, it will spread the mess much farther, quicker. We in Florida would be in the same situation that Louisiana is in right now. The areas closer to the spill will get the worst of it almost always.”

Those tracking the spill say it still poses dangers for South Florida, especially if the destroyed well keeps gushing for months and underwater plumes reach the East Coast.

But they say this region may be spared the worst of the spill because it occurred north of the loop current. So far, only small patches have drifted into its path.

The most likely result for South Florida will be tar balls that pass through the Florida Straits, baked by the sun and less toxic after weeks of exposure to water and weather.

If so, the environmental damage to Florida south of the Panhandle will be limited, but the debate over the future of offshore drilling will continue.

Whoever wins the Senate race will find a toxic political environment on Capitol Hill, where pressures to drill are relentless but opposition has hardened.
U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Weston, Fla., calls the disaster an “I-told-you-so moment” that should reunite Florida’s congressional delegation against offshore drilling.

The state’s once-solid opposition fragmented in recent years when some Florida Republicans bowed to party pressure to expand offshore resources. Republicans in Tallahassee, Fla., and Washington hoped that exploration would produce jobs and oil revenue to plug gaps in the state budget.

Since the spill, drilling proponents have focused on finding the cause and developing precautions that would allow exploration to safely continue.

For those who believe offshore production is a fact of life, it’s just a matter of time before drilling regains political momentum.
“I think the politicians recognize that you just can’t stop production,” said Eric Hamilton, associate director of the Florida Petroleum Council, an industry group that lobbies in Tallahassee for more drilling. “The oil and gas has to come from somewhere.”

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN0613745520100606?type=marketsNews
Protesters at BP gas station call for boycott of company
* Protest called after oil washes up on Pensacola beach
Sun Jun 6, 2010 5:55pm EDT
12:00am PDT

By Michael Peltier
PENSACOLA, Fla., June 6 (Reuters) – Demonstrators converged on a BP (BP.L) service station in Pensacola on Sunday to protest the massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill now affecting northwest Florida.

Several dozen people, including an Elvis impersonator, joined in the protest aimed at mobilizing support for a boycott of the company now responsible for sending oil onto their prized Panhandle beaches.

“I’ve been trying to keep drilling out of Florida waters since the 1990s,” said Pamela Corey, a high school English teacher.

“But so what. You can still drill in Louisiana and it shows up here,” Corey said.

For many, the man-made environmental disaster is the latest in a series of misfortunes to hit Florida including hurricanes and a housing market bust.

“(Hurricane) Ivan (in 2004) took my roof off, the housing market took my business and my house and now this is hampering my comeback,” said Bill Paul, a Pensacola resident with three young children who has scrapped plans to open a restaurant.

“But that’s my personal situation,” Paul added. “To me, this is more about the environment.”

Protester Chris Slick said he felt compelled to help organize Sunday’s demonstration after seeing tar balls wash up on Pensacola Beach and its famous sugar-white sands on Friday.
Until then, Florida had escaped the oil spewing into the Gulf since the April 20 explosion and fire aboard the BP Deepwater Horizon oil rig.

“BP had more than 40 days to get an effort ready and it’s not ready,” Slick said.
Others said government oversight was lacking.

“The bottom line is deregulation caused this,” Pensacola resident Gwen Ward said. “And now we have to put regulation back in force and do whatever we can to clean it up.”

Elvis Presley impersonator David Suhor stopped by the BP station to support the protesters and drum up some business.

“It’s now or never,” Suhor crooned to passersby, many of whom honked horns in support.
(Editing by Eric Beech)  Special thanks to Richard Charter

URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/magazine/06fob-wwln-t.html?emc=tnt&tntemail0=y

By DAVID LEONHARDT
       

Published: May 31, 2010

In retrospect, the pattern seems clear. Years before the Deepwater Horizon rig blew, BP was developing a reputation as an oil company that took safety risks to save money. An explosion at a Texas refinery killed 15 workers in 2005, and federal regulators and a panel led by James A. Baker III, the former secretary of state, said that cost cutting was partly to blame. The next year, a corroded pipeline in Alaska poured oil into Prudhoe Bay. None other than Joe Barton, a Republican congressman from Texas and a global-warming skeptic, upbraided BP managers for their “seeming indifference to safety and environmental issues.”

Much of this indifference stemmed from an obsession with profits, come what may. But there also appears to have been another factor, one more universally human, at work. The people running BP did a dreadful job of estimating the true chances of events that seemed unlikely – and may even have been unlikely – but that would bring enormous costs.              

Perhaps the easiest way to see this is to consider what BP executives must be thinking today. Surely, given the expense of the clean-up and the hit to BP’s reputation, the executives wish they could go back and spend the extra money to make Deepwater Horizon safer. That they did not suggests that they figured the rig would be fine as it was.        

For all the criticism BP executives may deserve, they are far from the only people to struggle with such low-probability, high-cost events. Nearly everyone does. “These are precisely the kinds of events that are hard for us as humans to get our hands around and react to rationally,” Robert N. Stavins, an environmental economist at Harvard, says. We make two basic – and opposite – types of mistakes. When an event is difficult to imagine, we tend to underestimate its likelihood. This is the proverbial black swan. Most of the people running Deepwater Horizon probably never had a rig explode on them. So they assumed it would not happen, at least not to them.         

Similarly, Ben Bernanke and Alan Greenspan liked to argue, not so long ago, that the national real estate market was not in a bubble because it had never been in one before. Wall Street traders took the same view and built mathematical models that did not allow for the possibility that house prices would decline. And many home buyers signed up for unaffordable mortgages, believing they could refinance or sell the house once its price rose. That’s what house prices did, it seemed.           

On the other hand, when an unlikely event is all too easy to imagine, we often go in the opposite direction and overestimate the odds. After the 9/11 attacks, Americans canceled plane trips and took to the road. There were no terrorist attacks in this country in 2002, yet the additional driving apparently led to an increase in traffic fatalities.           

When the stakes are high enough, it falls to government to help its citizens avoid these entirely human errors. The market, left to its own devices, often cannot do so. Yet in the case of Deepwater Horizon, government policy actually went the other way. It encouraged BP to underestimate the odds of a catastrophe.             

In a little-noticed provision in a 1990 law passed after the Exxon Valdez spill, Congress capped a spiller’s liability over and above cleanup costs at $75 million for a rig spill. Even if the economic damages – to tourism, fishing and the like – stretch into the billions, the responsible party is on the hook for only $75 million. (In this instance, BP has agreed to waive the cap for claims it deems legitimate.) Michael Greenstone, an M.I.T. economist who runs the Hamilton Project in Washington, says the law fundamentally distorts a company’s decision making. Without the cap, executives would have to weigh the possible revenue from a well against the cost of drilling there and the risk of damage. With the cap, they can largely ignore the potential damage beyond cleanup costs. So they end up drilling wells even in places where the damage can be horrific, like close to a shoreline. To put it another way, human frailty helped BP’s executives underestimate the chance of a low-probability, high-cost event. Federal law helped them underestimate the costs.               
In the wake of Deepwater Horizon, Congress and the Obama administration will no doubt be tempted to pass laws meant to reduce the risks of another deep-water disaster. Certainly there are some sensible steps they can take, like lifting the liability cap and freeing regulators from the sway of industry. But it would be foolish to think that the only risks we are still underestimating are the ones that have suddenly become salient.              

The big financial risk is no longer a housing bubble. Instead, it may be the huge deficits that the growth of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security will cause in coming years – and the possibility that lenders will eventually become nervous about extending credit to Washington. True, some economists and policy makers insist the country should not get worked up about this possibility, because lenders have never soured on the United States government before and show no signs of doing so now. But isn’t that reminiscent of the old Bernanke-Greenspan tune about the housing market?        

Then, of course, there are the greenhouse gases that oil wells (among other things) send into the atmosphere even when the wells function properly. Scientists say the buildup of these gases is already likely to warm the planet by at least three degrees over the next century and cause droughts, storms and more ice-cap melting. The researchers’ estimates have risen recently, too, and it is also possible the planet could get around 12 degrees hotter. That kind of warming could flood major cities and cause parts of Antarctica to collapse.           

Nothing like that has ever happened before. Even imagining it is difficult. It is much easier to hope that the odds of such an outcome are vanishingly small. In fact, it’s only natural to have this hope. But that doesn’t make it wise.

 David Leonhardt is an economics columnist for The Times and a staff writer for the magazine.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

ON BARATARIA BAY, La. – The wildlife apocalypse along the Gulf Coast that everyone has feared for weeks is fast becoming a terrible reality.

Pelicans struggle to free themselves from oil, thick as tar, that gathers in hip-deep pools, while others stretch out useless wings, feathers dripping with crude. Dead birds and dolphins wash ashore, coated in the sludge. Seashells that once glinted pearly white under the hot June sun are stained crimson.

Scenes like this played out along miles of shoreline Saturday, nearly seven weeks after a BP rig exploded and the wellhead a mile below the surface began belching millions of gallon of oil.

“These waters are my backyard, my life,” said boat captain Dave Marino, a firefighter and fishing guide from Myrtle Grove. “I don’t want to say heartbreaking, because that’s been said. It’s a nightmare. It looks like it’s going to be wave after wave of it and nobody can stop it.”

The oil has steadily spread east, washing up in greater quantities in recent days, even as a cap placed by BP over the blownout well began to collect some of the escaping crude. The cap, resembling an upside-down funnel, has captured about 252,000 gallons of oil, according to Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the government’s point man for the crisis.

If earlier estimates are correct, that means the cap is capturing from a quarter to as much as half the oil spewing from the blowout each day. But that is a small fraction of the roughly 24 million to 47 million gallons government officials estimate have leaked into the Gulf since the April 20 explosion that killed 11 workers, making it the nation’s largest oil spill ever.

Allen, who said the goal is to gradually raise the amount of the oil being captured, compared the process to stopping the flow of water from a garden hose with a finger: “You don’t want to put your finger down too quickly, or let it off too quickly.”

BP officials are trying to capture as much oil as possible without creating too much pressure or allowing the buildup of ice-like hydrates, which form when water and natural gas combine under high pressures and low temperatures.

President Barack Obama pledged Saturday in his weekly radio and Internet address to fight the spill with the people of the Gulf Coast. His words for oil giant BP PLC were stern: “We will make sure they pay every single dime owed to the people along the Gulf coast.”

But his reassurances offer limited consolation to the people who live and work along the coasts of four states — Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida — now confronting the oil spill firsthand.

In Gulf Shores, Ala., boardwalks leading to hotels were tattooed with oil from beachgoers’ feet. A slick hundreds of yards long washed ashore at a state park, coating the white sand with a thick, red stew. Cleanup workers rushed to contain it in bags, but more washed in before they could remove the first wave of debris.

Alabama Gov. Bob Riley and Allen met for more than an hour Saturday in Mobile, Ala., agreeing to a new plan that would significantly increase protection on the state’s coast with larger booms, beachfront barriers, skimmers and a new system to protect Perdido Bay near the Florida line.

Riley, who was angered by a Coast Guard decision to move boom from Alabama to Louisiana, said the barriers must be up within days for him to be satisfied. Allen said he needed to report to the president before confirming more details of the agreement.

The oil is showing up right at the beginning of the lucrative tourist season, and beachgoers taking to the region’s beaches haven’t been able to escape it.

“This makes me sick,” said Rebecca Thomasson of Knoxville, Tenn., her legs and feet smeared with brown streaks of crude. “We were over in Florida earlier and it was bad there, but it was nothing like this.”

At Pensacola Beach, Erin Tamber, who moved to the area from New Orleans after surviving Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, inspected a beach stained orange by the retreating tide.

“I feel like I’ve gone from owning a piece of paradise to owning a toxic waste dump,” she said.

Back in Louisiana, along the beach at Queen Bess Island, oil pooled several feet deep, trapping birds against containment boom. The futility of their struggle was confirmed when Joe Sartore, a National Geographic photographer, sank thigh deep in oil on nearby East Grand Terre Island and had to be pulled from the tar.

“I would have died if I would have been out here alone,” he said.

With no oil response workers on Queen Bess, Plaquemines Parish coastal zone management director P.J. Hahn decided he could wait no longer, pulling an exhausted brown pelican from the oil, the slime dripping from its wings.

AP – Plaquemines Parish coastal zone director P.J. Hahn lifts an oil-covered pelican which was stuck in oil …

“We’re in the sixth week, you’d think there would be a flotilla of people out here,” Hahn said. “As you can see, we’re so far behind the curve in this thing.”

After six weeks with one to four birds a day coming into Louisiana’s rescue center for oiled birds at Fort Jackson, 53 arrived Thursday and another 13 Friday morning, with more on the way. Federal authorities say 792 dead birds, sea turtles, dolphins and other wildlife have been collected from the Gulf of Mexico and its coastline.

Yet scientists say the wildlife death toll remains relatively modest, well below the tens of thousand of birds, otters and other creatures killed after the Exxon Valdez ran aground in Alaska’s Prince William Sound. The numbers have stayed comparatively low because the Deepwater Horizon rig was 50 miles off the coast and most of the oil has stayed in the open sea. The Valdez ran aground on a reef close to land, in a more enclosed setting.

Experts say the Gulf’s marshes, beaches and coastal waters, which nurture a dazzling array of life, could be transformed into killing fields, though the die-off could take months or years and unfold largely out of sight. The damage could be even greater beneath the water’s surface, where oil and dispersants could devastate zooplankton and tiny invertebrate communities at the base of the aquatic food chain.

“People naturally tend to focus on things that are most conspicuous, like oiled birds, but in my opinion the impacts on fisheries will be much more severe,” said Rich Ambrose, director of the environmental science and engineering at program at UCLA.

The Gulf is also home to dolphins and species including the endangered sperm whale. A government report found that dolphins with prolonged exposure to oil in the 1990s experienced skin injuries and burns, reduced neurological functions and lower hemoglobin levels in their blood. It concluded, though, that the effects probably wouldn’t be lethal because many creatures would avoid the oil. Yet dolphins in the Gulf have been spotted swimming through plumes of crude.

Gilly Llewellyn, oceans program leader with the World Wildlife Fund in Australia, said she observed the same behavior by dolphins following a 73-day spill last year in the Timor Sea.

“A heartbreaking sight,” Llewellyn said. “And what we managed to see on the surface was undoubtedly just a fraction of what was happening.”

The prospect left fishing guide Marino shaking his head, as he watched the oil washing into a marsh and over the body of a dead pelican. Species like shrimp and crab flourish here, finding protection in the grasses. Fish, birds and other creatures feed here.

“It’s going to break that cycle of life,” Marino said. “It’s like pouring gas in your aquarium. What do you think that’s going to do?”

___

Flesher reported from Traverse City, Mich. Contributing to this report were Associated Press writers Holbrook Mohr on Barataria Bay, La.; Melissa Nelson in Pensacola Beach, Fla.; and Jay Reeves in Gulf Shores, Ala.

Gulf oil spill: Jimmy Buffett tells Florida beachgoers to stay upbeat despite looming oil slick

Musician Jimmy Buffett, wearing his Margaritaville-brand flip-flops, stood Saturday on a pier at tar-ball blotched Pensacola Beach and led a pro-beach rally, urging Floridians to “not get a ‘sky is falling’ attitude” over the looming oil slick.

Buffett said he has survived hurricanes, getting shot at in Jamaica and a plane crash, and he insisted he’s ready to ride out the oil-spill disaster that in the last two days has hit the white sand beaches of the Florida Panhandle.

“This is an environmental disaster nobody asked for, but Floridians are a tough people,” Buffet said to the crowd of 1,000 beachgoers.

Tar balls swept along by strong winds hit more of the Panhandle coast Saturday, including Perdido Key at the far west end of the state and Grayton Beach, about 60 miles east of Pensacola Beach. A dozen tar mats — slabs of thickened crude as long as 30 feet  — were found near Navarre Beach.

As spill-response workers collected oil blobs in the background, Buffett was joined by Gov. Charlie Crist. Although the expanding slick is largely offshore, it continues to drift east and threatens to devastate the state’s crucial tourism industry.

For Crist, a sharp decline in visitors could drive up coastal unemployment and drive down state tax revenues. And for Buffett, crude oil washing ashore could spoil summer revenues as he opens his $50-million Margaritaville Beach Hotel in Pensacola Beach.

“People ought to come out here — it’s beautiful,” said Crist, putting up with an already hot and humid morning and sweating through his shirt. “Jimmy’s opening a hotel here next week.”

“Just batten down the hatches,” Buffett said.

–Kevin Spear, Orlando Sentinel, reporting from Pensacola Beach, Fla.

Photo: Musician Jimmy Buffett, left, with Florida Gov. Charlie Crist. Credit: Associated Press