Nearly 70 Organizations Call on Obama to Protect the Gulf of Mexico

Map depicting the effects of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill (source: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.)

by Gaius Publius

"The question now is whether we will have the courage to act [on climate change] before it’s too late."
    –Barack Obama, 2013

We've written about Obama, his language, his legacy, and his climate change actions here — "Climate Change and Barack Obama’s Legacy" — and in that piece discussed Obama's refusal to completely close public land and waters for fossil fuel extraction. Quoting Farron Cousins:

Under President Obama’s watch, the United States has become the largest fossil fuel producer on the planet when accounting for both oil and liquefied natural gas production. In terms of just crude oil production, the U.S. falls to third place, behind Russia and Saudi Arabia.

Oil and gas obtained via hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) now accounts for 50% of U.S. oil production, and, thanks to the Republican-controlled [but Democratic-enabled] Congress, the 40-year-long ban on crude oil exports was lifted.

Meanwhile, the government is still auctioning offshore oil and gas leases, even after President Obama presided over the largest ever oil spill in U.S. waters. Fracking continues its incredible boom, despite reports showing a rise in human-caused earthquakes related to fracking wastewater injections.

We also noted:

• Federal lands and waters could have accounted for 24 percent of all energy-related GHG emissions in the United States in 2012.

• Combustion of coal from federal lands accounts for more than 57 percent of all emissions from fossil-fuel production on federal lands.

• Methane pollution from venting and flaring from onshore federal leases rose more than 51 percent between 2008 and 2013, according to government data.

All excellent reasons for a legacy-seeking president to end all fossil fuel extraction on publicly held land and waters. Nevertheless, Obama has in the main resisted. Yes, there have been some new restriction of offshore drilling in the new five-year plan, but only to drilling in the Atlantic Ocean — that is, off the wealth-populated eastern seaboard.

Now come nearly 70 environmental organizations to ask that he do just that — end all offshore drilling. From the Sierra Club press release (my emphasis):

Nearly 70 Organizations Call on President Obama to Protect the Gulf of Mexico

Groups Call for the Gulf to be Excluded from the Five Year Plan
Tuesday, October 4, 2016

New Orleans, LA -- Today, nearly 70 groups sent a letter to President Obama, urging him to build on his climate legacy and remove the Gulf of Mexico from the 2017-2022 Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Leasing Program and immediately initiate a plan to transition the region away from a fossil fuel economy and towards one powered by clean energy.

In the latest draft of the five year offshore drilling plan released in March, the Obama administration removed leases in the Atlantic Ocean, but kept in leasing for the the Arctic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico.

As of 2016, more than 20 million acres of the Gulf have been leased to the oil and gas industry, and the 2017-2022 leasing plan, in its current state, will open it up further. Currently, approximately 80 percent of the previously leased acreage has yet to be developed.

Groups point to significant environmental impacts felt throughout the Gulf as a result of offshore drilling, noting numerous pipeline bursts, spills, and rig failures that have inundated the waters with oil and toxins, as well as onshore effects leveled by the petrochemical industry against communities of color across the region.

The letter calls for fossil fuel operations to be replaced with a clean energy alternative: wind. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, the Gulf of Mexico has the potential to generate 5,000 MW of wind power by 2030, supporting more than 20,000 full-time jobs.

More here. The letter is here (pdf).

Barack Obama is being challenged to choose. Does he want to protect the high-wealth eastern seaboard only and let the oil-and-gas industry risk trashing the less wealthy Gulf states (see map above)? Or does he want to save the coastal and offshore environment for all the citizens of the U.S. — and indeed of the world?

Is he counting on half measures to fully guarantee his legacy? I guess that depends on what you take his legacy needs to be, including the need for big-money donors like those mentioned here.

More simply: Does Barack Obama himself have the courage he called for? Or will that be his legacy, that he did not?

GP
  

Consider all those Deepwater Horizon reports safely buried before they're even written

PLUS: "Big Dick" Cheney gets his heart fixed.
Now what about his brain? (See below)


"'It's disappointing,' said 84-year-old Walt Parker, chairman of the Alaska Oil Spill Commission, which made dozens of recommendations for preventing a recurrence. 'It's almost as though we had never written the report.'"

-- from "Lessons from Exxon Valdez spill have gone unheeded" by Joe Stephens, in today's Washington Post

by Ken

Howie has been doing his usual diligent job covering the Gulf oil disaster and its terrible but predictable roots in the insatiable greed of the energy industry and the collaboration of its government "regulators," so that I don't think I've had occasion to write about it since my May 30 post, "Déjà vu all over again: Who could have foreseen the Deepwater Horizon disaster?" -- prompted by an article that appeared in that day's New York Times, "Documents Show Early Worries About Safety of Rig." The article had set me to thinking back to another of those totally unexpected and inexplicable disasters, the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, which turned out to be not only predictable but predicted, something we might never have learned if Nobel physicist Richard Feynman hadn't overcome his skepticism about the seriousness of the commission appointed to "investigate" the disaster and accepted a place on it, and proceeded to undermine the commission whitewashers by seeking out the right people and asking them the right questions.

Back then I wrote:

I learned something from that experience which other people already knew but which we all need to learn, one way or another. Anytime one of these "inexplicable" events occurs, surpassing the limits of human understanding, just wait for it. The odds are overwhelming that soon enough we'll learn that not only can it be understood, it was understood, and was probably a subject of deadly concern among the initiated.

The odds are also extremely good that a small, beleaguered band of fact-based whiners was pitted against a larger, or at any rate more powerful, group of deniers. Usually it will turn out that the deniers were looking at a balance sheet, seeing precious dollars flying out the window to assuage the concerns of the comparatively lowly whiners, who might not even know how to read a balance sheet.

In the end, of course, the balance sheet on the Challenger didn't look all that great even to the all-important and all-powerful Money People. Just as the balance sheet on the Deepwater Horizon mess isn't going to look so good, unless you happen to be looking at the balance sheet of one of the companies that is, er, cleaning up on the disaster. (Never forget that article of faith to the Corporate Right: Disasters are just financial windfalls that haven't been cashed in yet.)

Thank goodness we've now got our own commission to investigate the Deepwater Horizon disaster. I bet its report is going to be a shocker, whose findings will reverberate throughout the energy industry and government regulation thereof. Ha ha ha! Is that hilarious, or what? On the contrary, I expect that even as we speak a place is being found for that eventual report on a shelf in a dingy, out-of-the-way basement right next to the report on the Exxon Valdez oil-spill disaster.

In today's Washington Post, reporter Joe Stephens has a piece with the shocking headline "Lessons from Exxon Valdez spill have gone unheeded." Here's a bit of what he has to report:

[T]he full story of the Exxon Valdez wreck. . . offers striking parallels to today's events in the Gulf of Mexico -- including a central role played by a consortium led by British Petroleum, now known as BP.

A commission that investigated the Alaska spill found that oil companies cut corners to maximize profits. Systems intended to prevent disaster failed, and no backups were in place. Regulators were too close to the oil industry and approved woefully inadequate accident response and cleanup plans.

History is repeating, say officials who investigated the Valdez, because the lessons of two decades ago remain unheeded.

"It's disappointing," said 84-year-old Walt Parker, chairman of the Alaska Oil Spill Commission, which made dozens of recommendations for preventing a recurrence. "It's almost as though we had never written the report."

Marine experts predict that the many panels investigating the Deepwater Horizon blowout -- including a presidential commission that began work this week in New Orleans -- will produce reports with numerous findings that could have been cut and pasted from the 20-year-old report written by Parker's commission or another body that examined the Valdez accident. They also fear those findings may have no more impact than the Valdez conclusions have.

For more details, check out Stephens's report, though I can't think why you would want to bother. Surely we can consider all those reports for all practical purposes already safely buried and forgotten before they've even been written. We already have a pretty good idea how this latest disaster came about -- whose stupefying as well as literally death-defying money-saving "shortcuts" led to the disaster, and which government agencies, backed by which pro-business political factions, enabled them.

Already, however, even though the water-carrying energy-industry shills of the Right don't like being caught too flagrantly licking their masters' boots, the stooges are hard at work sanitizing the history of this disaster so as to grease its passage down the legendary and indispensable Right-Wing Memory Hole. By the time those reports reporter Stephens mentions start tumbling out, even if by chance any of their authors take their job seriously, the public is apt to remember mostly how BP organized its great 2010 "All You Can Carry" free crude-oil giveaway.


OK, THEY'VE FIXED BIG DICK'S HEART. NOW
CAN THEY DO ANYTHING ABOUT HIS BRAIN?

"The Scarecrow reveals that he lacks a brain and desires above all else to have one. . . . "
"[The Tin Man's] desire for a heart notably contrasts with the Scarecrow's desire for brains, reflecting a common debate between the relative importance of the mind and the emotions. . . . "
"The Cowardly Lion joins [Dorothy] so that he can ask The Wizard for courage, being ashamed that, in his cultural role as the King of the Beasts, he is not indeed brave. . . . "

-- Wikipedia

--------------------
News Alert: Former vice president Cheney says he had heart surgery last week
04:35 PM EDT Wednesday, July 14, 2010
--------------------

Former vice president Dick Cheney said in a statement Wednesday that he underwent surgery last week after he "began to experience increasing congestive heart failure," the Reuters news service reported. Doctors implanted a new heart pump in Cheney, 69, who has a long history of heart problems.

For more information, visit washingtonpost.com:
http://link.email.washingtonpost.com/r/5O5UA2/38UOQ/QFQBR0/RVTL6Z/14YIG/RF/t

As for courage, that seems hopelessly out of the question. Note that unmitigated gall, which the former vice president unquestionably has, not only isn't the same thing as courage but is a pathetic substitute for it. In the wimpiest of war-wimp fashion, this deep geopolitical thinker who believes in invading any country that won't give him a blowjob made damn sure he never got near a battlefield when he had his chance to walk the walk. It hardly came as a surprise that he demonstrates his manliness by "hunting" small birds furnished for the occasion while sitting drunk in a vehicle (clearly having imbibed more than just the spirit of the Second Amendment), shooting . . . well, shooting wherever the hell his weapon happens to point.

Whatta guy!

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Is the administration determined to make the Gulf oil-rig disaster "Obama's Katrina"?

Do they think we'll never find out? This May 11 satellite photo showing oil dispersing in the Gulf was finally released -- on the 17th.

by Ken

This Agonist post of Sean Paul Kelley's yesterday was titled, appropriately enough, "I Told You So!":

I told you so, I told you so, I told you so a thousand times:

BP director on MSNBC just now says what's really threatening Gulf states is not the oil leak but "alarmist" claims by scientists

Expect more of this. Expect the Feds and BP to do as much as they can to prevent real science from being performed on the underwater plumes and then flacks to pollute their airwaves denying that the massive dying off of fish stocks, crabs, oysters, porpoises and so much more are natural and had NOTHING, absolutely nothing to do with the Gulf Gusher.

Sean Paul has been all over the oil-gusher disaster, and the insufficiency of the response. The post to which this one immediately refers began by quoting this gem from Digby:

I keep seeing scientists on TV with that "hair on fire" look about them, nearly frantic, trying to get people to understand how serious the spill is. They are followed by oil company flacks saying it's no big deal and politicians turning it into he-said/she-said. It's the strangest disaster coverage I've ever witnessed.

Sean Paul points out, though, that "Much of the oil may never 'wash' ashore," thanks to all those chemical dispersants being dumped into the Gulf of Mexico. (And that's not going to cause any problems, nosiree!)

I think the oil companies had a pretty good idea of what would happen by using them, in essence that they would prevent or substantially delay millions of gallons of oil washing up on shore. And with that being the case the damage would be below the sea, in which they could then hire faux-scientists to spew arguments in the media about how fish stocks and oyster stocks (among others) were in terminal decline before the oil spill and their disappearance has nothing to do with the oil spill.

We're only seeing this just begin. But if less oil than any one expects washes ashore and "only" kills coral and wildlife under the sea in the Keys and other places, I guarantee you these arguments will be made and believed. After all, you going to believe your eyes or what the pointy headed libruls tell you?

What's really shocking Sean Paul, and not just him, is that the administration has managed -- surprise! -- to locate itself, not just on the side of the oil companies, but in apparent cahoots with them on what has clearly become a massive effort at cover-up. WTF?

Think back to the immediate aftermath of the rig blow-up, when Lyin' Rush led the Right-Wing Scumbag Chorale suggesting that it was all a liberal plot, and then that it was -- what else? -- all Obama's fault. It was grotesque. Yet another demonstration of the far right's total divorce from any semblance of reality, not to mention honesty or decency. "Obama's Katrina," they were calling it.

And at the time it did seem grotesque, beginning with the still-astonishing right-wing whitewash of the Bush regime, which began by playing with their tiny penises while the hurricane took dead aim at the undefended city of New Orleans, its inherent indefensibility having been greatly augmented by the thieving incompetence and ideological putridity of the regime, and then even after the catastrophe befell, those vile effing doodybrains just kept right on playing with their puds.

And the Bush pukepile's own incompetence and malicious indifference to and traitorous disregard for anyone who isn't part of the predatory corporate-criminal subculture of society that invented that swinish nonentity as a national figure had been so thoroughly imprinted on the federal government, which they were so determined to prove can't do nuttin' for nobody (except of course enable their slash-and-burn crusade of predatory thieving), that the entire government sat on its collective fat, lazy, stupid ass and burped and farted the days away as the city and far too many of its inhabitants died.

No, the hurricane itself wasn't the fault of those miserable sons of bitches. Everything else was, though.

Of course that Obama administration hasn't been that inept and disengaged in responding to the Gulf disaster. The mere fact that it has responded puts it in an entire other category. And yet, and yet. As in so many areas, the agenda of the Obama administration is far harder than one would wish to distinguish from that of the Bush regime.

Can anyone explain how it serves the interests of anyone except the people who allowed this to happen to make the first consideration a PR blitz in which the only concern is making believe that it's not such a big deal, everything's under control, when every shred of evidence indicates that, literally, nothing could be further from the truth? Why is it considered even permissible, let alone desirable, for the government to lie to the American people?

I don't know, maybe I'm missing something here.

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Another Wake-Up Call For The World’s Biggest Oil Junkie

Ken and I have been grappling with the horror of the Horizon deepwater oil drilling rig disaster all week but I was lucky enough to run into renowned energy expert Chris Nelder and to somehow persuade him to help put the whole catastrophe into some kind of useful perspective. No ideologue, Chris' goal has long been to get America to understand the reality of its energy situation, based on the decade he's spent studying and writing about energy and related issues. He's written two acclaimed books on the topic, Profit From The Peak and Investing In Renewable Energy, not to mention nearly a thousand articles on energy and investing. And aside from consulting with government and business leaders on the future of energy, he runs his own blog at GetREALList.com. I asked Chris to give us a little tutorial on what makes last week's disaster so important and what we as a society need to do about it. Chris:

America Still Doesn’t Get It

OK, America, it’s time to get real about energy.

The explosion and destruction of the Horizon deepwater rig and the subsequent oil spill disaster are only the latest in a series of wake-up calls you’ve received. Are you listening now?

Your first warning came in 1956, with the publication of M. King Hubbert’s model of US oil production, which correctly predicted its peak in 1970. When Hubbert updated his model on camera in 1976, he also nailed the peak of worldwide conventional oil production in 2005.

Since then, production has remained flat at roughly 74 million barrels per day (mbpd), despite prices gyrating wildly from $40 to $147 to $33 and back to $86 today. High prices did not deliver more oil to market.

Very simply, the cheap and easy oil is gone. What’s left is smaller, harder to find, of lesser quality, and in much more challenging places-- under a mile of water and another five miles of rock, for example. It’s expensive, risky, and yes, dangerous.

American domestic oil production peaked in October, 1970 at just over 10 mbpd. It has been in a steadily declining trend ever since, and now stands at 5.5 mpbd.

Over 30 percent of domestic production is from offshore drilling, of which about three-quarters comes from the Gulf of Mexico. Deepwater oil production has only become possible in recent years with the development of cutting-edge technology. We do it not because it’s without risk, but because we need the oil-- badly. Only offshore is it still possible to find a field in North America that can deliver over 100,000 bpd. Just two of the Gulf fields, Thunder Horse and Atlantis, produce a combined 350,000 bpd.

By comparison, the remaining onshore resources in North America are now decidedly marginal. The days of gusher strikes onshore in the U.S. are long gone. About 1.2 mbpd, or over 20 percent of domestic production, comes from thousands of small “stripper wells” producing under 15 (yes, 15) barrels per day. Low-quality resources like tar sands and shale oil are vast but expensive, and so difficult to scale that they can’t reverse the long-term decline.

The U.S now imports 9.4 mbpd of crude. At $85 a barrel, that’s an $800 million-a-day hole in our pocket, or $292 billion a year. And our import dependency is only getting worse.

An oil export crisis has been developing for years, as oil producers consume more of their own output and Asia outbids the West for declining global exports.

Even so, as the world’s most dependent oil junkie, our demand for oil has held firm. The decline in U.S. oil demand from 21 mpbd in 2007 to 18.6 mbpd today was almost entirely due to lost industrial demand; gasoline demand remained virtually flat throughout the entire oil price spike and recession.

For every finger pointed at an oil company, three point back at us.

Like the whaling ships of the late 1800s that would sail to the ends of the earth in search of whale oil, deepwater drilling is proof that we are willing to pay enormous sums and go to extraordinary lengths and depths to get oil. We have chosen to accept the risks of environmental damage, the horror of oil wars, and the deaths of rig workers in exchange for a continuing supply of cheap, convenient fuel.

We built an entire economy and topography of civilization on the premise of endless, cheap fuel, and profited handsomely from the ever-increasing bounty of the Age of Oil. But having reached the point where it can no longer be increased, and the risks have grown intolerable, we whine and accuse and complain like teenagers, claim we were victimized, and act as though our demand for oil were an unfortunate accident we had no part in.

Isn’t it time ask ourselves how much more risk we’re willing to take, to accept the situation like adults, and plan accordingly?

Since Hubbert’s first warning, our wake-up calls have come ever faster: The Arab oil embargo of the early 1970s and the gasoline rationing that followed. Oil spills. Oil wars. Economically devastating oil price spikes driven by hurricanes and shrinking spare production capacity. And the increasingly frequent spectacle of sinking and spilling offshore rigs.

Yet somehow, this stark and deadly serious reality has escaped our notice. The eager search for a scapegoat in the wake of the Horizon disaster is a clear sign that America simply doesn’t get it.

After highly visible disasters like the Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969, the Exxon Valdez spill, and now the Horizon spill, the public understands the risk of offshore oil production. What it doesn’t understand-- at all-- are the choices we now have to make.

Those calling for an end to offshore oil production in the U.S. apparently don’t understand that it accounts for over 30 percent of our domestic supply. They don’t understand that making offshore oil off-limits would be a double-whammy to our pocketbooks, both restricting our income and forcing us to import even more oil at ever-higher prices. They have an inkling that ethanol production is pressuring food supply, but have no concept that the non-food alternatives, like fuel from algae and cellulosic ethanol, are still puny, and a long way from being ready to scale up and replace oil.

Instead of having a rational discussion about how we’re going to manage our remaining offshore oil resources, we look to technology… as if deepwater drillships and blowout preventers and acoustic shutoff switches were the problem, rather than miraculous solutions only a dedicated junkie could love. These technologies don’t fall from the sky. Every safety measure ever invented came as the result of a lesson learned the hard way.

Instead of discussing how we’re going to break our addiction to oil, we turn to politics…as if yelling “Drill, Baby, Drill” or “Spill, Baby, Spill” even louder, or changing tack on our energy policy every four years, could amount to a solution.

All of our politically-driven energy approaches--carbon caps and trading schemes, offshore leases and moratoriums, short-term incentives for renewables, and so on--
are woefully incapable of addressing our long term problem.

It’s easy to vilify oil and its producers, and it’s politically popular to call for an end to drilling, but replacing oil is far more difficult and expensive than anyone seems to understand.

Here’s the real challenge.

Within two to three years, global oil production will begin a long decline. As a rough rule of thumb, the world will lose roughly 25% of its oil supply in 25 years, 50% in 50 years, and 100% in 100 years.

It’s likely that we will also see the peaks of natural gas and coal in the next 20 years. Hydropower and nuclear will do little more than hold their current market share.

By the end of the century, nearly everything will have to be powered by renewably-generated electricity, not liquids or gases.

But scaling up renewables to take over for fossil fuels, and transitioning all the infrastructure, is going to be mind-bogglingly expensive, difficult, and slow. Renewables like solar and wind currently make up less than two percent of the world’s primary energy supply. It will take decades of effort and trillions of dollars in investment to offset a mere 20 percent of global demand with renewables, and we’ll have to do it in an environment of declining fossil fuel supply and shrinking economies.

For another rule of thumb, consider this: To compensate for the decline of oil alone using renewables, the world would need to build the equivalent of all the world’s existing renewable energy capacity, every year. Since that is impossible, efficiency and a long transition to renewably powered infrastructure must make up the shortfall. This will take 50 years or more to achieve.

If we use it wisely, offshore domestic oil could provide a crucial portion of the fuel we’ll need in order to build that new infrastructure. But if we remain in ignorance of our energy reality, letting politics be our guide and scapegoating oil companies upon their every misfortune, we’ll go down in flames as surely as the Horizon did.

One more tool in the deepwater toolbox, be it an acoustic shutoff device or something not even invented yet, will not solve our problems. Scapegoating drillers while we continue to pump gasoline into our tanks is unproductive and hypocritical. Hyping the size of marginal resources like shale without acknowledging their low flow rates is disingenuous. And championing alternatives that can’t even meet half a percent of our needs, like non-food biofuels, while trying to shut down the 10 percent of our supply that deepwater production provides, betrays a suicidal ignorance of our reality.

It’s time to wake up, put politics aside, get a grip on the scale of the problem and its solutions, and develop a serious energy plan.