Video at:
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=6836255n

Print version below and at:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/09/04/eveningnews/main6835996.shtml

It’s come to close the Halliburton loophole and allow federal regulators to stem the watershed pollution that is now occurring as a result of increased gas exploration in America. I support the legislation sponsored by Sen. Robert Casey, D-Pa., called the Fracturing Responsibility and Awareness of Chemicals (FRAC) Act. DV

Sept. 4, 2010.
A Burning Debate Over Natural Gas Drilling
Chemicals That Energy Companies Secretly Use in a Process Dubbed “Fracking” Are Fueling Concerns About Our Water Supplies

By Armen Keteyian
Play CBS Video
(CBS) The natural gas-producing shale that lies under 34 states is now being seen as a game-changer in helping meet the nation’s energy needs for decades to come. But the process of extracting that natural gas, dubbed “fracking,” is fueling environmental fears.

CBS News chief investigative correspondent Armen Keteyian has more:

“You can’t live like this – it’s so stressful every single day.”

Homeowner Stephanie Hallowich is like many in western Pennsylvania who have watched their once-pristine neighborhood become an industrial site. Sprawling plants with flares that reach high into the night, noxious smells, trucks, and containment ponds with unknown chemicals are among the complaints of people who live in areas where natural gas companies have descended.

Hallowich believes three natural gas-drilling operations bordering her property turned her well-water black, forcing her to purchase a tank of fresh water every month.

The air? Uncertain.

“I’m very afraid, health-wise, for the kids, just because of the exposure to the water and the constant not-knowing what we’re breathing in outside,” she said.

The Hallowich home sits near the center of the Marcellus Shale, an energy-rich geological formation stretching from New York to Tennessee.

Three-quarters of Pennsylvania contain vast energy riches buried deep underground in shale formations, representing hundreds of billions of dollars in untold wealth locked up in rock – a potential goldmine for natural gas companies.

“The development of shale gas in the Marcellus and across the country is a very important part of the nation’s energy strategy,” said Kathryn Klaber, president of the Marcellus Shale Coalition, a natural gas industry group

Big players are rushing in. Exxon has invested $30 billion in the Marcellus in recent months. Foreign investors are also swooping in. India’s largest company, Reliance, has purchased a large stake. China, Korea, and Britain are investing in gas drilling in the Marcellus shale.

As gas companies rush in to make deals with landowners for the right to drill, the money on the table – signing fees and royalties – is substantial, and hard to argue with in a recession . . . hundreds of thousands of dollars in some cases.

In Pennsylvania, 60 gas companies hold 4,504 permits to drill, almost half (1,195) granted this year alone.

What’s driving the drilling rush here, and across the country, are advances in hydraulic fracturing, or “hydro-fracking,” a process whereby millions of gallons of water, sand and chemicals are blasted deep underground – about 5,000 feet – forcing cracks in the shale and freeing natural gas for collection.

It is at the surface where problems have been reported, like blowouts and spills into ground water . . .

. . . And – as depicted in the HBO documentary “Gasland” – ignition at the kitchen sink.

“Gasland”: Is “Fracking” Polluting America?

At public meetings, environmental groups and pro-drilling landowners who receive royalties (“It’s my house, it’s my land, my property, I deserve to be able to frack if that’s what I want to do,” says one) have squared off over potential health risks and safety.

“There’s no such thing as zero-impact drilling,” says John Hanger, head of Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection. Since 2008 he’s doubled the number of state regulators (100 to 205) and inspectors (21 to 45) to oversee the gas industry.

Hanger told Keteyian that there is evidence of chemical contaminants in water. “Spills and surface leaks have, in fact, contaminated people’s drinking water,” he said.

Yet nationwide the industry is not required to disclose what potentially toxic chemicals – like hydrochloric acid – are used in the drilling process.

A provision of a law proposed by the Bush administration and passed by Congress in 2005 (dubbed by opponents the “Halliburton loophole”) stripped the EPA of its ability to regulate “fracking” – leaving the job of regulatory enforcement in the hands of cash-strapped, undermanned state agencies.

Since then, drilling companies have been allowed to put millions of gallons of unknown chemicals into the ground without reporting it, making it difficult to link pollution claims to drilling.

What environmentalists fear most is widespread contamination to the watershed, on which millions of people depend.

“I think the industry’s way out of bounds for not disclosing the list of chemicals,” Hanger said. “I think the industry is close to insane to allow that issue to become a source of suspicion.”

Much like the quality of air and water now surrounding thousands of home sites like Stephanie Hallowich’s.
Legislation is being proposed in the Senate, sponsored by Sen. Robert Casey, D-Pa., called the Fracturing Responsibility and Awareness of Chemicals (FRAC) Act.

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/Institute-for-Energy-Research-statement-on-latest-Gulf-of-Mexico-oil-platform-accident-102183849.html

By: MARK TAPSCOTT
Editorial Page Editor
09/04/10 11:25 AM EDT

A second Gulf of Mexico oil platform accident has produced some interesting reactions. Compare, for example, the respective statements issued by the Institute for Energy Research, an industry backed think tank, and Sierra Club, one of the most vocal and aggressive advocates of radical environmentalism.
First, the IER statement:
“IER congratulates the U.S. Coast Guard, the employees of Mariner Energy and all those involved in the successful response to the fire and evacuation on the Vermilion Production Platform in the Gulf of Mexico yesterday.

“Their training and quick response resulted in no loss of life and very little release of hydrocarbons into the water. At IER, we recognize the outcome of this industrial accident is the norm, rather than the exception that marked the Macondo well in April.

“Although the opponents of domestic energy production were quick to try to use this accident as an indictment of all offshore energy production, the heroic actions of all concerned proved what all the experts and reports from the National Academy of Science have been telling us for decades – producing oil in our own waters is safer than importing it on tankers from foreign nations.

“Less domestic oil production means increased foreign imports, more job and dollar exports and the higher probability of a spill. The government’s self-imposed ban on production at home is even more reprehensible when you consider that the resulting need to increase our imports also increases the chances that the blood of young American soldiers will be spilled in areas where the flow of oil, so vital to the world’s economy, emanates.

“It is instructive that the same leaders in Washington, so quick to indict an industrial accident like that which occurred yesterday, refuse to investigate industrial accidents in their own districts, whether it be New Jersey, Massachusetts, Arizona or Hollywood. If it is fatalities they are focused upon, we at IER suggest these salons investigate why more people died this week due to environmental extremism than from domestic offshore energy production.

“With that in mind, and with an eye towards the celebration of Labor Day, IER calls upon President Obama to overrule his Energy Czar Carol Browner and lift the moratoria on offshore drilling. Not only the official and illegal moratorium on the deepwater, but also the unofficial one being imposed by bureaucratic inaction which has led to less than ten percent of the normal permits being issued for new wells in the shallow waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

“With 9.6% unemployment and a cratering economy, it is time to celebrate the Labor of those men and women who would otherwise be working hard to provide the secure energy our economy demands were it not for the Obama administration’s ongoing war on the production of the plentiful domestic oil, coal, and natural gas resources that power our lives and run our businesses.”

Now, compare the above with this statement from the Sierra Club:
“Our hearts go out to the workers involved in this disaster and their families. This is the second incident in recent months that has sent oil workers into the water, and some of them have never returned.

“The oil industry continues to rail against regulation but it’s become all too clear that the current approach to offshore drilling is simply too dangerous. We don’t need to put American workers and waters in harm’s way just so multinational oil companies can break more profit records.

“Instead of pursuing more dangerous, dirty, outdated offshore drilling, we could be investing in clean energy and a 21st century transportation system that would create good, safe jobs and infuse new life into our economy.
“How many disasters will it take until our leaders decide to act? We don’t want to see one more oil disaster. The BP disaster was supposed to be the wake up call, but we hit the snooze button. Today the alarm went off again.

“Oil is just too dangerous and dirty. It’s time to move America off of oil and onto clean, safe energy.”

Aside from the obvious differences in terms of emphasis, detail and tone, take particular note of the profound gulf between these two advocacy groups regarding the practical realities of America’s energy needs and future.

The IER statement focuses on the immediate need to restore domestic energy production and the reality that producing more oil and natural gas at home is ultimately safer and environmentally more sensitive than increasing America’s dependence upon foreign sources.

Then there is the Sierra Club vision of “investing in clean energy and a 21st century transportation system.” Sounds nice, but here’s what Sierra doesn’t say:
First, even the U.S. Department of Energy under President Obama estimates that it will be 2030 before those “clean energy” sources – wind, solar, biomass – will be able to produce anywhere near the amount of power, especially electricity, required by the American economy.

Second, do you ever wonder what that “21st century transportation system” might look like? Well, just take a look at the inside of a bus or subway car because urban mass transit is what Sierra Clubbers have in mind for all Americans. Of course, for mass transit to work even minimally well for the public, we all have to move back into the city. It will also be decades before anybody will be able to afford electric or fuel cell powered passenger cars able to serve the needs of a typical family of four.

In other words, IER is dealing with and has practical solutions for the real world. The Sierra Club has an abstract vision that has about as much chance of becoming reality as the Jamaican bobsled team has of winning a gold medal.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/subhankar-banerjee/senator-barbara-boxer-her_b_703079.html

Subhankar Banerjee
Photographer, writer, activist, founder ClimateStoryTellers.org
Posted: September 3, 2010 02:31 PM

Wednesday evening was the first (and perhaps the only) debate between Senator Barbara Boxer (D-California) and her Republican challenger Carly Fiorina.

I’m not a guru of politics. I’m not a pundit of policy debates. I’m not a Beltway lobbyist. My knowledge of politics does not go beyond 101, those classes we take during our freshman college year. I live in New Mexico — not California.

Yet, I care passionately about Senator Barbara Boxer’s reelection. Why? Because I care deeply about life on Earth and I’m very concerned about climate crimes that are killing animals, birds, trees, and also humans in the U.S. as well as all over the world.

Soon I’ll tell you about why we must help Senator Boxer’s reelection campaign, no matter where in the U.S. we live, but first I’ll share a story of how I came to know Senator Boxer.

March 19, 2003: I was living in Seattle. It must have been midday, when I got a call from Cindy Shogan, executive director of Alaska Wilderness League, a Washington-DC based non-profit organization. “Turn on your TV”, said Cindy, “Senator Boxer is showing your polar bear photo on the Senate floor”. She hung up, and I was nowhere near a TV. Later someone emailed me a screenshot from CSPAN — Senator Boxer showing a poster-size image of one of my polar bear photos from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska.

That day Senator Boxer passionately argued to prevent oil drilling in the Arctic Refuge. President George W. Bush was pushing very hard to sell the Arctic Refuge to the oil companies. Cindy had brought some of my photos and a copy of my just published book, Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: Seasons of Life and Land to Senator Boxer’s attention. Cindy’s hope was that it could help counter the arguments made by then Republican Senators Ted Stevens and Frank Murkowski, who had portrayed the Arctic Refuge as a “white nothingness” or “barren, frozen wasteland”. Vice President Dick Cheney sat at his Senate office most of the day, expecting that the Senate would split the votes 50-50, he will break the tie, win the vote, and let the oilers move forward. To their dismay, Senator Boxer’s passionate plea resulted in a 51-49 votes that day. Her use of my book and photos during the Senate debate, however, resulted in my soon to open exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution to turn into a political football. But that’s another story. I slowly began to learn about American politics.

Later that year, the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco opened my Arctic Refuge exhibition. Senator Boxer attended the opening reception. She told us a story. On March 19, when she returned home later that evening, her granddaughter said, “I’m very proud of you grandma for protecting the polar bear.” That day she indeed did. And she continues to be a champion of the Arctic Refuge, which is a crown jewel of America, and it is also the most biologically diverse conservation area in the entire Arctic. Later this year, on December 6, we will be celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. We must never sell the Arctic Refuge to the oil companies.

In 2007, Senator Barbara Boxer became the first woman ever to chair the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

Fast forward to 2010. We had BP’s unforgiveable oil-and-methane spill in the gulf, a disaster Jerry Cope and Charles Hambleton have called the crime of the century. Then on June 10, Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski launched an attack to block Environmental Protection Agency’s effort to limit greenhouse gas emissions through the Clean Air Act. Senator Barbara Boxer made a passionate counter-attack. She showed poster-sized images of blackened birds killed by BP’s spill. While showing the dead-bird photos, Senator Boxer said, “They’re almost too painful. But for someone (Senator Lisa Murkowski) to come to this floor to say too much carbon is not dangerous, then I’m sorry, we’ll have to look.” Her passion prevailed and the Republican attempt was defeated by 53-47 votes.

Wednesday evening during the debate at Saint Mary’s College, Senator Boxer talked about protecting the California coast from offshore oil-and-gas development (Carly Fiorina favors offshore development in California). On May 13, Senator Boxer and five senators from California, Oregon, and Washington introduced legislation to ban all future drilling along the Pacific shoreline.

Offshore oil development is a dirty and dangerous business. When something goes wrong it kills a helluva lot of marine life and also destroys people’s way of life. Some Californians may remember very well the 1969 oil spill off of Santa Barbara coast that spewed 200,000 gallons of crude, and killed seals, dolphins, fish, birds, and other marine life.

I’ve been extremely concerned about offshore drilling in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas of arctic Alaska. To prevent a BP like catastrophe in the Arctic Ocean that Shell was just about to embark on this summer, I wrote a piece BPing the Arctic? on May 25. Two days later President Obama reversed his earlier decision and suspended Shell’s drilling for 2010. We must put a permanent ban on offshore drilling in America’s Arctic Ocean, the way Senator Boxer and her colleagues have proposed for the Pacific coast.

Resource expert Michael Klare has pointed out that most of the easy oil in North America has already been extracted. We’re now going after what he calls extreme-energy with potentially devastating consequences — offshore drilling in deepwater, offshore drilling in extremely harsh environment like the Arctic Ocean, or the Tar Sands of Alberta in Canada.

Senator Boxer is doing the right thing by protecting the coast of her home state from offshore drilling. It’s time that we move away from the death grip of oil-and-coal and start a clean energy revolution in the U.S. During Wednesday evening’s debate Senator Boxer also pointed out that her aim is to make California “a hub of clean energy industry”. This is what all Americans need to hear. Clean energy is no longer an idea that has the promise to create new jobs. Elizabeth Lynch wrote recently in The Huffington Post that China has already beat the U.S. to become the new green tech giant. We need the same direction for U.S. — it’ll create new jobs, actually lot of new jobs, and help control global warming at the same time. For that we need Senator Barbara Barbara Boxer and not Carly Fiorina (whose sympathy is with the oil-and-coal companies).

After the U.S. Senate killed the climate bill in late July, many of us were disappointed (but not surprised). We pointed our fingers to what went wrong and why our climate movement failed, but then we got to work to figure out how to move forward. Just a few days ago I founded ClimateStoryTellers.org that you can check out. And for action you can check out great activist movements — 350.org and the Climate Justice Network. Last year with a puny budget and a lot of passion, Bill McKibben and his compatriots at 350.org organized 5200 climate rallies in 181 countries. And this coming October they’re planning Global Work Party — 1400 events already planned in more than 135 countries. Our climate movement is moving forward with many new ideas, renewed energy, and enthusiasm.

And we need Senator Boxer with us on our new climate movement train. She is a champion of our environment and clean energy economy, and we must do everything to help her win reelection.

I’m with her.

Are you?

Subhankar Banerjee is a photographer, writer, activist, and founder of ClimateStoryTellers.org
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Special thanks to Richard Charter

Boats spray water to extinguise the fire aboard the Mariner/NYT

New York Times
September 4, 2010

Blowout Preventer Is Removed
By HENRY FOUNTAIN
BP on Friday removed the damaged blowout preventer from atop the company’s stricken oil well in the Gulf of Mexico in preparation for the final plugging of the well, the government said. Thad W. Allen, the retired Coast Guard admiral who leads the federal response to the spill, said in a statement that the preventer — the roughly 500-ton safety device that failed in the Deepwater Horizon blowout in April — would be brought to the surface on Saturday. It will be replaced by a blowout preventer better able to handle any pressure increases that might result when a relief will is used to pump mud and cement into the well after Labor Day. The damaged blowout preventer will eventually be taken to shore and will be in the custody of investigators looking into the cause of the accident.

_________________________________________

New York Times
September 3, 2010

Spotlight Shifts to Shallow-Water Wells
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS and JOHN M. BRODER
For decades, thousands of oil and gas platforms have operated quietly in the shallower waters of the Gulf of Mexico, largely forgotten by the public and government regulators.

But just as the BP disaster in April brought new scrutiny to the dangers of drilling in the deepest waters of the gulf, Thursday’s fire aboard a platform owned by Mariner Energy could well drag the shallow-water drillers into the spotlight’s glare.

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, the new agency responsible for overseeing offshore oil and gas development, said Friday that it was investigating the cause of the Mariner fire, which forced the 13 crew members to jump overboard and rattled nerves in a region that was still coping with the effects of the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

Members of Congress expressed alarm about the accident, with some saying it was proof that drilling laws needed to be tightened. And even industry executives said it was likely the fire would toughen the already difficult regulatory climate for gulf drilling after the Deepwater Horizon explosion killed 11 people and caused the largest maritime oil spill in American history.

“We will use all available resources to find out what happened, how it happened and what enforcement action should be taken if any laws or regulations were violated,” said Michael R. Bromwich, head of the bureau, which replaced the discredited Minerals Management Service after the BP disaster.

Mr. Bromwich has been carefully reviewing shallow-water drilling as he draws up new regulations governing the industry. The agency, which imposed a six-month moratorium on all deepwater projects after the BP accident, has approved only four of 21 new shallow-water drilling applications since it issued new safety and environmental guidelines in late May.

Representative Nick Rahall, Democrat of West Virginia and chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, said he was “alarmed” by the latest mishap in the gulf and demanded documentation on the Mariner platform from the Interior Department for a committee investigation.

He said the Mariner platform, working in only 340 feet of water, “highlights all too clearly that the risks of offshore drilling are not limited to deep water.”

Although more than 70 percent of all offshore oil production now comes from jumbo oil platforms plumbing the gulf’s deeper waters, thousands of small-scale outfits pump oil from the shallower waters. Currently, 3,333 platforms are drilling in depths of less than 500 feet, compared with just 74 in deeper waters, according to B.O.E.M. data.

The kind of accident that set the Mariner platform ablaze is not unusual. Although the cause is still under investigation, it appears to have started in the crew’s quarters and did not lead to any significant oil leakage.

Under normal circumstances, such an event would have received little attention. There are more than 100 fires a year on oil and gas facilities in the gulf, mostly minor incidents involving welding sparks, grease fires and other mishaps that occur during routine maintenance.

“People need to remember that the environment that people work in offshore is really no different from other industrial plants located onshore,” said Thomas E. Marsh, vice president of operations for ODS-Petrodata, which tracks the offshore industry. “And industrial accidents happen regularly, but not commonly.”

But industry experts say that most accidents happen aboard older platforms that tend to be concentrated in shallow waters.

Mariner operations alone have reported several dozen incidents, including 18 fires, from 2006 to 2009, according to federal records. Although no one died, there were at least three dozen injuries, including one that paralyzed a worker. Several others suffered severe injuries, and some received burns and broken bones. In May 2008, a Mariner rig briefly lost well control and partly evacuated the crew while workers frantically worked to shore up operations.

In addition, since 2006, Mariner Energy has been involved in at least four spills, in which at least 1,357 barrels of chemicals and petroleum flowed into the gulf, according to federal records.

Patrick Cassidy, Mariner’s director of investor relations, said that the company only seriously got into the offshore drilling business in 2006 with its acquisition of properties of the Forest Oil Corporation. “Since Mariner has been operating there, we have steadily improved our performance,” he said. “The performance yesterday is indicative of the improvement. There were no injuries, no spill, and the fire was extinguished.”

Early reports of Thursday’s accident suggested another spill had occurred. But Coast Guard officials said on Friday that only a patch of light rainbow sheen, measuring about 100 yards by 10 yards, had been spotted in morning flights over the area around the platform. The sheen appeared to be residual from the firefighting efforts, the Coast Guard said.

Nevertheless, the Mariner accident has already stoked the intense policy debate over stiffening regulations on shallow-water drillers.

“It will likely provide sufficient political cover for the Obama administration to pursue its current strategy toward stricter offshore regulation,” Robert Johnston of the Eurasia Group, a research and consulting firm, said in a note to clients on Friday. “Even after the formal moratorium is lifted, the pending oil-spill legislation and proposed changes by the Interior Department will translate to higher costs and extended uncertainty for offshore drilling.”

Oil production in the deep slopes and canyons of the Gulf of Mexico surpassed production from shallow waters roughly a decade ago. But for half a century before that, scores of oil and gas companies, big and small, made their fortunes from platforms propped up in waters less than 1,000 feet deep on the inner continental shelf, which can extend for 100 miles or more off the coasts of Texas and Louisiana.

According to data published in July by the Energy Policy Research Foundation in Washington, more than 50,000 wells have been drilled in the gulf’s federally regulated waters since oil production in the area first began in 1947. Only 4,000 of those have been drilled in depths beyond 1,000 feet, and just 700 wells have gone beyond 5,000 feet.

Independent oil and gas companies — far smaller than the majors like Exxon Mobil and BP — represent the dominant shareholders in two-thirds of the 7,521 leases in the gulf, including the vast majority of the production leases in shallow waters.

According to a recent study by IHS Global Insight, the independents produced nearly 500,000 barrels a day of oil last year in shallow gulf waters, while the majors produced just over 20,000 barrels a day there.

But the new accident came at an inopportune time for the oil industry. After BP capped its runaway well and the spill faded from news media coverage, political pressure had grown in the gulf and around Washington to lift the drilling moratorium.

Now, the momentum is likely to shift again.

“This explosion is further proof that offshore drilling is an inherently dangerous practice,” said Senator Frank R. Lautenberg, Democrat of New Jersey, an opponent of offshore oil and gas development.

James W. Noe, senior vice president of Hercules Offshore, the largest shallow-water drilling company in the gulf, said he thought the administration and regulators would use the incident to further slow drilling.

“People that have an agenda that is hostile to offshore drilling will use this incident, there’s no doubt about that,” he said, “But once the facts are understood fully, this will be treated as an industrial accident that could have occurred at a gas station around the corner. It’s just bad timing.”

Andrew W. Lehren and Tom Zeller Jr. contributed reporting.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

http://www.grist.org/article/2010-09-03-Gulf-oil-well-explosion-off-shore-drilling/

BY Randy Rieland
3 SEP 2010 10:25 AM

If we hadn’t spent the summer watching crude gush into the Gulf, no one outside the industry would have noticed or cared much about Thursday’s explosion on a Mariner Energy oil platform. No serious injuries, no spreading slick.

But everyone did notice, and it reminded us that no matter how much BP and the rest of Big Oil say they’ve learned from the Deepwater Horizon disaster, offshore drilling remains a high-risk business, even in shallow water.

Plus, Tony Hayward had nothing to say: The fossil-fuel folks were quick to point out that yesterday’s accident had little in common with the BP debacle. But as David A. Fahrenthold and David S. Hilzenrath point out in The Washington Post, that made it even more noteworthy to offshore drilling critics. This wasn’t some cutting-edge venture where machinery was drilling a mile under the ocean; it was in relatively shallow water, and while the well was still in production, the drilling was finished. Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune cut to the chase:
The oil industry continues to rail against regulation, but it’s become all too clear that the current approach to offshore drilling is simply too dangerous. We don’t need to put American workers and waters in harm’s way just so multinational oil companies can break more profit records.

Timing is everything: Wouldn’t you know it that just a day before the explosion, at a “Rally for Jobs” event in Houston sponsored by the American Petroleum Institute, Barbara Hagood, a Mariner Energy exec, moaned about the moratorium on deepwater drilling in the Gulf:
I have been in the oil and gas industry for 40 years, and this administration is trying to break us. The moratorium they imposed is going to be a financial disaster for the Gulf Coast, Gulf Coast employees, and Gulf Coast residents.

While not in the same league as BP as a safety ne’er-do-well, Mariner has been more Homer Simpson than Ned Flanders. According to The Houston Chronicle, the company has been involved in at least 13 offshore accidents since 2006 in the Gulf — including a blowout and four fires.

Language barrier: BP, meanwhile, is sharing its concern that it may not be able to spend as much money on restoring the Gulf and its economy as it previously said it would. The reason? Language in a drilling overhaul bill passed by the House this summer that it contends would hamper its business. Clifford Krauss and John M. Broder of The New York Times explain:
The bill includes an amendment that would bar any company from receiving permits to drill on the Outer Continental Shelf if more than 10 fatalities had occurred at its offshore or onshore facilities. It would also bar permits if the company had been penalized with fines of $10 million or more under the Clean Air or Clean Water Acts within a seven-year period. While BP is not mentioned by name in the legislation, it is the only company that currently meets that description.
BP also announced that it has now spent $8 billion in dealing with the Deepwater Horizon explosion and its consequences. About $93 million of that went toward ads on TV, radio, and in newspapers from April through July. All those images of BP employees vowing to “make things right” appear to be working. An Associated Press poll found that 33 percent of the people surveyed in August approved of the job BP was doing — more than double the number who felt that way in June.

You’re not the boss of me: If the comments of one of China’s top climate spokespeople is any indication, don’t expect that country to take the lead in slashing energy consumption. Yu Qingtai, who represented China in climate talks from 2007 to 2009 and is now his country’s ambassador to the Czech Republic, had this to say in a recent speech:
As a Chinese person, I cannot accept someone from a developed nation having more right than me to consume energy. We are all created equal — this is no empty slogan. The Americans have no right to tell the Chinese that they can only consume 20 percent as much energy. We do not want to pollute as they did, but we have the right to pursue a better life. The public relations efforts of developed nations on climate change are always more effective than ours, but it is more important to look at their actual actions. Overall, when you look at the facts, there is a huge difference between what is said and what is done.

Andrew Revkin has more in his Dot Earth blog.
The road to madness: Remember that hideous traffic jam in China that lasted nine days? Well, it’s back. The replay’s only a few days old, but it’s already stretching 75 miles again. And also again, the cause is road construction and the huge number trucks hauling coal to Beijing from mines in Inner Mongolia.

California reamin’: The race for California senator between incumbent Democrat Barbara Boxer and her Republican challengers Carly Fiorina is heating up. But when it comes to green issues, Fiorina is bobbing and weaving like a flyweight boxer. During a recent debate, she refused to say if she believed global warming is real. Instead, she offered up the lame comment, “We should always have the courage to examine the science.” When she also declined to take a stand on Prop. 23, which would suspend California’s landmark climate law, Boxer pounced:
If you can’t take a stand on Prop. 23, I don’t know what you will take a stand on. If we overturn California’s clean energy policies, that’s going to mean that China takes the lead away from us with solar, that Germany takes the lead away from us with wind, but I guess my opponent is kind of used to creating jobs in China and other places. I want those jobs created here in America.

Well, that didn’t take long: The more rabid of climate-change deniers have seized upon the revelation that James Lee, the madman shot by police after he grabbed three hostages in Discovery’s headquarters, was moved to environmental fanaticism in part by watching Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. Matt Drudge has piled on, as have others in the right-wing blogosphere, laying blame on Gore himself. Under the headline “Stop the Hysteria,” here’s Thomas Fuller on the climate-change-denial site wattsupwiththat:
At what point will we call to account those who have preached ‘the end of the earth as we know it’ to countless people? How many people will be driven to desperation by those who distort the science?

Blizzard of lies: OK, one last run at all the woofin’ last winter by Foxcateers Limbaugh, Beck, and Hannity when they mocked global warming during the double dose of blizzards in Washington. New research suggests that the intense snowfalls were caused by a rare, once-in-a-century collision of two weather systems. You could explain what happened — that a climatic phenomenon called a North Atlantic Oscillation entered a “strongly negative phase” and that brought cold air down from the Arctic to the East Coast where it rammed into air full of moisture from El Niño.
Or you could just say Al Gore is crazy.

Special thanks to Richard Charter