This may useful in courses on GEP/environmental policy...
-----Original Message----- From: International Society for Environmental Ethics on behalf of Ronnie Hawkins Sent: Sat 5/8/2010 4:15 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [ISEE-L] On the expanding oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico ====== This message is from the ISEE-L electronic mailing list. ============= ========= See the end of this message for more information, ================= ============= including how to subscribe or unsubscribe. ==================== I'm surprised there hasn't been any discussion on this list as yet regarding this enormous ecological disaster. Here's s clip from today's Democracy Now! about the "moratorium" on new drilling permits--what a charade! (I can remember my dismay when President Obama appointed an old man wearing a cowboy hat as his Secretary of the Interior. One of the first in what is now a very long list of betrayals.) It seems this and other oil rigs have been permitted with no environmental impact statement under a "categorical exclusion" originally meant to cover things like constructing hiking trails. Unbelieveable--except it's not it's all too believeable, given our current status quo. AMY GOODMAN: Salazars announcement comes on the heel of a Washington Post expos revealing that the Minerals Management Service had approved BPs drilling plan in the Gulf of Mexico without any environmental review. The article notes that the agency under Secretary Salazar had quote categorically excluded BPs drilling as well as hundreds of other offshore drilling permits from environmental review. The agency was able to do this using a loophole in the National Environmental Policy Act created for minimally intrusive actions like building outhouses and hiking trails. Well, for more on this story, were joined now from Tucson, Arizona by Kieran Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity. Welcome to DEMOCRACY NOW!, Kieran. Explain this loophole, how you found it, and what it means for the Gulf. KIERAN SUCKLING: Well, when a federal government is going to approve a project, it has to go through an environmental review. But for projects that have very, very little impact like building an outhouse or a hiking trail, they can use something called a categorical exclusion and say theres no impact here at all so we dont need to spend energy or time doing a review. Well, we looked at the oil drilling permits being issued by the Minerals Management Service in the Gulf, and we were shocked to find out that they were approving hundreds of massive oil drilling permits using this categorical exclusion instead of doing a full environmental impact study. And then, we found out that BPs drilling permitthe very one that explodedwas done under this loophole and so it was never reviewed by the federal government at all. It was just rubber-stamped. JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, according to the Washington Post article, in one of its assessments of the agency estimated that a large oil spill from a deep platform like the Deepwater Horizon would not exceed a total of 1,500 barrels and that a deepwater spill occurring off the Intercontinental shelf would not reach the coast. Obviously, both of thoseboth of those assessments have proven dramatically off the mark. As many as 250-400 waivers a year for drilling in the Gulf? KIERAN SUCKLING: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Its also important to note that when the government says its very unlikely this spill will occur, its unlikely the spill will reach shore, those arent even the governments own assessments. Theyre just repeating what BP, Exxon, and other oil companies put in their drilling applications. And since theres no environmental impact study, the government never actually does an independent review. So everyone is just repeating the industrys statements as they rubber-stamp the approvals. . . . . . JUAN GONZALEZ: I want to play a clip of President Obama where he says that oil spills dont come from rigs, but from refineries. He was speaking on April 2nd, just over two weeks before the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig. PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: I want to put out, by the way, that oil rigs today generally dont cause spills. They are technologically very advanced. Even during Katrina, the spills didnt come from the oil rigs, they came from the refineries onshore. JUAN GONZALEZ: Kieran Suckling, your response? KIERAN SUCKLING: Yeah, I mean, I think what the President has said here is actually just very, very critical, because he is repeating, and I suspect without even knowing it, the big lie of offshore oil drilling. For decades, the oil companies and the Minerals Management Services have told us, Oil drilling is safe, its fine, thats not where oil spills come from. In fact, thats the basis of not doing any environmental review is, you simply assert it will never be a problem, therefore, you dont even have to study it. When its true that they dont leak often, but when they do leak, its absolutely catastrophic. Its very similar to nuclear power plants. They dont often fail, but when they fail its catastrophic. And, therefore, you have to plan for catastrophe. You have to do very intensive environmental analysis, not simply say, Its rare, so we can ignore it. AMY GOODMAN: Kieran Suckling, what do think has to happen right now? KIERAN SUCKLING: Well, first off, I think that the President should announce a complete moratorium on all new offshore oil drilling. This three-week time-out is really too little, too late. And its very important to do that now because the president, under the urging of Secretary of Interior Ken Salazar, has planned to open up new offshore oil drilling in Alaska, in the eastern Gulf of Mexico, and on the Atlantic coast. And that just needs to end. Its not safe anywhere, anytime. Secondly, the president should immediately revoke existing oil permits and especially in Alaska. Shell Oil, this July, has- is going to start doing offshore oil drilling in the Chukchi Sea of Alaska. And if you think its difficult to clean up oil in the relatively warm, calm Gulf of Mexico, imagine trying to do this with icebergs and sea ice, twenty hours of darkness in the Arctic oceans. It just cannot be done. If this spill had happened in Alaska, its magnitude would have been ten times worse than has happened in the Gulf. Then, thirdly, the President should start an initiation of an investigation of Ken Salazar and his role in allowing this to happen. Salazar has been a major proponent of the offshore oil drilling industry. He passed legislation as a senator in 2006 to open up the Gulf of Mexico in the first place to offshore oil drilling. He gets campaign contributions by British Petroleum. And then he walks into this agency he is supposed to reform, and instead of reforming it, pushes it to do even more offshore oil drilling. So Ken Salazar is part of the problem here, not the solution. He should not be doing the investigation of MMS. He should be under investigation for helping to cause this crisis. --No kidding. And how about investigating Haliburton, while we're at it, for the shoddy job they did on a cut-off valve that blew out 20 hours after they "finished" the job? Are we EVER going to call for a reversal of our present course? Ronnie =========================================================================== ISEE-L is a discussion list for the International Society for Environmental Ethics. Its creation was authorized by the ISEE Board of Directors in December 2000. It is intended to be a forum for announcements and discussion related to teaching and research in environmental ethics. 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