Counterpunch: Deepwater Ken– Scapegoating Birnbaum, Saving Salazar

http://www.counterpunch.org/doe06042010.html

Weekend Edition
June 4 – 6, 2010

By PHILLIP DOE
Last week Secretary of Interior Ken Salazar threw an old friend of mine, Liz Birnbaum, from Obama’s creaky Hope-Express.  For ten months she was the head of the Mineral Management Service.  Not exactly a lifetime you say?

Well, according to Salazar, who has been on the job 16 months, that should have been enough time to clean up a dysfunctional agency that has been in the news repeatedly over recent years because of its habit of sleeping with the oil industry, both figuratively and physically–the same industry it was established to baby sit after being spun off from the Bureau of Land Management, the mother agency which was also criticized for being unable to fully protect the public from the all-powerful oil drilling fraternity.

Despite what is reported in the press, and megaphoned by the headline seeking, platitude prone Salazar, MMS is not uniquely dysfunctional among Interior agencies, for none of the other regulatory agencies within Interior have ever received awards for protecting the public interest either.  The BLM is notorious throughout the west for being owned by the ranching industry.
The Bureau of Reclamation has always been the captive of the water buffaloes, as a library of books like Cadillac Desert and Rivers of Empire demonstrate.  Plus, I’d lay good money that more than one bureaucrat from the upper reaches of these agencies has spent less than an innocent evening with those they were supposed to be giving the bad news to, and that they’ve done it recently and repeatedly.

Good reasons abound.   All three constitute a daisy chain of aligned interests: the agencies get congressional funding for being compliant, the congressmen and senators get campaign money from the regulated for being friendly, and the regulated get pretty much what they want as long as they don’t overreach.  The overreaching at MMS during the Bush administration was one of those moments, and it provided a precious opportunity for Salazar, with his hometown newspaper, The Denver Post, acting as front man, to come out west, cowboy hat on pate, bolo tie on neck, cowboy boots on feet, and oversized belt buckle over navel to announce to a great and hushed audience that he was the “new sheriff in town.”   Salazar’s Wyatt Earp moment played well on the editorial page of The Denver Post, which has always said that Salazar is just right for Colorado, while other more discerning voices have muttered nervously that he seemed better suited for the role of Grand Marshal at Cheyenne Frontier Days.  The Post’s never varying assessment is code, meaning that Salazar is just right for The Denver Post and its shameless Chamber of Commerce boosterism.  He still is.
Unfortunately for the nation, and Salazar, the largest environmental disaster in the country’s history took place on his watch.  Still, Deepwater is not his fault, but neither is it Birnbaum’s, nor Obama’s.  The tragedy is that Obama has not moved forcefully to permanently close down deep-ocean drilling as too risky, with too many potentially disastrous unknowns to be even remotely necessary or economic.  (A word of warning to environmental types who argue that had environmental documentation been faithfully carried out on every well head, this tragedy could have been averted.  Take off your bespattered blinders!  NEPA, the law requiring environmental consideration in federal decision making, has rarely stopped big projects and has never stopped one when really big money, accompanied by the irresistible drum beat of more, more, more, has been called upon to drown out the voices of the people and common sense.  NEPA would have to be strengthened mightily for it to stop Washington from making campaign decisions rather than common-good decisions.)

The greater tragedy is that the oil spill has killed people and a huge swath of the Gulf’s environment, ruined countless lives through lost jobs and incomes, and will continue to wash its aftermath over people and the environment for decades to come.

The greatest tragedy of all is that similar disasters will inevitably reoccur if we don’t change.  The chances of reasoned change seem remote and certainly not something to believe in.

As for Salazar, he has shown himself to be just another contemptible politician by making Birnbaum the scapegoat for Deepwater. The desperation in his wager is shown by the fact that he presented a new organizational chart for MMS the day after meeting with Obama for two hours about Deepwater.  His intention, announced at a press conference the next morning, where he also announced Birnbaum’s resignation, is to divide the MMS into three agencies.
This comes pretty close to management by press conference. It is palpably idiotic, being nothing more than the midnight spawn of a desperate politician.  The result surely will be more dysfunction, more hierarchy and grade creep, and less transparency, for the left hand will seldom know what the other two hands are doing.  Moreover, the MMS does not make energy policy, the real culprit in this drama.  Washington does, or should.

Illustrative of how much Salazar has depended on carefully managed press for his climb up the greasy pole–Disraeli’s term to describe the comedy of political aspiration–an organization calling itself Sportsmen for Responsible Energy Development took out a half page ad in The Denver Post just two days after Salazar had accepted Birnbaum’s resignation and announced his new controls over MMS.  This is the minimum time it would take to get something to the paper in the form of a quasi press release.

In the ad, Salazar is shown facing a sepia toned Teddy Roosevelt.  Salazar is in living color, quaffed in the cowboy hat and bolo tie, which he has left on the bedroom floor since the Deep-Water disaster, probably on advice from the White House.  The bold headline declares Teddy and Ken to be “Two of a Kind.”  The print is necessarily skimpy, inversely proportional to the outrageousness of the claim perhaps. Here is most of it.

“No one has a better opportunity to continue Theodore Roosevelt’s legacy than Interior Secretary Ken Salazar.  His common-sense oil and gas leasing reforms will help conserve our public land and places where families have hunted and fished for generations.

Secretary Salazar, thanks for protecting our outdoor heritage for our children and grandchildren.  We think T.R. would be proud. ”

Holy Toledo, can canonization or the White House be far behind?  I couldn’t find out much about the sponsors of this ad.  Their web page doesn’t disclose who is on their board of directors.  They appear to be primarily a front organization for corporations in the recreation industry.  But Trout Unlimited and the National Wildlife Federation are also listed as admirers.  The sheer chutzpah of the claim makes it Colbert Report material.  The timing makes it clear that friends of the “new sheriff in town” are pulling out all the stops to keep their man atop the greasy pole.
 
So what of the real Salazar, the presumed environmentalist selected by Obama to head the Department controlling much of the nation’s land and water resources?   How does he stack up?  How does he compare to the summarily cashiered Birnbaum?  Not very well I’d say.

I know Birnbaum to be intelligent, sane, and honest.   Her bone fides include editor of the Harvard Environmental Law Review and legal counsel for American Rivers.  American Rivers had listed the Animas River in Colorado as among the world’s most endangered rivers because of the Animas-La Plata (ALP) project.  She co-authored a paper while working for the House Natural Resources Committee entitled “Taking from the Taxpayers,” which highlighted the outrageous subsidies tied to federal natural resource development, chief among them is western water development.

Salazar, on the other hand, has been a lifelong champion of federal farm and water programs.  When he ran for the senate, he often said he was going to be the senator for farm and ranch interests even though Colorado is among the most urbanized states in the union.  Colorado may be naturally splendorous, but it takes a hell of a lot of handouts at both the federal and state level to keep the big boys in pickups.  His brother, Congressman John Salazar, received $175,000 in farm subsidies for running the family ranch, this in addition to his upfront congressional salary of $174,000, plus benefits. He stopped taking them in 2007.  He was elected to Congress in 2004.  Other family members have been blessed with smaller farm subsidy checks floating in from the Treasury as well.

In Colorado, Ken Salazar has been an outspoken, lifelong supporter of ALP, the project American Rivers saw as threatening a river.  He supported it while Colorado Governor Roy Romer’s chief legal advisor and head of the Department of Natural Resources, then as Colorado Attorney General, then as U.S. Senator, and now as head of Interior.  He even used ALP to help propel himself into the senate seat through the spectacle of publicly kissing the ring of the lawyer who was the project godfather, of course with an adoring and uncritical press in tow.  On that occasion he declared with great humility that everything he knew about western water law he learned at the knee of the godfather.  I’m not kidding.

As for ALP, it is a shocker of a water project, even by western pork barrel standards.  It has no uses, just some laughable nonbinding scenarios for uses published in the project’s final EIS, of which 5 were written as due diligence smoke screens for this monument to mindless federal pork.  The construction costs of the project are over $600 million already, with hundreds of million more needed to move even a small portion of the water to any conceivable point of use since, at present, only a reservoir perched on a hillside exists with a complement of energy guzzling pumps needed to lift the water 500 feet from the river to the reservoir.  Billions more in interest payments will ultimately be added to the fiscal insanity since the public pays for all but a sliver of the costs.

The reservoir is fittingly named for Salazar’s predecessor in the senate, Ben Nighthorse Campbell.  He resigned from the Senate while under felony investigation for influence peddling, thus opening the way for Salazar’s relentless climb.

As for project funding and repayment, it was such a dog that Congress had to suspend federal law regarding the cost sharing obligations of project beneficiaries; otherwise, it was DOA.  The project backers couldn’t or wouldn’t pay.  The public wasn’t asked, but they got the bill. At the forefront of these decisions and other indelicacies too numerous to mention was David Hayes, then Secretary of Interior Bruce Babbitt’s ALP chief negotiator, now, Ken Salazar’s Deputy at Interior and second in command.  He also led the selection committee for political appointees to Interior for Obama’s transition team.  The water world over which Salazar is the titular head gets ever smaller, for another principal in the ALP negotiations, Michael Connor, is now head of the Bureau of Reclamation.  He too is a lawyer.

The latest in the sorry saga of ALP is that the state of Colorado passed a bill this last session to dedicate $12 million this fiscal year and in each of two years hence to buy water from ALP.  The state has no use for the water, but somebody’s got to buy a little of the stuff stored in Nighthorse just to maintain the appearance of rectitude; thus the state has been bamboozled into buying the water on speculation, and never mind that speculative buying and storing of water is expressly forbidden under state law.  Claiming dire poverty, the state legislature earlier in the session had cut $260 million from education funding.  It will have to cut more next year.

Bruce Whitehead, the legislator who spearheaded the legislative effort and leader of the bamboozling, is a former water district engineer who testified in court in support of the project.  He is now a manager of one of the water organizations created to disperse ALP pork.  The head of the state agency through which the money will flow, and collaborator-in-chief in the bamboozling, had been employed by the BOR.  She, Jennifer Gimbel, is another lawyer and reputedly an acolyte of former Secretary of Interior Gale Norton through whom she found employment at BOR.

Whoa, is this change we can believe in or what?

Salazar was also heavily involved in Colorado’s largest modern environmental catastrophe, Summitville Mine.  It seems that the Governor during this period, Roy Romer, had taken the mine’s equipment in lieu of a bond.  Normally a surety bond is required by state law to protect against damages resulting from environmental accidents or mismanagement.  But Romer claimed jobs were needed and took the alternate bonding route.  The mine, a cyanide leach operation to recover gold, leaked cyanide and heavy metals into an adjoining stream, destroying, according to press reports, all life in 18 miles of mountain stream and threatening farming and ranching operations even further downstream. The mining equipment proved useless in recovering costs.

What advisory role Salazar may have played early on in this environmental disaster is unknown and shall probably forever remain so, but he was Romer’s legal adviser, then head of the state Department of Natural Resourses, and then Attorney General during this period.  What is known is that Salazar announced to the press, with typical fanfare, when he became AG that he would personally take over negotiations with the mining company to recover costs for the state.  He professed he was unafraid of billionaire mine owner Robert Friedman, known as Toxic Bob to his detractors.

In the end, EPA assumed management of Summitville as a Super Fund site, mitigating Romer’s dunderheaded deal making.  Hundreds of million in costs were thus transferred from 3 million Coloradoans to 300 million Americans, saving Romer and Salazar considerable embarrassment and explaining.  Oh, and Toxic Bob is still a billionaire, having managed to effectively pay none of the cleanup or damage costs.

So, Salazar’s environmental record is colored, a blushing red at best.   Should he be fired for Deepwater?  Of course not.  He isn’t directly responsible.  But a good case can be made that in firing Birnbaum for Deepwater, he has shown himself to be a career chasing scoundrel.  His environmental record in Colorado is supportive of this assessment.  In my book that is more than enough.  Maybe Rahm Emmanuel can make a few phone calls and get him a gig as permanent Grand Marshal at Cheyenne Frontier Days.  He’s already got the hat.

Admission:  I was chair of a small grassroots organization that went to court over ALP.  We sought the court’s aid in answering two questions project backers and Interior refused to answer.  We wanted to know what the 120,000 acre feet of public water to be stored in Nighthorse Reservoir was to be used for, since beneficial use is the essential test in state law for granting a water right.  We also asked why the 1970 Supreme Court decision telling the Ute Indians they were barred from making further claims against the United States was not controlling in ALP-the project backers had morphed ALP into a quasi Indian project as every other option to them was closed down or rejected.
We were held hostage in water court for 6 years while Interior continued to build the project.  We never got an answer to our questions from a judge, Gregory Lyman, who after all those years was still trying to figure out what consumptive use meant, a fundamental measurement of water use.  Our appeal to the state Supremes was rejected out of hand by rubber-stamping the opinion rendered by Lyman, the man who seemed flummoxed by basic water engineering terminology.  But we did get one thing.  We were hit with substantial court costs, which project backers knew we could not pay, thus ending our pursuit of the truth about ALP.

 
Phillip Doe lives in Colorado. He can be reached at: ptdoe@comcast.net

Governor’s Press Office: Governor Crist’s Request for Fishery Failure Determination for Florida Granted by U.S. Department of Commerce

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
JUNE 4, 2010
 
CONTACT: GOVERNOR’S PRESS OFFICE
850-488-5394
 
Governor Crist’s Request for Fishery Failure Determination for Florida
Granted by U.S. Department of Commerce
~Fisherman and affected businesses can now qualify for economic injury loans ~
 
TALLAHASSEE – Governor Charlie Crist, continuing his commitment to recovery efforts in the Gulf of Mexico, announced that his request for a Fishery Failure Determination for Florida has been granted by the United States Department of Commerce. The Governor made the request yesterday, based on the growing impact of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on fishing communities throughout the state.
 
“The quick response of the federal government to this request is a positive step towards protecting Florida’s hard-working citizens,” said Governor Crist. “We are continuing to keep a close watch on the oil spill and are prepared to respond to any impacts we may experience. Florida is still open and we encourage everyone to go fishing and enjoy Florida seafood products.”
 
Under the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, Governor Crist urged Secretary Locke to establish a regional economic transition program. By granting the Governor’s request, impacted fisherman and affected businesses can now qualify for economic injury loans through the U.S. Small Business Administration.
 
For more information on Florida’s response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, visit www.dep.state.fl.us/deepwaterhorizon, follow www.Twitter.com/FLDEPalert or call the Florida Oil Spill Information Line at 888-337-3569.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

AP: Graham: Spill panel would have subpoena power, & U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reported 522 dead birds at least 38 of them oiled

So, why isn’t BP and the Coast Guard preventing the oil from killing the birds by using more and more absorbents, oil skimmers, booms, tankers to contain the spill??  DV

June 4, 2010

 http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gDzR9FfvXxFe-C6rdCAAYNjp5sSwD9G4532O2

Graham: Spill panel would have subpoena power
By WILL LESTER (AP)  11 hours ago

WASHINGTON  A leader of the presidential commission investigating the Gulf oil spill said Thursday he has been told his panel will have subpoena power to get a full accounting of the disaster.

Former Fla. Sen. Bob Graham, a co-chairman of the commission, said he’s not sure if that subpoena power will be necessary for the panel to do its work.

Graham told the CBS Evening News, that “the whole industry was largely unprepared” for such an oil spill and said a great deal of development of deep-sea drilling technology was not accompanied by a similar investment in the safety of oil rigs and the ability to respond to an accident.

Former Environmental Protection Agency chief William Reilly, the other co-chairman, said he’s surprised he hasn’t seen more progress in the technology available to handle a spill more than 20 years after the Exxon Valdez ran aground and spilled its cargo. Reilly was in charge at EPA at the time of the Exxon Valdez spill off the Alaska coastline in 1989.

“I’m appalled that we’re in that stage of primitive response capability,” Reilly said.

BP sliced off a pipe with giant shears Thursday in the latest bid to curtail the worst oil spill in U.S. history, but the cut was jagged and placing a cap over the gusher will now be more challenging. Several earlier efforts to stem the flow have failed.

Reilly said it’s time to reassess the laws passed after Exxon Valdez intended to hold companies accountable for a spill. The update is needed in case a company is not willing to cover cleanup expenses, he said, adding that Exxon was willing to pay its expenses and BP has expressed a willingness to pay.

So far, anywhere between 21 million and 46 million gallons of oil have spewed into the Gulf, according to government estimates.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reported 522 dead birds  at least 38 of them oiled  along the Gulf coast states, and more than 80 oiled birds have been rescued. It’s not clear exactly how many of the deaths can be attributed to the spill.

Oil drifted six miles from the Florida Panhandle’s popular sugar-white beaches, and crews on the mainland were doing everything possible to limit the damage.

Reilly said the spill has been catastrophic for people’s lives and their livelihoods. And he said he has concerns about what effects chemical dispersants will have on the Gulf and its wildlife.

“There’s nothing worse than a slow-moving catastrophe,” Reilly said, “and that’s what we’ve got.”

Xxxxxxxxxxxxx

 http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gGyt_zfjX_sVsaMTgnOtGnrEXTMwD9G43JO00

Gulf spill workers complaining of flulike symptoms
By NOAKI SCHWARTZ and MATTHEW BROWN (AP)  13 hours ago

NEW ORLEANS  For days now, Dr. Damon Dietrich and other physicians have seen patients come through their emergency room at West Jefferson Medical Center with similar symptoms: respiratory problems, headaches and nausea.

In the past week, 11 workers who have been out on the water cleaning up oil from BP’s blown-out well have been treated for what Dietrich calls “a pattern of symptoms” that could have been caused by the burning of crude oil, noxious fumes from the oil or the dispersants dumped in the Gulf to break it up. All workers were treated and released.

“One person comes in, it could be multiple things,” he said. “Eleven people come in with these symptoms, it makes it incredibly suspicious.”

Few studies have examined long-term health effects of oil exposure. But some of the workers trolling Gulf Coast beaches and heading out into the marshes and waters have complained about flu-like symptoms  a similar complaint among crews deployed for the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska.

BP and U.S. Coast Guard officials have said dehydration, heat, food poisoning or other unrelated factors may have caused the workers’ symptoms. The Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals is investigating.

Brief contact with small amounts of light crude oil and dispersants are not harmful. Swallowing small amounts of oil can cause upset stomach, vomiting and diarrhea. Long-term exposure to dispersants, however, can cause central nervous system problems, or do damage to blood, kidneys or livers, according to the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention.

In the six weeks since the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded, killing 11 workers, an estimated 21 million to 45 million gallons of crude has poured into the Gulf of Mexico. Hundreds of BP contractors have fanned out along the Gulf, deploying boom, spraying chemicals to break up the oil, picking up oil-soaked debris and trying to keep the creeping slick out of the sensitive marshes and away from the tourist-Mecca beaches.

Commercial fisherman John Wunstell Jr. spent a night on a vessel near the source of the spill and left complaining of a severe headache, upset stomach and nose bleed. He was treated at the hospital, and sued  becoming part of a class-action lawsuit filed last month in U.S. District Court in New Orleans against BP, Transocean and their insurers.

Wunstell, who was part of a crew burning oil, believes planes were spraying dispersant in the middle of the night  something BP disputes.

“I began to ache all over …” he said in the affidavit. “I was completely unable to function at this point and feared that I was seriously ill.”

Dozens of complaints, most from spill workers, have been made related to oil exposure with the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, said spokeswoman Olivia Watkins, as well as with the Louisiana Poison Center, clinics and hospitals. Workers are being told to follow federal guidelines that recommend anyone involved in oil spill cleanup wear protective equipment such as gloves, safety glasses and clothing.

Michael J. Schneider, an attorney who decided against filing a class-action lawsuit in the 1990s involving the Valdez workers, said proving a link between oil exposure and health problems is very difficult.

“As a human being you listen to enough and you’ve got to believe they’re true,” he said. “The problem is the science may not be there to support them … Many of the signs and symptoms these people complained of are explainable for a dozen different reasons  it’s certainly coincidental they all shared a reason in common.”

Similar to the Valdez cleanup, there have been concerns in the Gulf that workers aren’t being supplied with enough protective gear. Workers have been spotted in white jumpsuits, gloves and booties but no goggles or respirators.

“If they’re out there getting lightheaded and dizzy every day then obviously they ought to come in, and there should be respirators and other equipment provided,” said LuAnn White, director of the Tulane Center for Applied Environmental Public Health. She added that most of the volatile components that could sicken people generally evaporate before the oil reaches shore.

BP PLC’s Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles said reports of workers getting sick are being investigated but noted that no one has pinpointed the cause. Suttles said workers were being given “any safety equipment” needed to do their jobs safely.

Unlike with Exxon Valdez, in the Gulf, the oil has been lighter, the temperatures warm and humid, and there have been hundreds of thousands of gallons of chemicals used to break up the oil.

Court records showed more than 6,700 workers involved in the Exxon Valdez clean up suffered respiratory problems which the company attributed to a viral illness, not chemical poisoning.

Dennis Mestas represented the only known worker to successfully settle with Exxon over health issues. According to the terms of that confidential settlement, Exxon did not admit fault.

His client, Gary Stubblefield, spent four months lifting workers in a crane for 18 hours a day as they sprayed the oil-slicked beaches with hot water, which created an oily mist. Even though he had to wipe clean his windshield twice a day, Stubblefield said it never occurred to him that the mixture might be harming his lungs.

Within weeks, he and others, who wore little to no protective gear, were coughing and experiencing other symptoms that were eventually nicknamed Valdez crud. Now 60, Stubblefield cannot get through a short conversation without coughing and gasping for breath like a drowning man. He sometimes needs the help of a breathing machine and inhalers, and has to be careful not to choke when he drinks and eats.

Watching the Gulf situation unfold, he says, makes him sick.

“I just watch this stuff everyday and know these people are on the very first rung on the ladder and are going to go through a lot of misery,” said Stubblefield, who now lives in Prescott, Ariz.

Associated Press writers John Flesher from Michigan, Brian Skoloff and Kelli Kennedy from Miami contributed to this report.

Thanks to Richard Charter

Skytruth: Animation shows oil slicks moving eastward along Alabama, Florida coasts

June 4th, 2010

MODIS images today were too cloudy to be useful, but an excellent radar satellite image was taken today of the ongoing Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. This image, taken from the Envisat satellite using the ASAR radar sensor, shows oil apparently making landfall in Alabama on the east side of Mobile Bay, in the Fort Morgan – Gulf Shores area. An article on the Washington Post website today seems to confirm what we’re seeing on the image:

Envisat ASAR satellite radar image, June 3, 2010. Image courtesy CSTARS.

Oil slicks and sheen spread across a total area of about 11,505 square miles (29,796 km2) on this image, which doesn’t extend very far west of the Mississippi Delta, and doesn’t cover the approach to Florida Straits where we saw possible indications of oil on May 27.

Dr. Ian MacDonald and Dr. Oscar Garcia-Pineda at Florida State University have also been systematically analyzing the radar images of this spill. The animated graphic below shows a detailed look at the northeastern portion of the oil slick as it moves eastward off the Alabama coast and the Florida Panhandle on May 31, June 1 and June 3:

Animation showing oil slicks moving eastward along the Alabama and Florida coasts. Image courtesy Florida State University / MacDonald Image Lab.

Posted By John to SkyTruth at 6/03/2010 08:13:00 PM

John Amos
John@skytruth.org
P.O. Box 3283
Shepherdstown, WV 25443-3283
phone: 304-260-8886
skype: skytruth.amos
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Special thanks to Richard Charter

National Ocean Industries Assn: Thousands of Jobs and Billions of Dollars in Gov’t Revenue at Risk

Yeah, it’s ONLY about the money………..DV
For Immediate Release:                                                        Contact:  Nicolette Nye
Wednesday, June 2, 2010                                                         (202) 347-6900
 
Thousands of Jobs and Billions of Dollars in Government Revenue at Risk
From Six-month Gulf Drilling Halt Says National Ocean Industries Association Chairman
 
Washington – Preliminary estimates show crippling job loss and significant economic impacts will result from the President’s recent order to halt work on 33 exploratory wells in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico and institute a six-month moratorium on all drilling in water depths greater than 500 feet.
 
“The immediate impacts of the order will be felt by the families of tens of thousands of offshore workers who will be unemployed,” said Burt Adams, Chairman of the National Ocean Industries Association.   
 
For each platform idled by the work stoppage, up to 1,400 jobs are at risk, and lost wages could reach $10 million per month per platform and up to $330 million per month for all 33 platforms, preliminary estimates from the Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association (LMOGA) show.  
 
“At a time when the spill is already causing economic stress for key industries in the region, the president’s action will make things much worse by putting more Gulf citizens out of work,” said Adams.
 
The LMOGA estimates show the six-month halt would defer four percent of anticipated 2011 deepwater Gulf of Mexico production (80,000 barrels per day), and  likely render seven current discoveries sub-economic, putting $7.6 billion in future government revenues at risk.  Additionally, drilling rigs idled by the order will be contracted overseas, and will not be available to work in the Gulf once the halt is lifted, making the U.S. even more dependent on foreign oil.   “Other countries are apparently more confident in the overall safety of the oil and gas industry and will no doubt fill the potential void created by less domestic production,” said Adams.
 
“The need to act in the face of the ongoing crisis in the Gulf of Mexico is understandable, but the 33 rigs affected by the presidential order are the very ones successfully inspected in early May at the order of Interior Secretary Ken Salazar,” Adams said.  “Nobody wants to just rush into deepwater drilling during this ongoing crisis, but it appears that less draconian and potentially less harmful solutions such as increased inspection and recertification of equipment would be an acceptable compromise.”
 
“Considering that the deepwater regions generate 80 percent of the Gulf’s oil production and 45 percent of its natural gas production, a six-month work stoppage will have severe and perhaps long lasting impacts on our domestic energy supply and economic security,” said Adams. “When you couple this ‘no less than six-month’ moratorium with the cancelled Western Gulf lease sale, the potential for long term job loss and economic hardship for the Gulf of Mexico looms even greater.”
 
The offshore industry is responsible for nearly 200,000 jobs in the Gulf of Mexico alone, and provides 30 percent of our nation’s domestic oil production and 11 percent of our domestic gas production.  Offshore oil and gas production accounts for an average $13 billion a year in non-tax revenues to states and the Federal government and has made over $24 billion available to the Land and Water Conservation Fund over the last 28 years.
###
NOIA is the only national trade association representing all segments of the offshore industry with an interest in the exploration and production of both traditional and renewable energy resources on the nation’s outer continental shelf.  The NOIA membership comprises more than 250 companies engaged in business activities ranging from producing to drilling, engineering to marine and air transport, offshore construction to equipment manufacture and supply, telecommunications to finance and insurance.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

"Be the change you want to see in the world." Mahatma Gandhi