Land Managers Ask Salazar To Finalize Reforms
Onshore Drilling Has Environmental Risks, Too
By Deb Courson, Public News Service, Guest Writer, 5-18-10
The Gulf of Mexico oil spill has led Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to announce there will be reforms on how leases are granted for offshore drilling. Meanwhile, 60 former land managers have sent him a letter about onshore drilling, asking him to finalize reforms he announced in January.
Gloria Flora formerly supervised the Lewis and Clark National Forest in Montana, where she made a decision to halt oil and gas leasing due to environmental concerns. She signed on to the letter because she claims accidents happen almost everywhere there is production.
“We’ve seen problems crop up continuously with onshore oil and gas drilling, and so you do wonder what it’s going to take.”
Mike Dombeck, former Chief of the U.S. Forest and director of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, also has signed the letter. His point is restoration of balance in all uses of public lands, instead of making development a priority.
“We should protect the health of the land that includes hunting and fishing and grazing and all the other uses, and have that be on an equal plane with oil and gas development.”
Oil and gas companies say they take safety seriously; they accuse environmental groups of taking advantage of the Gulf accident to try to ban all domestic production.
The letter to Secretary Salazar does not call for a halt in drilling. It recommends a middle ground that allows development to continue, but be more tightly monitored.
Editor’s note: Interesting reading on the subject here.
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Mike Dombeck, Gloria Flora....let me guess. Bill Wade, David Parsons, um, er, anyway, I bet I'd recognize at least 15 of them as being green as oil eating algae.
How about posting this famous letter?
http://science.howstuffworks.com/federal-land-oil-drilling.htm
I've been pondering something lately. During WW II the Nazi sank many many oil tankers off the east coast not to mention hundreds of ships at sea. I don't have the time nor inclination to research it-but I wonder what kind of "ecological" disaster washed ashore in 1943.
I have never seen any studies that enumerate and evaluate the environmental damages from WWII ships sunk at sea and on the beaches of the battlefields. I think I read that almost two hundred at Normandy were sunk. No matter, the losses were catastrophic in today's language, and the long term impacts are unknown, or at least no telling and apparent daily. And so it will be with the Gulf spill. I sometimes wonder if the Exxon Valdez cleanup effort made the situation worse, not better, and the way to deflect litigation is to make any effort, good or bad, but an effort at clean up. Is our litigious society so combative that we daily are involved in defending not the environment, but our collective asses, from attorneys intent on turning disaster into profits?
Any venture comes with risk. If we run our society to reduce risk, that is smart. But to run it to have zero risk, or if there is risk, not do whatever, then we slowly strangle in the tethers of our societal restraints, and some other entity will come along to take over and put the pieces back together, and most likely not in a configuration that most will appreciate. We do have to be rational, if that is now possible in these United States.
I listened on Public Radio to a scientist who said that two Very Large oil tankers had collided near Trinidad a few years back, in a spill of huge dimensions, and in ten days, the oil slick could not be found. Warm water, Arab light crude, aerosols, bacteria, and the oil had either become greenhouse gases or been eaten by bacteria. He said that Pemex, the Mexican oil cartel had also had a big blowout spill, and that oil had been devoured by micro organisms in the warm waters of the Gulf. He also said the daily "seeping" from oil reserves untapped in the Gulf were in an amount greater than that being released by the BP well, and that keeps the bacteria numbers substantial and available. Not that I condone, want, cheer, or value any oil spill for any reason, but we do have to be rational. Or is it we can't "waste a perfectly good crisis" as Rahm Emanuel believes?
Perhaps Salazaar and the true green activists should google the Bakken Field, and while they are at it, they may wish to contact the Canadian/Saskatchewan Authorities overseeing drilling in S.E. Saskatchewan....reliable contacts working on the ground in transporting crude and managing drilling sites report few, if any incidents associated with handling the "light,sweet crude" coming from the onshore Bakken field there and the Bakken in Montana, North Dakota a la the US.
The US imports much oil from Canada and additional pipelines are being placed in the corridor (5 now, more lines later) running S.E. across Saskatchewan. The Canadian Government has instituted
effective land restoration policies(organic soil stockpiling and replacement) even with the install of oil transmission pipelines headed toward the central US.
This supply is not impacting ground water aquifers in the prairies due to specific drilling and piping techniques currently being used
in northern US and Saskatchewan.
The Bakken field has been repeatedly upgraded/ assessed by the USGS in terms of massive supplies on our own/Canadian terrain, with proven means of extraction below 6000ft.
Having traveled to SE. Saskatchewan for over 30 years, it can be reliably reported that virtually no impacts have occured on natural resources(wetlands,water,wildlife) in the vacinity of drilling sites or
pipeline corridors....in fact the wildlife populations in the area of the above mentioned (subsurface) pipelines have increased due to opening of watered terrain and careful restoration of ag. lands
Let's take the politics out of the fight for energy in this instance, and learn from the Bakken!
Canada has shown remarkable dexterity in its policy and public/private partnerships and innovation...we can replace adversary politics with intelligent exchange of proven practice....and move on to agile resource practice that serves our future...not the futures of OPEC, and preserves our virtually unique coastal natal estuaries and waterways..
Oil is NOT toxic. You could drink all you want(and perhaps run all you want to the can). Our company used to do a lot of environmental work on pulling old leaky fuel tanks. I asked our enviro guys what they did with all the "toxic" soil that was contaminated, thinking they would haul it off to a special landfill in Utah somewhere. Instead, They told me they hauled it to the local landfill, where it was "turned" by a disc plow every couple months to let the "microbes and bacteria" do their thing, and made dandy topsoil. The Govt. has since decided to leave the tanks in place and let the soil "bio remediate". Which means the natural bacteria eventually eats it up and farts it out as Co2.
I did a little quick Googling about WWII tankers sunk. There were 20 tankers sunk in 1942 in the Gulf of Mexico. I'm sure not all were filled. But the average T2 tanker held 6 million gallons! The Exxon Valdez spilled 10 million(something doesn't add up here since the Valdez had a much larger capacity-did they pump most of it out). Around the world 860 tankers were sunk. I have a feeling that the gulf coast was an "ecological disaster" in WWII, that went away on it's own.
Doesn't any of the intelectuals at the AP ever think about this stuff.
I've got a lot more confidence in "intelectuals" than the half-baked information you're offering, logger.
Your local news media realizes this. Do you notice your local newspaper has shunted the "nation and World" section, which is all AP reporting, off to section F at the back of the paper. It's all local news now-the AP used to lead in the front page. The paper realizes that most of their readers not only get their national news somewhere else, most of their readers despise the AP. I don't need the AP to think for me Tom. Seek perspective TOm.
Oil is toxic if you ingest too much. The stuff they refine out of oil can be toxic just to sniff or get on your skin. The whole gamut of organic chemistry is available in the refining processes which does not mean the raw material, Gulf light crude, is in itself the worst and most toxic material on earth. Your basement and the radon gas is probably a lot more toxic over time. The Gulf has the ability to heal, and the frigging engineers had better come up with a lot better way to shut down a well head. That is the whole of it for now. In the meantime, all the usual suspects will strut and preen, and voice their politically correct utterances, which will only make getting progress on the control and stopper mechanism slower. Lead, follow, or get out of the way. The universal goal is to get that well controlled, not to stop using fossil fuels worldwide. That will come in time, of its own encumbering disadvantages.
I'm thinking the notion of open comments ought to have three sections for comments:
Fascist, Socialist, and Undecided.
It would probably save time.
I've been learning more about oil spills from various sources lately, and have the luxury of being able to withhold judgment about how catastrophic this particular one will be from my far-off home in Idaho. The only thing I've demeaned in this thread is the leakage of toxic nonsense and the casual derision of the AP.
I'm all in favor of oil spills magically disappearing, but it just doesn't seem very likely that the world really does work that way. For the millions of people who live in the area that's immediately affected this time around, and who will suffer the consequences to the quality of their lives and livelihoods, having a some yokel in the Pacific Northwest tell them not to sweat it because oil isn't toxic and he swam on the beach in Santa Barbara seems rather demeaning to me.
Obviously, engineers are likely to make more headway in improving the situation than Congress is (as always). The problem is that engineers work under management constraints, and management needs adult supervision. The technician's first-person account that 60 Minutes ran last week spoke volumes in that regard. The evidence that the Deepwater Horizon's blowout preventer was fatally damaged was there, but willfully ignored because any source of delay was deemed unacceptable.
Now we know being late isn't the worst that could happen.
This oil spill will magically disappear Tom. Just like Santa Barbara. Oh it'll take a few years and injured partys should be compensated. I'd be pissed if I was a shrimp boater. The biggest myth of the environmental establishment is the fragility of nature. The daily AP communique from the spill is loaded with adjectives such as "fragile, delicate, pristine" and claims that it may never recover. My whole WWII analogy is pure speculation but I have a feeling a lot of these beaches were previously "oil slicked" and recovered to the pristine conditions the AP has found them to be now. I've seen erosion after wildfires that would have made the cover of TIME magazine if a logger had caused it, but it ain't news if nature does it. If nature can recover from a wildfire, it sure can recover from a clearcut. Duck hunters kill only 8% of ducks, the rest are killed by nature(predators). There is no butterfly effect. There is no keystone species. There is no canary in a coal mine. Nature adapts and nature recovers. This doesn't mean we turn on the spickots and abuse the Earth.
We've doubled our per capita kilowatt hour usage since we were little baby boomers. The enviro movement(that Santa Barbara spurred) was gonna change the establishment-but all they did was double the establishments carbon footprint. They screw in CFL bulbs to shave off 5% then feel good about themselves. It's a fraud of the concience. Live your idealism.
Tom, I'm sure your a good man. And no hard feelings. I've butted heads with a few contractors in my day, but on the next job we're all friends again.
The biosphere has proven to be remarkably resilient for lo these billions of years, even though individual species have not always lived to see the resilience.
There have been many predictions of doom that have proven to be absurd. To infer that all such predictions are thus false is a very dangerous course given the quantity, and the capability of humans on earth.
Your 40 years that you constantly talk about is not even a blink in environmental issues. It's more like 4 seconds between two human errors...And how easily you neglect to bring up Valdez at all.