Seriously, can we trust this company with the Arctic Ocean?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/mar/30/bp-missing-laptop-gulf-oil-spill-compensation-claims

BP sends letters to 13,000 Louisiana residents whose data was stored on computer, notifying them of potential security breach

Associated Press
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 30 March 2011 03.36 BST

Workers clean up the oil washed ashore in Alabama from the BP Deepwater Horizon spill. Photograph: KeystoneUSA-ZUMA / Rex Features

A BP employee has lost a laptop containing personal data belonging to thousands of Louisiana residents who filed claims for compensation after the Gulf oil spill.

The firm said it had sent letters to roughly 13,000 people whose data was stored on the computer, notifying them about the potential security breach and offering to pay for their credit to be monitored.

The laptop was password-protected, but the information was not encrypted.

The data included a spreadsheet of claimants’ names, social security numbers, phone numbers and addresses. Curtis Thomas, a BP spokesman, said the company did not have any evidence that claimants’ personal information had been misused.

“We’re committed to the people of the Gulf coast states affected by the Deepwater Horizon accident and spill, and we deeply regret that this occurred,” he said.

The data belonged to individuals who filed claims with BP before the Gulf Coast Claims Facility took over the processing of claims in August. BP paid roughly $400m (£250m) in claims before the switch. As of Tuesday, the GCCF had paid roughly $3.6bn to 172,539 claimants.

BP said no one would have to resubmit a claim because of the lost data.
The employee lost the laptop on 1 March during “routine business travel”. “If it was stolen, we think it was a crime of opportunity, but it was initially lost,” Thomas said.

BP is offering to pay for claimants to have their credit monitored by Equifax, an Atlanta-based credit bureau. Asked why nearly a month elapsed before BP notified residents about the missing laptop, Thomas said: “We were doing our due diligence and investigating.”

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.coutrhousenews.com/2011/03/30/35363.htm

By SABRINA CANFIELD

GRAND ISLE, La. (CN) – A billboard on Highway 1 says: Devastating Spill, Devastating Feelings. Inside the Gulf Coast Claims Facility building on the far end of Grand Isle, about 60 people have turned out for a National Resource Damage Assessment public scoping meeting. “You talk about 18 months or so before we get started,” a resident tell trustees. “That’s a long time for us who live here, while our environment and animals are dying.”

“We have a huge problem,” Beverly Armand, continues. “We have to stop denying it. We can’t fix the problem if we deny it is there.”

The National Resource Damage Assessment, or NRDA, is being conducted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, the Department of the Interior, and the states of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida.

Because of the magnitude of the oil spill and its effects, the earliest that the NRDA plans to have a restoration plan in place is 18 months from now.

The NRDA has held public scoping meetings along the Gulf Coast all month, to find out what concerns residents have and to hear ideas for restoration.

“Medical issues,” Armand says, “many residents have medical issues. BP is not cleaning the beaches. They are burying the problem. We will have children on these beaches. First thing they do will be to dig in the sand, and they will come up with oil.
“The air quality – I don’t even believe anyone is even testing the air anymore.”

“People are suffering,” Armand says. “And please be honest about the continued use of Corexit. They’re continuing to use it. It’s washing up on our beaches all the time.”

Corexit is the brand name for the dispersant BP used to break up the oil that spewed from a broken wellhead for 10 weeks after the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon.

Cheryl Brodnax, habitat restoration specialist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said the impacts of the oil spill “have been so vast” that creative ideas are a necessity.

“These types of conversations are important,” Brodnax said toward the meeting’s end. “Even if they feel frustrating, they are important.”

The broken wellhead under the Deepwater Horizon, before the drilling rig exploded, is 50 miles offshore from Grand Isle.

Eight miles long and a mile wide, Grand Isle has almost 10 miles of white sand beaches. It once was home to 1,100 residents. With salt water on one side and fresh water on the other, it was a nature lover’s paradise and a fisherman’s dream, with 46 species of game fish.

During his public comment, Wayne Keller from the Grand Isle Port Commission referred to a NOAA check sheet listing resources that may have been affected by the oil spill.

“Probably 99.9 percent of everything you could check off has been impacted,” Keller said. “This is Ground Zero.”

Concerns raised at scoping meetings have varied by location.

At a scoping meeting last week in Biloxi, Miss., Vietnamese shrimpers said they have pulled up nets full of oil from the seafloor and have had to decide whether to report the oil to the Coast Guard, which would mean dumping their day’s catch, or pretend they don’t see the oil.
John Lliff, a supervisor with NOAA’s Damage Assessment Remediation and Restoration Program, said no one knows how much of the seafloor is covered in oil.
Simply lowering a camera to the Gulf floor can take as long as 4 hours. The oil may have sunk in part because of dispersants. Other factors such as sediment might also have caused it to sink, Lliff said.

Shrimpers in Biloxi also said that in places where shrimp have been plentiful, there are no shrimp now.

Fishermen in Pensacola and Panama City, Fla. brought a day’s catch to a scoping meeting to show that several fish had lesions. The fishermen were concerned the lesions were a result of the oil spill.

“Lesions do occur in fish,” Lliff said. “Typically, they are a low occurrence, but fishermen there are saying they are coming up every catch.”

Dr. Susan Shaw, an independent marine toxicologist and director of the Marine Environmental Research Institute in Blue Hill, Maine, said Tuesday in a telephone interview that from a toxicology standpoint, dispersed oil is more toxic than oil by itself.
Shaw said what was supposed to happen with Corexit didn’t happen.

BP has acknowledged that it sprayed and injected at least 1.8 million gallons of the toxic dispersant on the oil, expecting to disperse it into the water rather than float on the Gulf’s surface. But rather than simply disperse the oil, the Corexit caused the oil to change into massive subsea plumes.

Animals, including dolphins, swam through the several-mile-wide plumes.
“We were very concerned last fall about the dolphins,” Shaw said.

She said fishermen have reported that dolphins are coming up to their vessels, looking sick, and sometimes swimming in circles.

NOAA records indicate that since February 2010, 2 months before the disastrous oil spill, dolphins have been dying at unusually high rates. Over the past year there have been three spikes in dolphin deaths. This year alone 136 dolphins have been found dead along a portion of coast off Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida.

Shaw said that dispersants work by breaking the outer membrane of cells: organs and oil alike. The effect on marine life is that the oil can enter the body more readily. Shaw said there is no hard data about the dolphin deaths.

“I don’t feel convinced there is enough testing going on,” she said, adding that it only takes a few hours for decomposition to set in, making it difficult to get good samples.
Scientists conducting the dolphin autopsies are considering all options, NOAA said.

Shaw said she hasn’t seen an autopsy program that includes a test for contaminants, such as dispersants.

Many have attributed the recent spike in dolphin deaths to the oil spill. But assumptions about the oil spill are tricky. To link dolphin deaths to the spill, there must be evidence of death caused by oil and hydrocarbons. Results of such studies could take months, if not years, according to NOAA documents.

Now the dolphin death investigation has been closed by the federal government because its results have to be kept for litigation purposes.

“Now we’re going to know less about it,” Shaw said. “At this point, there are more questions than answers.”

In January, Louisiana Senator A.G. Crowe sent a letter to President Obama, expressing concern that dispersants are still being used in the Gulf of Mexico.

“Mr. President, my concern is that this toxic and damaging chemical is still being used and it will compound the long-term damage to our state, our citizens, our eco-system, our economy, our seafood industry, our wildlife and our culture,” Senator Crowe wrote.

“Many are concerned that the oil laced with this toxic dispersant is still in the Gulf being moved constantly by currents throughout the ecosystem spreading contamination.”

Shaw was on Grand Isle March 12 and 13, collecting samples for research.

“You can see black oil in the soil,” Shaw said. “There is a noticeable absence of marine life and animals. If you dig down 6 inches, oil is coming up – not tar balls, oil.

“There were dolphins in shallow water, swimming.”

Shaw said Grand Isle residents who have had their blood tested for chemicals are finding they have high concentrations of solvents – the chemicals found in dispersants.

Shaw said it is easy to find people who are sick from solvent contamination on Grand Isle.
Libby Comeaux, a Louisiana native, likened the Gulf of Mexico to mother’s milk.

“It’s what we carry with us,” she told the group Monday. “If we slow down, get more information, and make sure we don’t do anymore harm to it. If we can just stop hurting the Gulf …”

Scoping will last until May 18. Public comments are posted on NOAA’s website.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

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