http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/01/02

Published on Monday, January 2, 2012 by The Hill (Washington, DC)
by Andrew Restuccia

With President Obama’s decision on the Keystone XL pipeline looming, the White House and Republicans will spend the next several weeks trying to win the messaging war over the controversial project.

The stakes are high for both sides. Obama risks backlash from key union supporters if he rejects the project, but faces the ire of environmental groups if he approves it. [ Will Wysong)] By arguing that the GOP-backed measure will force the administration to reject Keystone on a technicality, the White House can avoid having to weigh in on the substantive issues raised by the pipeline — including whether it will boost the economy or harm the environment. (photo: Will Wysong)

Republicans, meanwhile, stand to score a political victory if Obama green lights the pipeline. But their successful effort to force a decision could backfire if the president rejects the pipeline and pins blame on the GOP for rushing the review.

TransCanada Corp.’s Keystone XL pipeline would carry oil sands crude from Alberta, Canada, to refineries along the Gulf coast. The proposed project, which has been under federal review for years, has set off a firestorm in Washington, with supporters arguing the pipeline will boost the ailing economy and opponents raising concerns about oil spills and greenhouse gas emissions from oil-sands production.

Both sides are mobilizing to win the messaging war. White House and Obama administration officials have said they will have little choice but to reject the pipeline under the 60-day timeline that was outlined in the payroll tax package that passed in December.

By arguing that the GOP-backed measure will force the administration to reject Keystone on a technicality, the White House can avoid having to weigh in on the substantive issues raised by the pipeline — including whether it will boost the economy or harm the environment.

Obama sought in November to delay a final verdict on the pipeline by calling for review of alternative routes around the environmentally sensitive Sand Hills region of Nebraska. The move delayed a decision on the project until 2013 to give the administration time to conduct additional review of the new route.

The State Department, which is leading a multi-agency review of the proposed pipeline, has said the administration will have no choice but to reject Keystone because the expedited timeline pushed by Republicans will not leave enough time to conduct the review.

Other administration and White House officials have echoed that line. White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer said earlier this month on Twitter that the GOP-backed Keystone provision “simply shortens the review process in a way that virtually guarantees that the pipeline will NOT be approved.”

Environmental groups echoed the administration’s comments this week, arguing that Republicans have sealed Keystone’s demise.

“The president is going to have no choice but to reject the pipeline,” said Susan Casey-Lefkowitz, director of international programs at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “I don’t see any wiggle room.”

Proponents of the project are pushing back. Marty Durbin, a lobbyist at the American Petroleum Institute, said the measure in the tax package allows for rerouting the pipeline around the environmentally sensitive Sand Hills region of Nebraska, a requirement the Obama administration has said is essential for approval of the project.

“It gives them the time they need, however much time they need, to review what’s going on in Nebraska,” Durbin said.

Under the Keystone measure, if Obama approves the pipeline, the final permit must require the rerouting, along with necessary review of the new route by the state of Nebraska. But it specifically bars additional federal environmental review of the project, as the State Department has proposed.

Supporters of the pipeline are upping the pressure on Obama to quickly approve the project, arguing there will be political consequences if he rejects it.

“In our view it’s a slam dunk decision because it benefits the country in terms of jobs and national security,” Durbin said. “I think there will be a potential backlash if he rejects the project.”

Matt Letourneau, spokesman for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Institute for 21st Century Energy, said Obama needs to make a decision on the merits.

“Right now, the issue in front of the president is whether the pipeline is in the national interest or not, and that’s where we think the discussion should be,” Letourneau said. “Using some other issue as a reason to avoid making that decision, to us, is not sound policy.”

http://www.alternet.org/story/153475/why_is_the_fda_saying_it%27s_ok_to_eat_seafood_10%2C000_times_over_the_safe_limit_for_dangerous_carcinogens?page=entire

My cynical selfs tells me we knew this all along. How can you slime the Gulf benthos with tons of toxic dispersant without contaminating the food chain? DV

By Brad Jacobson

FDA not only downplayed the risk of contamination, but ignored staff members who proposed higher levels of contamination protection.
December 18, 2011

Ever since the largest offshore oil spill in history spewed into the Gulf of Mexico last year, independent public health experts have questioned the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s efforts to effectively protect Americans from consuming contaminated seafood.

Now a recent study by two of the most tenacious non-government scientists reveals that FDA Gulf seafood “safe levels” allowed 100 to 10,000 times more carcinogenic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) in seafood than what is safe. The overarching issue the report addresses is the failure of the FDA’s risk assessment to protect those most vulnerable to the effects of these chemicals, such as young children, pregnant women and high-consumption seafood eaters.

In an effort to pinpoint how the FDA decided to set its acceptable levels for PAH contaminants in Gulf seafood, researchers at the Natural Resources Defense Council, which performed the study — published in the leading peer-reviewed environmental health journal Environmental Health Perspectives — also scoured documents wrested from the FDA under the Freedom of Information Act.

These include internal emails and unreleased assessments that suggest the FDA not only downplayed the risk of contamination but also that the EPA, and even members of FDA staff, had proposed higher levels of contamination protection, which in the end were ignored.

In vehemently denying the NRDC study’s findings, the FDA argues that its chemical risk assessments are inherently biased “on the side of safety” and that setting higher protective health measures for PAHs in Gulf seafood would actually “do more harm than good.”

Robert Dickey, director of the FDA’s Gulf Coast Seafood Laboratory, who’s taken the lead for the agency in responding to the NRDC report, elaborated in an email to AlterNet, “Overly conservative estimates would lead you [to] remove a great deal of food from our refrigerators and pantries than is needed.”

In an interview with AlterNet, the study’s lead researcher, NRDC staff scientist Miriam Rotkin-Ellman, said that such a response from the FDA “begs the question of whether or not it was a political versus a scientific decision” because the agency “does not provide scientific evidence” for the claim that being more health protective somehow carries an increased risk of doing harm.

She added, “PAHs in food have been evaluated and standards set in the European Union without jeopardizing anyone’s nutrition.”

AlterNet confirmed that the FDA indeed has provided no scientific evidence to back up this claim in either its formal response to the NRDC report or in addressing AlterNet’s questions.

More broadly, the FDA declined to directly explain the email correspondence the study’s researchers obtained in the FOIA request. They reveal that the Environmental Protection Agency, and even members of the FDA’s own staff, questioned the FDA’s seafood safety risk assessment criteria for protecting the most vulnerable populations, particularly Gulf residents.

Other documents received via the FOIA request show that the FDA considered multiple other potential calculations and criteria where more health protective risk assessments were considered but never followed.

Asked if these documents, along with the NRDC study’s findings, belie the FDA’s chief claim that their risk assessments are biased “on the side of safety,” Dickey responded, “The seafood safety risk assessment was developed in extensive and open collaboration between FDA, EPA, CDC, NOAA, and public health experts and toxicologists from all five Gulf states impacted by the oil spill.”

He added, “During that process many factors and calculations were considered before the final version was agreed on by all participants.”

Dickey also claims that the FDA has “built into our assessments, a more than 100-fold safety factor that gives us confidence that sensitive populations are protected.”

Yet Rotkin-Ellman countered that this conclusion is based on “outdated science” in which FDA calculations relied on the average lifetime weight of a 176-pound person.

“FDA continues to ignore the best scientific evidence on early-life vulnerability to chemical contaminants, which has shown that it is not sufficient to rely on life-time assessments,” she said.

“The National Academy of Sciences and EPA guidelines emphasize that additional steps must be taken to specifically assess early-life stages,” Rotkin-Ellman continued, “which includes calculating exposure based on age-specific bodyweights and adjusting to account for increased susceptibility.”

The NRDC study found, for example, that the risk of cancer associated with eating Gulf shellfish contaminated at levels the FDA has deemed safe could be as high as 20,000 in a million. In other words, if 1,000 pregnant women consumed Gulf seafood at these levels, 20 of the children they give birth to would be at significant risk of cancer from the contamination.

The report also concluded that based on available testing data on PAH levels in shellfish after the spill, up to 53 percent of the shrimp tested had PAH levels exceeding the NRDC researchers’ revised levels of concern for pregnant women who are high consumers of Gulf shellfish.

In the interview with Rotkin-Ellman, she highlighted many other central weaknesses in the FDA’s protective criteria for PAHs in Gulf seafood about which she and her NRDC study co-author and UCSF clinical professor of health sciences, Gina Solomon, have long been concerned. These include underestimating the amount of seafood Gulf residents consume, ignoring cancer risk from naphthalene contamination (one of the most prevalent PAHs in petroleum) and projecting the contamination will only last five years.

Another key finding the NRDC report confirmed is that the FDA has no set levels of acceptable PAHs in seafood, but rather creates them on a case-by-case basis after each oil spill.

For example, the FDA made PAH “safe levels” less stringent after the BP oil spill than they had been following the Exxon-Valdez spill.

Asked to explain this practice, Dickey replied, “Each oil spill can involve different kinds of crude oils or refined oil products in different types of environments, so the responses are different to account for the physical environment and the compounds of concern that must be tested for.”

He added, “Also, over time scientific knowledge of the toxicity of the many hundreds to thousands of compounds in oil and refined oil products increases, which directly affects the analysis of risks involved.”

But Rotkin-Ellman noted his answer simply evades the underlying question.

“There are core PAHs of public health concern that are present in most petroleum products that FDA could set standards for regardless of the specifics of an oil spill,” she said. “If analyses prove that those PAHs are not present in the next oil spill then those standards will not be applicable.”

But this variability, she went on to say, does not preclude FDA from evaluating health threats from PAHs now.

“The ad-hoc risk assessment performed by FDA without public or outside expert review,” Rotkin-Ellman added, “have jeopardized FDA’s credibility and they have lost public confidence.”

Currently, the FDA has no plans to begin setting standard levels of concern for PAHs in U.S. seafood, as Europe does to protect its citizens. The NRDC recently filed a petition with the FDA to change this practice but has yet to receive a response.

Gulf seafood continues to be tested on a limited basis. On the FDA’s Web site, the agency contends that seafood from the Gulf “is as safe to eat as it was before the oil spill.”
Brad Jacobson is a Brooklyn-based freelance journalist and contributing reporter for AlterNet. You can follow him on Twitter @bradpjacobson.

Special thanks to Elaine Granata

By Emma Reynolds
Last updated at 9:04 AM on 29th December 2011

BP employees could be charged with attempting a cover-up over the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, it emerged today. Several Houston-based engineers and at least one supervisor may have provided false information to regulators about the risks associated with the drilling, according to sources. The staff members could be charged early next year over the April 2010 disaster, Fox News reported.

Investigation: BP’s staff could be charged individually, with the firm already facing up to $36.6million in fines and potential criminal charges as a company. Eleven workers were killed and four million barrels of oil were dumped into the Gulf of Mexico during the environmental catastrophe. If the BP employees are convicted, they could face up to five years in prison and a fine.

The U.S. Department of Justice may decide not to bring charges, however. It is not unusual for prosecutors to threaten charges to pressure people into cooperating in investigations, according to the news channel. BP itself is expected to face broader criminal charges, including violations of the federal Clean Water Act. There are also said to be questions over the accuracy of BP’s drilling permit applications. The company is already appealing against what could amount to $36.6million in administrative fines by U.S. regulators for safety violations.

Disaster: BP engineers may have tried to hide information from authorities in a cover-up

BP spokesman Daren Beaudo declined to comment on the potential for charges against employees or the company. The company has said it believed the accident was caused by a combination of events that involved multiple parties, not just BP.
A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment.

The accident has been under investigation by a federal task force in New Orleans for the past 18 months. Prosecutors have reviewed thousands of documents and conducted dozens of interviews, bringing some people before a grand jury, sources close to the investigation told Fox. The investigation recently looked into a key safety measure in deep-water drilling – the difference between the minimum amount of pressure that must be exerted in a well’s bore by drillers to keep the well from blowing out, and how much pressure would break apart the rock formation containing oil and gas. The narrower the margin between those two points, the more difficult a well is to control.

Federal regulations do not define what margin qualifies as safe, but companies are supposed to identify the margin in their applications for permits to drill. When a company cannot maintain that safety margin, it is supposed to suspend drilling and remedy the problem. Prosecutors have apparently asked whether information gathered during drilling – which helped determine the safety margin in the Deepwater Horizon situation – was properly reflected in amended drilling permit applications that had to be submitted to federal regulators.

________________________

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/12/29/144421391/report-criminal-charges-being-prepared-against-bp-for-gulf-oil-spill

NPR: Criminal Charges Possible Against BP Engineers For Gulf Oil Spill

07:40 am December 29, 2011

by MARK MEMMOTT

The Deepwater Horizon oil rig burned on April 21, 2010.

“U.S. prosecutors are preparing what would be the first criminal charges against BP PLC employees stemming from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon accident, which killed 11 workers and caused the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history,” The Wall Street Journal reports this morning, citing “people familiar with the matter.”

[9:45 a.m. ET: See update below from NPR’s Carrie Johnson, who reports no decision has been made on whether to go ahead with charges.]

According to the Journal, the prosecutors are focusing on evidence that some BP engineers and supervisors may have given regulators false information about the risks associated with the drilling.

The Journal (longer excerpt posted here, by Fox News; both news outlets are owned by News Corp.) says that “a Justice Department spokesman declined to comment.” That version of the Journal report also notes that “Justice still could decide not to bring charges against the individuals, people familiar with the situation said. It’s not unusual for prosecutors to use the threat of charges to pressure people to cooperate in investigations.”

Bloomberg Businessweek says that “Scott Dean, a spokesman for BP in Chicago, and David Nicholas, a London-based spokesman for the company, declined to comment on the report.” It adds that:
“BP faces at least 350 lawsuits by thousands of coastal property owners and businesses claiming damages from the more than 4.1 million barrels of oil that gushed from its well off the Louisiana coast.”

As we’ve reported, all the companies involved in the spill have been trading accusations about which was most responsible.

Update at 9:45 a.m ET. “No Final Decisions About Charges Have Been Made”:
NPR’s Carrie Johnson reports that sources familiar with what’s happening say no final decisions about charges have been made. As she tells the NPR Newscast Desk:

“The Justice Department task force that has been investigating the spill is starting to wrap up its work. And while prosecutors are looking into criminal charges against engineers at BP who may have under-estimated the dangers of drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, they haven’t yet decided whether to prosecute. Even if they do go ahead, defense attorneys for the engineers will have the option of appealing to higher ups at Justice.

“An attorney for one of the engineers said a decision to prosecute would be the beginning of the legal process, not the end.

“Meanwhile, the head of the task force, longtime Brooklyn prosecutor John Buretta, has stepped up his meetings with supervisors at Justice in Washington in recent weeks. Observers expect some decisions about criminal charges to come before a civil trial over liability for the spill begins in February.”

Now that we’ve added Carrie’s reporting, we’ve also tweaked the headline on this post. It originally read: “Report: Criminal Charges Being Prepared Against BP For Gulf Oil Spill.”

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.latimes.com/health/la-me-herring-kill-20111228,0,4854111.story

The fuel oil that discharged into San Francisco Bay from the cargo ship Cosco Busan devastated the herring population that feeds seabirds, whales and the bay’s last commercial fishery, study says.

On Rodeo Beach in Marin County, cleanup crews collected oil that had spilled into San Francisco Bay after the cargo ship Cosco Busan sideswiped the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge in 2007. Researchers now say that the fuel oil had a devastating effect on the bay’s herring population. (Robert Durell / Los Angeles Times / November 12, 2007)

By Kenneth R. Weiss, Los Angeles Times
December 27, 2011

Thick, tarry fuel oil disgorged into San Francisco Bay from a damaged cargo ship in 2007 was surprisingly toxic to fish embryos, devastating the herring population that feeds seabirds, whales and the bay’s last commercial fishery, scientists reported Monday.

Although the bay’s herring spawning grounds are now free of toxic oil, studies have found that the moderate-size spill of 54,000 gallons had an unexpectedly large and lethal effect.

The culprit, a common type of ship fuel called “bunker fuel,” appears to be especially toxic to fish embryos, particularly when exposed to sunlight, according to a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“That’s the big lesson,” said John Incardona, a toxicologist with the National Marine Fisheries Service. “This bunker oil is literally the dregs of the barrel, and it’s much more toxic than crude oil.”

The container ship Cosco Busan spilled low-grade bunker fuel after it sideswiped the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge on a foggy November morning four years ago. This type of sludge-like fuel is cheap and thus popular among operators of commercial shipping fleets that transport raw materials and goods around the globe.

Scientists have traditionally focused on larger crude oil spills, such as last year’s Deepwater Horizon drilling rig blowout in the Gulf of Mexico or 1989’s Exxon Valdez tanker disaster, in which 11 million gallons of oil were discharged into Alaska’s Prince William Sound. The Exxon spill is suspected of wiping out the sound’s herring fishery, which has never bounced back.

From studies in Alaska, scientists knew that oil could cause heart deformities to developing herring in their embryonic sacs.

But after examining herring embryos placed in cages in shallow waters near the Cosco Busan spill site, researchers were surprised to find that nearly all had died, and their tissues were deteriorating faster than expected in the bay’s chilly water.

“We didn’t think there was enough oil spilled to cause this much damage,” said Gary Cherr, a study coauthor and director of the UC Davis Bodega Marine Laboratory. He described the total spill as similar in size to a large backyard swimming pool.

Oil and water don’t mix. The fat-filled herring egg sacs can act like little sponges, soaking up the highly toxic compounds from the bunker fuel. Once exposed to sunlight during low tides, the oil compounds became even more lethal to developing fish.

“Bunker fuel is used worldwide and is spilled relatively often,” Cherr said. “It is important to look at small spills in sensitive areas,” he added, now that science understands the lethal potential of low concentrations.

The owners and operators of the Cosco Busan in September agreed to pay $44.4 million to cover government claims, the cost of the cleanup – about half of the spilled oil was captured – and bay restoration programs. Besides tarring about 30% of the bay’s herring spawning grounds, the spill killed about 6,800 seabirds and closed beaches for months.

ken.weiss@latimes.com

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.tampabay.com/news/environment/water/coast-guard-plans-to-use-dispersants-if-cuban-drilling-produces-oil-spill/1207054

TampaBay.com

By Craig Pittman, Times Staff Writer
Posted: Dec 20, 2011 11:01 AM

As Cuba prepares to begin allowing a Spanish company to drill for oil 12 miles north of Havana next year, U.S. Coast Guard officials say they have learned from the mistakes made during the Deepwater Horizon disaster and will be prepared for the worst should a spill happen so close to the Florida Keys.

“We will attack it quickly, aggressively and as far from our shores as we can,” Rear Adm. William Baumgartner told reporters during a news conference Tuesday.

Attacking an offshore spill from Cuba would include spraying dispersants such as Corexit on any oil slick, to break it up and make it degrade more quickly, Baumgartner said.

“We will use every tool at our disposal,” said the admiral, who commands the Seventh Coast Guard District, headquartered in Miami. “Aerial dispersants are going to be an effective tool. Undispersed oil is more damaging to natural resources than dispersed oil.”

The use of Corexit during last year’s Deepwater Horizon cleanup proved to be controversial, especially after scientists from the University of South Florida and other institutions reported finding underwater plumes of dissolved oil droplets that they feared would affect marine life.

Environmental activists are already questioning whether using such dispersants to break up the oil would be a good idea so close to such sensitive areas as the Dry Tortugas National Park, the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, the National Key Deer Refuge and John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park.

“Just because it disappears doesn’t mean it’s not there,” said Jonathan Ullman of the Sierra Club’s South Florida office.

Baumgartner said his goal is not to protect Florida tourist-attracting beaches so much as it is to protect natural areas that are important to marine life, particularly coral reefs, mangroves and sea grass beds.

He said he expects the currents that flow through and near the Keys — the gulf’s Loop Current, the Florida Current and the Gulfstream — will help buffer Florida from contact with most of any oil that might be spilled in Cuban waters. But he conceded that eddies are likely to break off and carry some of the oil close enough to taint the shore.

That’s why he wants to attack it before it ever arrives. In addition to dispersants, Baumgartner said he would use skimmer boats, booms and controlled burns to stop the spill. However, a report on the Deepwater Horizon cleanup found that those tools did little to stop BP’s spill, with only 5 percent of the oil burned, and a mere 3 percent skimmed off the surface.

Cuba has agreed to let a Spanish company, Repsol, drill exploratory wells off its shores. Repsol’s safety record is spotty. In February 2008, its operation in Ecuador experienced a crude oil spill near the Yasuni National Park in a rainforest area. In February 2009, another oil spill occurred in Ecuador’s Amazon region after a rupture in a pipeline.

Repsol is bringing in an Italian-owned, Chinese-made drilling rig to drill the wells. U.S. officials are scheduled to inspect the rig when it reaches Trinidad and Tobago next week, Baumgartner said. Then it would head for Cuba and get to work drilling in January.

Currently Cuba gets its oil from Venezuela and relies on sugar, nickel mining and tourism for its economic wellbeing. But sugar production has fallen off, and the price of nickel worldwide has fallen. Meanwhile its tourism industry has been sputtering — so now the Cubans are ready to consider drilling for oil.

The U.S. Geological Survey has estimated Cuba’s offshore fields hold 4.6 billion barrels of oil and 9.8 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and said the area has “significant potential.” The first block Repsol is expected to explore lies under 5,600 feet of water – 600 feet deeper than where BP’s Deepwater Horizon well exploded in April 2010.

Baumgartner and Capt. John Slaughter, his head of planning, said the main lesson they learned from Deepwater Horizon was to do a better job of coordinating with state and county emergency officials, who complained repeatedly about being ignored during last year’s cleanup. The admiral said he has personally briefed Gov. Rick Scott and talked with state and county officials about his contingency plans for any Cuban incident.

Craig Pittman can be reached at craig@tampabay.com
[Last modified: Dec 20, 2011 12:06 PM]

Special thanks to Richard Charter