climate change, energy policy, fossil fuels, national ocean politics, natural resource management, tar sands, Uncategorized

Common Dreams: Expect More Resistance: Direct Action Targets Tar Sands as #FearlessSummer Kicks Off

Leave a comment

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/06/24-1

Ahhhh, right. Enbridge–the OTHER pipeline. DV

Published on Monday, June 24, 2013 by Common Dreams

9 arrests following action that thwarted construction of a tar sands pump station
– Andrea Germanos, staff writer

tarsands

Activists locked to an excavator to thwart construction work. (Photo: Great Plains Tar Sands Resistance)Nine people with Great Plains Tar Sands Resistance (GPTSR) have been arrested on Monday after succeeding in temporarily shutting down construction of a Keystone XL pump station.

The action in Seminole, Okla. was part of a series of coordinated, nationwide #FearlessSummer actions starting this week that aim to fight “extreme energy,” which “continues to escalate its attack of life on earth.”

For GPTSR, the direct action was a necessary step to confront the fossil fuel industries that “profit off of continued ecological devastation and the poisoning of countless communities.”

“As a part of a direct action coalition working and living in an area that has been historically sacrificed for the benefit of petroleum infrastructure and industry, we believe that building a movement that can resist all infrastructure expansion at the point of construction is a necessity,” Eric Whelan, spokesperson for the group, said in a statement.

“We’re through with appealing to a broken political system that has consistently sacrificed human and nonhuman communities for the benefit of industry and capital,” added Whelan

While Monday’s action targeted TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline, the group emphasized that “tar sands infrastructure is toxic regardless of the corporation or pipeline,” and pointed to spills in the Kalamazoo River in Michigan and in Mayflower, Arkansas.

“We are opposed not only to the Keystone XL, but all tar sands infrastructure that threatens the land and her progeny,” stated Fitzgerald Scott, who took part in Monday’s action.

So the group’s message to Enbridge, another heavyweight in the rapacious industry, is this: expect resistance.

“While KXL opponents wait with baited breath for Obama’s final decision regarding this particular pipeline, other corporations, including Enbridge, will be laying several tar sands pipelines across the continent. The Enbridge pipelines will carry the same volumes of the same noxious substance; therefore, Enbridge should get ready for the same resistance.”

_________________________

energy policy, fossil fuels, national ocean politics, natural resource management, offshore oil, tar sands

Hamptonroads.com: Weighing the risks of offshore drills

Leave a comment

http://hamptonroads.com/2013/06/weighing-risks-offshore-drills

I am disappointed in the local NAACP for endorsing drilling in Virginia. DV

The Virginian-Pilot
© June 22, 2013

First of two parts

Under current rules, drilling for oil and gas off Virginia’s coast is a terrible idea:
– Much of the federal territory on the outer continental shelf directly off our shore actually belongs to Maryland and North Carolina for royalty purposes.
– There’s no system in place to provide revenue to any Atlantic state to help compensate for the significant risk the industry brings.
– The oil and gas business has done far too little to improve its safety record, despite major spills that caused massive damage to industries dependent on clean water.

That leaves only a few justifications – primarily jobs and energy – for the continued pursuit of platforms. Thanks to fracking, America is already awash with cheap natural gas, which previous surveys have indicated may lie off Virginia’s coast. And while offshore drilling might well create jobs in Hampton Roads, they’ll come by risking current jobs, including in the military and in tourism.
N
evertheless, political leaders, from Virginia Beach Mayor Will Sessoms to Gov. Bob McDonnell, have embraced offshore drilling as a potential economic boon for our region, even without changes to the federal framework. But that would mean the oil and gas industry is willing to improve life in Hampton Roads out of the goodness of its heart and in defiance of its past performance in places like Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico. Just a few petroleum-stained legislators would even dare to make such an argument, which is why legislation sponsored by U.S. Rep. Scott Rigell and U.S. Sens. Mark Warner and Tim Kaine – and supported by McDonnell and Sessoms – seeks to fix two of the three major shortcomings of the current federal regime: The map and the royalties.

The last one – the inherent danger in drilling – still presents a real and unacceptable threat to Virginia’s military installations, its tourism industry and environment. It’s also the one over which the lawmakers have the least control.
Drilling off Virginia’s Atlantic coast remains barred by the White House in the wake of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. The legislation now in the works would force the White House to lift that ban and release territory covered in “Lease Sale 220.”

Past exploration has suggested that there may be natural gas in Virginia’s outer continental shelf territory, though nobody admits to knowing for sure. That’s part of the reason a new survey is under way. Despite that uncertainty, both before Deepwater Horizon and after, Virginia’s delegation to Washington and lawmakers in Richmond have pushed to lift the barriers to drilling.

The oil and gas industry has made a huge political bet on Virginia. Even if there’s nothing there, energy companies see freedom to drill off the commonwealth as a first step toward creating momentum for platforms from Maine to Florida.
Support for drilling isn’t limited to politicians and fossil fuel interests. Last week, Virginia Beach’s chapter of the NAACP endorsed Rigell’s bill, citing the potential for jobs. “Given the unemployment rate, especially that of African Americans here in Virginia Beach and the region, we are encouraged that you are taking proactive steps toward increasing employment opportunities in this part of the commonwealth,” local President Carl Wright wrote to the congressman.

Rigell has said offshore energy production would diversify the region’s defense-dependent economy and create 18,000 jobs. What’s far less clear is how many jobs it would imperil. For the military, to which 47 percent of the region’s economy is tied, oil and gas development in Lease Sale 220 has long presented an unacceptable risk to training and operations. For that reason, the Pentagon has opposed opening most of Virginia’s coast to drilling. More on that Sunday.

To fix the problem with the map of offshore territory – Virginia’s share resembles a slim slice of pie – both the House and Senate bills would draw state boundaries differently, essentially extending Virginia’s border lines straight out to sea.
While the resulting map would greatly expand the federal territory assigned to Virginia (and presumably the amount of royalties that could flow to the commonwealth), Maryland and North Carolina would lose that territory and resulting revenue. In addition, the bill would require the rest of the nation to surrender money. Right now, there is no royalty structure for oil found off the Atlantic Coast.

The proposal would expand the royalty scheme in the Gulf of Mexico – where states get 37.5 percent of revenue from new drilling – to the Atlantic coast. Those royalties and revenues, which amount to billions of dollars, now go to the Treasury and from there to other states. Perhaps Rigell, Warner and Kaine can persuade enough other congressional delegations to forgo such a big revenue stream. Perhaps they can persuade Maryland and North Carolina (where some lawmakers also want to drill) to cede valuable offshore territory in exchange for nothing. They still can’t make an inherently risky enterprise safer, for the environment or for tourism, the second-largest economic sector in Hampton Roads.

The oil and gas industry has made some recent progress toward improving safety. But those meager efforts, combined with the industry’s poor environmental record and the still-incomplete accounting of how much oil and gas is off our shore, provide good reason to avoid betting Hampton Roads’ future. If Virginia is going to seriously consider drilling, the benefits must substantially outweigh the significant risks.
So far, it’s clear they don’t.

Special thanks to Richard Charter

fossil fuels, gulf of mexico clean-up, Gulf restoration, marine pollution, ocean pollution, offshore oil

Times-Picayune: BP, Coast Guard criticized for trying to downgrade oil spill clean-up efforts

Leave a comment

http://www.nola.com/environment/index.ssf/2013/06/coastal_authority_criticizes_b.html#incart_m-rpt-2

Nola.com

tar mats 2

Tar mats photographed on the beach at Elmer’s Island in September 2012, a few days after Hurricane Isaac. State officials say they are concerned more oil from the BP spill could surface after tropical storms this year. (Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority)
Print

By Mark Schleifstein, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune
Follow on Twitter
on June 19, 2013 at 11:25 PM, updated June 19, 2013 at 11:26 PM

The state Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority used its monthly meeting in Baton Rouge on Wednesday as a bully pulpit to criticize BP and the U.S. Coast Guard for their attempts to downgrade the continued clean-up of oiled wetlands and shoreline areas in Louisiana, in the wake of the 2010 Gulf oil spill triggered by the fatal explosion on the Macondo well.

The authority also criticized the Army Corps of Engineers for the agency’s attempts to turn over to state control completed segments of the post-Katrina New Orleans area levee system before the entire east and west bank system is determined to be complete.

The complaints about BP and the Coast Guard come a week after the company and federal agency announced that they’ve ended official “response” actions involving oil sightings in Mississippi, Alabama and Florida.

The public complaints are in part an effort to forestall a similar move in Louisiana, which authority Chairman Garret Graves said BP has been demanding and the Coast Guard has been threatening to do.

Coast Guard officials have repeatedly denied that they will end official clean-up efforts in Louisiana until it’s clear that contaminated shorelines are clean or that further cleanup would be more detrimental than leaving the remaining oil in place.

Drue Banta Winters, a lawyer who handles BP environmental response issues for Gov. Bobby Jindal, told the authority Wednesday that oil contamination continues to be found in patches along 200 miles of the state’s shoreline.

In April and May, 2.2 million pounds of oily material in Louisiana were collected, compared with 4,112 pounds in the other three states, she said.
A spokesman for BP said the company’s contractors continue to remove oily material from the state’s coastal area.

“We continue to make significant progress in Louisiana where most of our active cleanup activities in 2013 have focused on the barrier islands,” said BP spokesman Jason Ryan. “Over the past 6 months we have drilled over 14,000 auger holes and found that about 3 percent of the locations required any clean-up. Recovery of the material is nearly complete.

“In the marshes, the highest concentrations of oil were found primarily in Upper Barataria Bay and Middle Ground Shoal,” he said. “In Upper Barataria Bay, we have completed active cleanup and are now progressing the segments through the final inspection process.

“At Middle Ground Shoal, the area with the most remaining oiling is about a half-acre in size and includes both MC252 and non-MC252 oil,” Ryan said. BP’s Macondo well also is known as Mississippi Canyon 252, or MC252 for short.

“The Coast Guard has determined that intensive manual and mechanical treatment could do more harm than good. The (federal on-scene coordinator) is considering treatment options, including allowing this small, remote area to recover naturally,” he said. “Our operations in Louisiana will continue until the Coast Guard determines that active cleanup is complete.”

Graves said the state also is upset that the Coast Guard and BP have refused to commit to establishing a plan to inspect Louisiana beaches and wetlands for oil in the aftermath of a tropical storm or hurricane.

When Hurricane Isaac hit Louisiana last August, its storm surges and waves unearthed large quantities of oily material that had been buried beneath the sand along Grand Terre, Grand Isle, Fourchon Beach and Elmer’s Island, and oozing oil was discovered in other wetlands. Within days of the storm, BP contractors were collecting the material, a task that has continued into this year.

In public statements, BP and Coast Guard officials have said they will respond to any apparent resurfacing of oil, and have urged the public to report sightings to the Coast Guard’s National Response Center.

The criticism of the corps surfaced during a briefing by authority executive director Jerome Zeringue on the status of levees for the 2013 hurricane season, which extends through Nov. 30.

The corps has agreed to not turn over several major structures to the state, which would mean the state would be responsible for operating and maintaining them. While the state is the official local sponsor for the projects, the actual operation and maintenance would be done by local levee districts, acting under the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East and -West.

The structures include the storm surge barrier wall along Lake Borgne, which includes a navigation gate for ships and barges at the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway in eastern New Orleans and a smaller navigation gate for fishing vessels on Bayou Bienvenue; a storm surge gate at the Seabrook entrance of the Industrial Canal from Lake Pontchartrain; and the West Closure Complex on the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway on the West Bank, south of the confluence of the Harvey and Algiers canals.

The state and flood protection authority want the corps to operate the navigation gates at Seabrook and on the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway at the Lake Borgne barrier. Legislation pending before Congress would give the corps the responsibility of running only the Lake Borgne GIWW navigation gate.

Operation of the various gates – and operation and maintenance, including grass cutting and levee lifts, along the levees – will cost millions of dollars a year.

Graves said the state has repeatedly demanded that the entire levee system should undergo a comprehensive review before the state accepts authority for it. He said the corps’ attempts to send letters to the state and local levee districts indicating individual segments of the system are being turned over conflict with that plan.

Graves said the state is concerned about a variety of issues that state officials have raised about the design of some parts of the system, including the corps decision to allow contractors to use thicker sheet piling instead of coating the pilings with a material that would resist rust.

An independent peer review that the corps promised concerning the use of the thicker sheet pilings instead of the coatings has never been completed, Graves said.

Also awaiting test results is a decision by the corps on how to “armor” earthen levee segments to assure that storm surge doesn’t cause erosion. Tests on an East Bank levee in St. Charles Parish and a West Bank levee in Jefferson Parish of a fabric material through which grass grows is not yet complete.

_______________

Special thanks to Richard Charter

climate change, energy policy, fossil fuels, Keystone XL, national ocean politics, natural resource management

CREDO action: Building the new wave of resistance to Keystone XL: Action leader trainings this summer.

Leave a comment

Now that we kicked off the Pledge of Resistance with an amazing action on Monday in Chicago, the next step is make this much, much bigger.1

The core of the Pledge, and of our strategy to put enough pressure on President Obama that he has no choice but to reject Keystone XL, will be the threat of hundreds of peaceful civil disobedience actions across the country just like the one in Chicago. These actions will be planned and ready to be deployed if Obama’s State Department recommends that he approve Keystone XL — a decision we expect later in the fall.

It will take hundreds of trained activists across the country to organize these actions, and train tens of thousands of activists to safely take part in peaceful and dignified civil disobedience.

CREDO, Rainforest Action Network and the Other 98% have spent the past few months putting together the resources to train you to become a Pledge of Resistance action leader in your community.

Starting on June 29th, and running through July, we’re putting on weekend-long trainings in 25 cities to train activists to lead Pledge of Resistance actions in their own communities. Here’s the schedule:

June 29-30: San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, Boston
July 6-7: DC, Detroit, Portland, Los Angeles
July 13-14: NYC, Cincinnati, Denver, Phoenix, Albuquerque
July 20-21: Tampa, Miami, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Dallas, Houston
July 27-28: Raleigh, Atlanta, Des Moines, Kansas City, Salt Lake City, Tulsa

To make the Pledge of Resistance a game-changer in our fight against Keystone XL, we need hundreds of people like you, ready to take the next step in their activism. Click here to find your nearest training and RSVP.

These trainings are free. No experience is required. We have developed an amazing curriculum which will provide you with the resources and support you need to pull this off – even if you’ve never done anything like it before. But leading a local pledge of resistance action will be a significant commitment over the next few months. Here’s what we ask if you want to sign up for an Action Leader training:

Come to both days of the training. (If you don’t live in the city, that means you’ll need to find a place to stay overnight.)
Bring a friend. (There will be a lot to learn, so it’ll help to have someone else there to help you remember.)
Be firmly committed to principles of non-violence.
Have a serious intention to lead an action where you live. (That requires working with a training coach to develop an action blueprint from a list of local targets, assigning roles on your team, training activists to take action, then being ready for a decision on KXL.)

Not everyone will be able to lead a local action. For example if you live in a major city, there may be larger events planned, and we’d be relying on you to play a major planning and support role. In some places there may be multiple local leaders, and we’ll have you team up. Regardless, to pull this off, and have any chance of defeating Keystone XL, we need hundreds of highly trained climate organizers in cities and towns all over the country.

Whether you are now a seasoned organizer or an activist looking to get involved, this training will give you everything you need to be a leader in the fight against Keystone XL. You’ll learn all the tools you need to plan a civil disobedience action where you live, build an action team, and train your fellow activists to safely engage in peaceful and dignified civil disobedience. And you’ll be empowered with skills that you can continue to use to advocate for climate action beyond the Keystone XL fight.

This won’t be a game-changer unless people are ready to commit to it. If you are a ready to step up and be a leader in the Keystone XL Pledge of Resistance, click here to find your nearest training and RSVP.

Thanks for fighting Keystone XL.

Elijah Zarlin, Campaign Manager
CREDO Action from Working Assets

If you can’t attend a training or aren’t ready to make a commitment, the best way you can support this effort right now is by donating to fund this massive organizing effort to stop Keystone XL.

1. “22 Arrested in New Wave of Resistance to Keystone XL Pipeline

fossil fuels, Gulf restoration, marine mammals, offshore oil

E&E: OFFSHORE DRILLING: Landmark settlement aims to protect Gulf whales and dolphins

Leave a comment

Jeremy P. Jacobs, E&E reporters
Published: Friday, June 21, 2013

Conservation groups, the Interior Department and oil and gas representatives yesterday reached a landmark settlement that will place restrictions on the use of seismic surveys to protect vulnerable populations of whales and dolphins in the Gulf of Mexico.

The settlement focuses on the use of high-intensity air guns, which fire air into the water every 10 to 12 seconds for weeks and months at a time. The technology is critical to prospecting in the Gulf of Mexico for new places to drill.

Advocates including the Natural Resources Defense Council, Center for Biological Diversity, Sierra Club and Gulf Restoration Network allege that the blasts — which are sometimes as intense as dynamite — threaten bottlenose dolphins and sperm whales, both of which have experienced die-offs since the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill.

“Today’s agreement is a landmark for marine mammal protection in the Gulf,” said Michael Jasny of NRDC. “For years this problem has languished, even as the threat posed by the industry’s widespread, disruptive activity has become clearer and clearer.”

The environmental groups filed their lawsuit in 2010 in a Louisiana federal court. They claimed that the blasts disrupted the whales, dolphins and other ocean species that rely on sound to feed, mate and navigate, though industry groups strongly dispute that characterization.

The environmentalists claimed that Interior violated the Marine Mammal Protection Act and Endangered Species Act when it permitted the use of air guns without preparing an environmental impact statement.

Several industry groups, however, pushed back on the lawsuit and NRDC’s claims. Moreover, Chip Gill, president of the International Association of Geophysical Contractors, classified the settlement as a “huge victory” because his members were already implementing many of its terms.

The lawsuit, he said, contained “numerous outlandish and unsubstantiated allegations. The environmental groups can’t prove them, so they are settling.”

Gill said a worst-case scenario would have been for the court to throw out Interior’s 2004 National Environmental Policy Act review. If that happened, permits could have been revoked or a hold could have been placed on future permits. None of that is part of yesterday’s settlement, he said.

Sperm whales and bottlenose dolphins have experienced significant and unexplained die-offs in the Gulf of Mexico since the 2010 spill. Environmentalists have sought to point the finger at the spill, but government scientists are continuing to study the cause, and the air guns are seen as a confounding variable in solving the problem.

The settlement prohibits the use of air guns in biologically important areas, such as the DeSoto Canyon, which is particularly important to endangered sperm whales. The canyon is also critical to Bryde’s whales.

Under the agreement, industry also may not use air guns along coastal areas during the main calving season of bottlenose dolphins between March 1 and April 30, and the settlement requires a minimum separation distance between surveys.

Additionally, the settlement, which still must be approved by the court, requires the use of listening devices to make sure the air guns aren’t disrupting marine mammals.

“The settlement not only secures new protections for whales and dolphins harmed by deafening air guns but also establishes a process for investigating alternatives to air gun surveys,” said Ellen Medlin of the Sierra Club, referring to a mandated Bureau of Ocean Energy Management report on new standards and multiyear research project to be developed on an less harmful alternative.

“As a result,” Medlin said, “the settlement not only delivers immediate benefits for Gulf marine mammals, but also takes the first step towards a long-term solution.”

Special thanks to Richard Charter

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