Williams.etal.2011.Underestimating.cetacean.mortality_DeepwaterHorizon.BP.incident.Conservation.Letters

Animal Carcasses Recovered Represent a Small Fraction of Fatalities

The Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010 devastated the Gulf of Mexico ecologically and economically. However, a new study published in Conservation Letters reveals that the true impact of the disaster on wildlife may be gravely underestimated. The study argues that fatality figures based on the number of recovered animal carcasses will not give a true death toll, which may be 50 times higher than believed.

“The Deepwater oil spill was the largest in US history, however, the recorded impact on wildlife was relatively low, leading to suggestions that the environmental damage of the disaster was actually modest,” said lead author Dr Rob Williams from the University of British Columbia.”This is because reports have implied that the number of carcasses recovered, 101, equals the number of animals killed by the spill.”

The team focused their research on 14 species of cetacean, an order of mammals including whales and dolphins. While the number of recovered carcasses has been assumed to equal the number of deaths, the team argues that marine conditions and the fact that many deaths will have occurred far from shore mean recovered carcasses will only account for a small proportion of deaths.

To illustrate their point, the team multiplied recent species abundance estimates by the species mortality rate. An annual carcass recovery rate was then estimated by dividing the mean number of observed strandings each year by the estimate of annual mortality.
The team’s analysis suggests that only 2% of cetacean carcasses were ever historically recovered after their deaths in this region, meaning that the true death toll from the Deepwater Horizon disaster could be 50 times higher than the number of deaths currently estimated.

“This figure illustrates that carcass counts are hugely misleading, if used to measure the disaster’s death toll,” said co-author Scott Kraus of the New England Aquarium “No study on carcass recovery from strandings has ever recovered anything close to 100% of the deaths occurring in any cetacean population. The highest rate we found was only 6.2%, which implied 16 deaths for every carcass recovered.”

The reason for the gulf between the estimates may simply be due to the challenges of working in the marine environment. The Deepwater disaster took place 40 miles offshore, in 1500m of water, which is partly why estimates of oil flow rates during the spill were so difficult to make.

“The same factors that made it difficult to work on the spill also confound attempts to evaluate environmental damages caused by the spill,” said Williams. “Consequently, we need to embrace a similar level of humility when quantifying the death tolls.”

If the approach outlined by this study were to be adopted the team believe this may present an opportunity to use the disaster to develop new conservation tools that can be applied more broadly, revealing the environmental impacts of other human activities in the marine environment.

“The finding that strandings represent a very low proportion of the true deaths is also critical in considering the magnitude of other human causes of mortality like ship strikes, where the real impacts may similarly be dramatically underestimated by the numbers observed” said John Calambokidis, a Researcher with Cascadia Research and a co-author on the publication.

“Our concern also applies to certain interactions with fishing gear, because there are not always systematic data with which to accurately estimate by-catch, especially for large whales”, noted Jooke Robbins, a co-author from the Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies. “When only opportunistic observations are available, these likely reflect a fraction of the problem.”

“While we did not conduct a study to estimate the actual number of deaths from the oil spill, our research reveals that the accepted figures are a grave underestimation,” concluded Dr. Williams. “We now urge methodological development to develop appropriate multipliers so that we discover the true cost of this tragedy.”

This study is published in Conservation Letters. Media wishing to receive a PDF of this article may contact Lifesciencenews@wiley.com

Full citation: Williams. R, Gero. S, Bejder. L., Calambokidis. J, Kraus. S, Lusseau. D, Read. A, Robbins. J., “Underestimating the Damage: Interpreting Cetacean Carcass Recoveries in the Context of the Deepwater Horizon/BP Incident”, Conservation Letters, Wiley-Blackwell, March 2011, DOI: 10.1111/j.1755-263X.2011.00168.x

Special thanks to Richard Charter

MARCH 28, 2011 3:02 PM

This one could go viral.

In this video a 10-year-old member of the Sliammon First Nation in British
Columbia, Ta’Kaiya Blaney sings a haunting and beautiful song that could
be one of the strongest weapons in the arsenal for those opposed to plans
for west coast oil tanker traffic.

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=LkjIkuC_eWM
She wanted to sing a song of protest to Enbridge officials recently but
was stopped by security guards who said they had “locked down” parts of
the energy company’s building. “I wanted to sing my song and I didn’t
think I was scary,” said Ta’Kaiya Blaney, who had a rehearsed talk on
coloured cards and a video of her song.

The company, which has proposed twin pipelines and oil tanker traffic
along the B.C. coast, said it had no one available to meet Ta’Kaiya.
Ta’Kaiya, is home-schooled in North Vancouver by her mother, who
accompanied her daughter to the building in Vancouver Thursday.

Ta’Kaiya said she did a lot of research for her environmental issues unit.
“It’s true that the oil pipelines and the tankers will give people jobs,
but if there is an oil spill like the Exxon Valdez or the Gulf of Mexico,
that will take other people’s jobs and wildlife will die,” said Ta’Kaiya.
“This is the 22nd anniversary of the Exxon Valdez and there is still oil
in the water that can’t ever be cleaned up.”

Ta’Kaiya’s message and song, which she co-wrote, was emailed by Greenpeace
to all provincial and federal politicians. Greenpeace B.C. director
Stephanie Goodwin called Enbridge “contradictory.” “They say they want
public input, but won’t even hear the concerns of a 10-year-old First
Nations girl who presented her views respectfully.”

After Ta’Kaiya and her mother were sent out to the sidewalk, B.C. Premier
Christy Clark sent the girl an email, saying she had “watched your YouTube
video and commend you for your talent. Your message is very clear — we
must be concerned about the environment.”

Enbridge spokesman Paul Stanway said the company had no one available to
greet Ta’Kaiya, but “will be responding” to her letter.

http://www.timescolonist.com/news/year+girl+offers+song+anti+tanker+sentiment+video/4517316/story.html?cid=megadrop_story

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-s-becker/all-of-the-above-is-no-en_b_841659.html

This is a great article that makes the point well with details we should remember. DV

William S. Becker
Energy and Climate Policy Expert, Natural Capitalism Solutions

Posted: 03/28/11 05:12 PM ET

Several times recently, we’ve heard this argument: When it comes to securing America’s energy future, we need “all of the above” — coal, oil, gas, nuclear, solar, wind, and so on.
That is a not an energy policy; it’s a cop-out. It’s how elected officials dodge hard choices about our energy security. It’s how they avoid political backlash from energy interests, especially those with money and clout such as coal, oil and nuclear.

“All of the above” is how elected officials minimize their personal political risk by shifting it onto the shoulders of the American people, who have to live with the consequences.

With the memory still fresh from the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, with new oil slicks appearing in the Gulf from another spill this month, and with Japan’s nuclear disaster leaking radioactivity into the ocean and atmosphere, you’d think policy makers would be reconsidering “all of the above”.

But President Obama is sticking to his position that nuclear energy is a necessary part of America’s energy future and deserves heavy federal subsidies. Pointing to the BP disaster, the President told a CBS affiliate “all energy sources have their downside”.

In an interview with the conservative blog Red County, House Speaker John Boehner described the GOP’s “American Energy Initiative” this way:

It’s our all-of-the-above energy policy. Let’s have more oil and gas exploration, let’s use most of the royalties to help develop alternative sources of energy, but it’s clean coal technology, it’s nuclear energy.

The chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, Rep. “Doc” Hastings (R-WA), told Fox News:

I’m in favor of all of the above. I’m in favor of nuclear and hydro and wind and solar, but at the end of the day, we need to recognize the resources that we have and we need to pursue that.

Last week as the new oil spill was discovered off Louisiana’s coast, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced his department had approved another permit for deepwater oil and gas drilling and opened another 7,400 acres in Wyoming to coal mining. As he put it:

There’s no place in the country that captures this all-of-the-above approach quite like Wyoming…We need to recognize that coal is a very abundant resource in the United States. Coal will be part of the energy portfolio in American for the future.

In London, the Guardian published an op-ed by author George Monbiot (The Age of Consent: A Manifesto for a New World Order) who argued, like President Obama, that all energy involves risks. “Energy is like medicine,” Monbiot wrote. “If there are no side effects, the chances are that it doesn’t work.”

Even analysts at the Heritage Foundation object to the wisdom of this “everybody wins” approach. As Nicolas Loris of the Foundation wrote in a post late last year:

(The) “all of the above” energy approach…guarantees handouts and subsidies for all energy sources to make everyone happy. In other words, all the special interests win and the consumer loses.

There are variations to “all of the above”. One is, “There is no silver bullet” to solve our energy problems. Another is, “Everything should be on the table”. Let’s review these cop-out conclusions:

First, while it’s true there is no silver bullet to meet our energy needs, there definitely are a number of duds. If we really want energy security, economic stability and some protection against climate change, then we need to take the duds off the table as rapidly as possible.

Second, let’s face it: In a rational national energy policy there will be winners and losers. The winners will be those energy technologies that allow us to thrive in a carbon-constrained, post-peak-oil economy. The losers will be the carbon-intensive fuels and energy resources whose risks in this new world outweigh their benefits.

Third, it is an insult to our intelligence to put resources such as solar and wind energy in the same risk category as coal, oil and nuclear power. The downsides of renewable technologies – for example, intermittency and the tradeoffs between solar farms and wildlife habitat — are far less consequential and easier to avoid than the risks of oil, coal and nukes.

What risks? Those who are regular readers of this blog are well aware of them, so I won’t elaborate. I’ll just use some key words:

Nuclear power: radioactive contamination, nuclear weapons proliferation, tempting terrorist targets, finite uranium supplies, big water consumption, endless cradle-to-grave taxpayer subsidies (aka corporate welfare and socialized energy production), high construction costs, long construction periods, high investment risks, long-lasting radioactive wastes, no permanent storage. (The Associated Press reports the United States — which uses more nuclear power than any other nation — now has nearly 72,000 tons of nuclear wastes spread across 31 states with no permanent place to store them. Temporary storage facilities are at full capacity.)

Oil: In addition to peak oil, wars, military bases in Islamic countries, world demand exceeding production, more wars, environmental accidents, carbon emissions, extortion by unfriendly suppliers, more money for terrorists, supply disruptions, price spikes, yet more wars, repeated economic recessions and billions in taxpayer subsidies the industry doesn’t need.

Coal: Mountain top removal, ruined rivers, mercury pollution, childhood asthma, trapped minors, black lung disease, safety violations, unpaid fines, avalanches of coal ash, slurry ponds, water contamination, unsustainable carbon emissions, billions in taxpayer subsidies to chase “clean coal”.

Liquids from coal, and oil from shale and tar sands: Water competition with farms and cities, low net energy benefits, high prices, lots more carbon emissions. Oh, and more government subsidies.

Natural Gas: Secret fracking agents, groundwater contamination, unacceptable waste water, volatile prices. Better than coal or nuclear and a good transition fuel IF the industry solves these problems.

One reason these fuels remain on the table is that we don’t fully consider their risks. The traditional energy industries are nimble in hopping aboard any available bandwagon to hitch a ride to the future. Nuclear power is relatively carbon free; don’t worry about the highly toxic wastes. Liquids from coal, tar sands and oil from shale will reduce oil imports; don’t worry about the carbon emissions or water consumption. If oil is a liability, we’ll drill more at home. Never mind that easy supplies are gone and more domestic production will have little impact on oil prices.

Here’s what we should be doing:

First, we should publicly assess the full life-cycle benefits and risks of each significant energy option — fossil, nuclear and renewable.

Second, we should create a performance standard for federal energy subsidies, defining limits on each resource’s net impacts on water, energy consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, public health and national security and job creation. No energy technology or resource should be supported by the federal government if it fails to meet the performance standard and can be replaced by less-damaging options.

Third, we need a comprehensive national energy policy that guides us to a clean, stable and prosperous future. That means on-ramps for truly clean energy and off-ramps for the rest. As others and I have written before, presidents have been required by law since 1977 to develop comprehensive national energy policy plans and submit them to Congress every two years. The last to comply was President Bill Clinton in 1998. It’s President Obama’s turn.

Whether or not politicians and policy-makers like it, they need to make choices. Some will be hard. As I said, there will be winners and losers, as there are in every major economic transition. But there will be far fewer losers if King Coal and Big Oil know their time has passed and begin investing in — and training their workers for — a clean energy economy.

As for the rest of us? After Salazar’s announcement of new coal leases in Wyoming, a news story quoted one observer saying, “The president knows his electoral future hangs on coal.” It’s up to us to let national leaders know their electoral futures actually hang on making hard but necessary energy choices. Why? Because our future depends not on “all of the above”, but on leaving the riskiest and most harmful fuels behind.

Follow William S. Becker on Twitter: www.twitter.com/sustainabill

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.thenewstribune.com/2011/03/26/1601327/republicans-see-high-gas-costs.html#storylink=mirelated

Northwest News
Sunday, March 26, 2011, Tacoma, WA

POLITICS
As the national average price for a gallon of regular gasoline hit $3.56 on Friday, Republicans on Capitol Hill geared up to make a little noise.

WASHINGTON, D.C. – As the national average price for a gallon of regular gasoline hit $3.56 on Friday, Republicans on Capitol Hill geared up to make a little noise.

On Thursday, the House Natural Resources Committee will hold a hearing on the effect of rising gasoline prices on families and businesses as part of its effort to determine “what has or hasn’t been done” since President Barack Obama took office two years ago.

Pasco Republican Rep. Doc Hastings, the panel’s chairman and a nine-term congressman, already has an answer. He says the president “has done nothing” by not moving fast enough to allow more oil drilling in the Gulf Coast and on public land. And he says his hearing “will put a spotlight on the issue.”

With the average price already exceeding $4 a gallon in Alaska and Hawaii and public anger growing, the GOP – led by Hastings – is hoping to capitalize on a potent political issue.

But Obama has plenty of defenders who say the president is being unfairly blamed for something he has little control over. They say that prices are rising because of increased global demand, instability in the Middle East and oil speculation on Wall Street.
As the new chairman of the committee, Hastings gets a loud megaphone on the issue, and he’s using it.

“Since the president’s earliest days in office, his administration has blocked, delayed, hindered and obstructed energy production across America – from coast to coast, onshore and offshore, and all the way up to Alaska,” Hastings said.

He said that Americans “know what $4-per-gallon gasoline feels like – and they don’t want to go back to those days.” And he said he is hearing about the issue from constituents whenever he goes home to his large Central Washington district.

“Listen, I’m in a rural area,” he said. “Rural areas are more impacted than urban areas.”

As he conducts his hearings into gasoline prices and other issues, Hastings will be aided by an Office of Oversight and Investigations that he created this month. Hastings said it will have “multiple staff” members with experience as attorneys and investigators. His committee already has a communications team of six to help Hastings get his messages out.

LARGER MARGIN REQUIREMENTS

Democrats say the GOP is simply playing politics with a hot and volatile issue.

In a speech on the Senate floor, Democrat Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico, the chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said it’s “a fundamental truth” that the primary driver of gasoline prices is the price of crude oil. He noted that gasoline-price movements have exactly tracked with global crude oil prices for the past three years.

“The idea that our gasoline prices are high today because of some policy of the Obama administration is just not supported by the facts,” Bingaman said.

Twelve other Democratic senators, including Washington’s Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray, entered the fray last week, saying that oil speculators are mainly responsible.

“There is strong evidence that the recent surge in gas prices has little to do with the fundamental supply and demand for oil,” they said in a letter to Gary Gensler, the chairman of the U.S. Commodities Futures Trading Commission.

They asked Gensler to impose larger margin requirements for speculative oil contracts. Margin is the amount of money a person must put up to purchase futures contracts.

“Washington drivers are paying at the pump for reckless Wall Street oil speculation,” Cantwell said.

The bickering on Capitol Hill has intensified as prices have spiked in recent months.
Friday’s national price of $3.56 a gallon compares with $3.19 a month earlier and $2.81 a year ago, according to AAA. Prices ranged from a low of $3.36 in Wyoming to a high of $4.19 in Hawaii, the auto association said.

Across Washington, the average price was $3.74. In Tacoma, the average price hit $3.75 on Friday, compared with $3.44 a month ago and $2.97 a year ago. In Olympia, it was $3.76 on Friday, compared with $3.44 a month ago and $3 a year ago.

Obama is clearly sensitive about the criticism.

Two weeks ago, on the same day that an earthquake and tsunami hit Japan, the president called a news conference to empathize with Americans, saying “families feel the pinch every time they fill up the tank.”

Obama said that three years ago, before the recession hit, rising demand from emerging economies such as China drove gasoline prices to more than $4 a gallon.

After the recession drove down demand and prices fell, Obama said, they increased again in the past year as the economy improved and global demand rose. The president added that turmoil in North Africa and the Middle East has added uncertainty to the market and that Libya’s lost production has tightened supply.

OIL PRODUCTION UP

He defended his record, noting that oil production in the U.S. last year rose to its highest level since 2003, with imports accounting for less than half of what Americans consumed for the first time in more than a decade.

“So any notion that my administration has shut down oil production might make for a good political sound bite, but it doesn’t match up with reality,” Obama said.

Experts say there’s no shortage driving the increase in gasoline prices. There are at least 4 million barrels a day of spare oil production capacity globally, they say.

Despite the rising prices, U.S. gasoline inventories are exactly what they were a year ago, Ed Yardeni, a veteran financial analyst, said in a recent note to investors. Crude oil stocks are where they were two years ago, he added.

Yardeni suggested the biggest driver of the current surge in prices is speculation by people who have little interest in oil except as a way to gamble their money. He said the latest U.S. government report on oil speculation found that large speculators had acquired options to purchase almost 80 percent of the world’s entire inventory of oil.

Instead of talking about drilling more oil domestically to reduce U.S. reliance on foreign oil, some experts say the focus should be on conservation.

“The most important thing that we can do for consumers in the short term is to make a long-term commitment to reduce our gasoline consumption by improving the fuel economy of our vehicles,” Mark Cooper, director of research for the Consumer Federation of America, told a congressional panel last week.

Cooper said U.S. gasoline prices this year are projected to reach a record high as measured in either current or inflation-adjusted dollars. For low- and middle-income families, that will mean that the cost of gasoline will be the single largest expense in their cost of driving, costlier than owning a vehicle.

Kevin G. Hall of the McClatchy Washington, D.C., bureau contributed to this report.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.pnj.com/article/20110327/OPINION/103270309/Editorial-Drilling-risks-exposed?odyssey=mod%7Cnewswell%7Ctext%7CFRONTPAGE%7Cp

9:00 PM, Mar. 26, 2011 |

BP’s fault, Transocean’s fault, Cameron International’s fault, nobody’s fault – all we know is the failure of the blowout preventer to do what it was designed to do – prevent the Deepwater Horizon disaster – underscores just how much of a gamble deepwater offshore drilling really is.

Here we are almost a year after the well blowout and explosion that caused the largest environmental disaster in U.S. history, and still nobody can say with certainty why it happened.

But now we have a report from a respected Norwegian company indicating that the widely used blowout preventers, built by Cameron and used as the last line of defense against catastrophic blowouts, might themselves be compromised by a design flaw.

The report also indicates that Transocean, the company drilling the well, might have made errors that also compromised the function of the blowout preventer.

So that’s possibly two fatal errors – one of design, one of operation.

That’s a recipe for the kind of complete failure that led to the blowout and oil spill last April.
This clearly and simply underscores why we should all be highly skeptical of claims by the oil industry that they have learned the lessons of the Deepwater Horizon and that deepwater drilling is now safer than it was.

The reality? They can’t know if that’s true; they can’t even say precisely what happened to the Deepwater Horizon, nor can they say that they know the blowout preventers currently “protecting” scores of other wells even work.

That means deepwater drilling remains a risky gamble of unknown proportions. Yet the oil companies are doubling down on that gamble by seeking permission to drill in even deeper waters.

We’re told the report by Det Norske Veritas “is not the final word” on the disaster. That means its conclusions don’t tell us everything we need to know.

That’s easy to see.

Cameron, the manufacturer of the blowout preventer, says the device was “designed and tested to industry standards and customer specifications.”

Transocean says the findings “confirm that the (preventer) was in proper operating condition and functioned as designed.”

It did? Oh, says Transocean, “high-pressure flow from the well created conditions that exceeded the scope of (the preventer’s) design parameters.”

In other words, the company was using a safety device unable to cope with the conditions it met … even assuming it would operate as intended?

If all this doesn’t reveal the hypocrisy behind the bland assurances coming from the proponents of offshore drilling about how safe it now is and how the industry knows what it’s doing, it will be a sure sign that they don’t really care about the environmental or economic risks.

Drill, baby, drill – and keep your fingers crossed?

Special thanks to Richard Charter