Posts Tagged ‘oil slick’
“Haynesville” Director Responds: “Shouldn’t people see the film before commenting?”
I would like to address a portion of Paul CometX NYC’s entry (“the “Haynesville” movie, which is nothing more than pro-drilling propaganda masquerading as a film”). To start, I have to ask the question:
Have you seen “Haynesville”? If not, that’s okay. I would ask that you and everyone else please watch the film before discussing it.
If you had seen “Haynesville”, you would know that the film is a balanced look at energy, it’s human impact and what a path to a clean energy future could look like (spoiler alert: taking coal out of energy diet and using natural gas and conservation to get us to a renewable-based clean energy future). The film has been called “fair and smart” and a “humane take on a complicated subject”. In fact, it has been suggested many times that “Haynesville” and “Gasland” should run together as complementary pieces (not sure what HBO has to say about that, but it is what it is).
As anyone who has seen the film would also know, the centerpiece of the film is woman named Kassi Fitzgerald. Her entire mission is to preserve environmental protections for her rural community’s land and water supply.
Upon seeing “Haynesville”, you would’ve noted that Kassi’s environmental fight is focused on surface spills of any (and all) chemicals from the drilling process. Asking most people involved with regulation and/or studying ill effects of drilling, this is a major concern. Even Josh Fox would probably concur.
Surely, you would have at least seen that the film postulates that the path to a clean energy future (as presented by Bill McKibben — founder of 350.org and not exactly a “gas industry” guy) is a balanced approach of conservation, using natural gas to replace coal and a ramping up of a renewable-based power sources. In fact, in “Haynesville”, Michael Tidwell (environmentalist and author of “The Ravaging Tide”) says that we also need to be prepared to get off natural gas in the future. You’d have to admit this is not a “pro-drilling” stance.
My issue with your post is that it sounds as uninformed as what I read from the Glenn Beck loving, Drill-Baby-Drill folks.
The fact is that there is a place for “Haynesville”, “Gasland” and any other project that opens the conversation on energy and the energy future. The hope is that these films (articles, books, etc.) bring people to the table to discuss the issues, their challenges and, ultimately, figure out the solution. The problem is that both far sides of the energy discussion won’t meet in the middle. Instead, you hide on your cloistered side of the issue and lob insults at the other. From my perspective, this is a pretty crappy way to solve a problem.
In the end, we have a huge problem in the form of our current energy consumption habits and our current primary energy sources. We need to solve this problem by creating a more environmentally conscious approach to energy, its attainment and its use. If we can’t come together and start the conversation, and if we continue to tolerate the petty snipes from the far right and the far left of the energy issue, then we will get what we deserve when the energy future and all its impending ugliness is decided for us.
– Gregory Kallenberg
Director of “Haynesville”
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Oil by the numbers – Houston Chronicle Editorial
While waiting and hoping for an end to the spill, let’s address our insatiable demand
The oil spill has left the central Gulf of Mexico awash in goo and the nervously watching American public buried in a blizzard of numbers: 20,000 barrels per day gushing into Gulf waters; 20,000 workers striving around the clock to plug the spill; nearly 1,400 vessels mobilized for the effort; millions of feet of boom to corral the oil; a million or so gallons of dispersant to break it up. And much more of everything in prospect as the effort continues to plug the runaway well and stop the mess from widening.
We’ll offer one number that hasn’t received the attention it deserves: 20 million. That’s roughly the number of barrels of oil consumed each day by this country’s cars, trucks, heavy equipment — everything.
It’s a big number. To put things in perspective, if the BP spill is flowing at 20,000 barrels per day, that makes for an environmental catastrophe, but it amounts to a statistical rounding error when compared with daily U.S. oil consumption. It’s roughly one-tenth of 1 percent of what we use daily.
We bring this up to call attention to the obvious: If this country is serious about reducing our oil dependency and, by inference, the amount of drilling at great depths offshore, we’ll have to make some major inroads on the demand side. Short of that, shutting down drilling and production for any length of time in the Gulf of Mexico is a nonstarter. Gulf production provides us with 30 percent of the oil we produce domestically. Take it away without cutting consumption and you get only one thing: increased dependency on foreign oil, much of it controlled by countries that don’t like us.
The Gulf spill has turned into a vexation for the Obama administration, framed curtly by the president’s frustration-filled plea to White House aides to “plug the damn hole.”
We share Obama’s pain. But that plug may not come for a while yet. Let’s make the best use of the interim, Mr. President: Put it to use marshaling public opinion in the cause of cutting the nation’s demand.
Here’s another number that might help: 700 billion barrels of oil equivalent. That’s a rough estimate of how much natural gas this country has, mostly trapped in shale formations from Texas to Colorado and in the West Virginia-Pennsylvania-New York region. It’s accessible without drilling through deep waters and the product is twice as clean as coal.
Maybe now is the time, Mr. President, to have a look at the energy independence plan put forward by the wildcatter T. Boone Pickens — especially his proposal to convert our nation’s fleet of 8 million 18-wheeler trucks from imported diesel to domestically produced natural gas.
That would take time, and it wouldn’t be cheap. A new infrastructure would have to be put in place. But it would make better use of a fuel that this country has in abundance, and which is more accessible than deepwater oil.
Focusing on future options (including nuclear power) beats the alternative of simply wringing your hands and wagging fingers at the oil companies, Mr. President. There’ll be time enough for blaming after the Deepwater Horizon well is plugged and the Gulf’s cleanup is under way.
Now is the time to point the way forward with cleaner alternatives that help build that bridge to a sustainable energy future we all want.
We believe the American people are primed for a mission that makes us more secure and creates good jobs while cleaning up the environment. It’s your moment to lead, Mr. President. Take full advantage of it.
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“Haynesville” expert Bill McKibben speaks out against Gulf Oil Spill Disaster – NPR.org
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With anger building over the BP oil spill, environmentalists are wondering if President Obama will stand up to Big Energy and get to work on climate change. Melissa Block talks to Bill McKibben, one such person waiting for a more forceful message from the White House. He wrote an op-ed in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times, in which he writes: “Obama’s barely broken a sweat on climate change … We need someone to stand up and tell it the way it is, and in language so compelling and dramatic it sets us on a new path.”
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
As anger builds over the BP spill, environmentalists are hoping to hear more forceful message from President Obama on climate change. They say this could provide the transformative moment for the country to commit to clean energy.
Bill McKibben has been writing along these lines. His most recent book is “Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet.”
Bill McKibben, welcome to the program.
Mr. BILL McKIBBEN (Author, “Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet”): Good to be with you, Melissa.
BLOCK: You have written that President Obama has barely broken a sweat on climate change. And I’m wondering what it is exactly you have been waiting to hear him say.
Mr. McKIBBEN: We’ve been waiting for him, I think, to go stand there with his back against the Gulf and say: Look, as ugly as that is – that black mess that BP has left us in the Gulf – even if that oil had gotten safely ashore and been refined and put in the gas tanks of your cars and burned, it would have been an environmental disaster then too. It would have driven the even larger problem that we’re facing, this runaway global warming that’s really the largest challenge that he or any other president has ever come up against.
BLOCK: And on these three trips that he’s made now to the Gulf, you’re hearing something falling short of that.
Mr. McKIBBEN: Well, he’s beginning to make some noises about working towards clean energy transition and things, and that’s good. But if there was ever an opportunity to take this debate and change it once and for all, to do what John Kennedy did when he got us going to the moon, you know, this is that moment.
BLOCK: You use that example of President Kennedy’s 10-year timetable to land a man on the moon. But there’s a huge difference here, and that is that there are very powerful, entrenched interests that have huge economic stakes in this…
Mr. McKIBBEN: That’s right.
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Despite Moratorium, Drilling Projects Move Ahead – New York Times
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WASHINGTON — In the days since President Obama announced a moratorium on permits for drilling new offshore oil wells and a halt to a controversial type of environmental waiver that was given to the Deepwater Horizon rig, at least seven new permits for various types of drilling and five environmental waivers have been granted, according to records.
The records also indicate that since the April 20 explosion on the rig, federal regulators have granted at least 19 environmental waivers for gulf drilling projects and at least 17 drilling permits, most of which were for types of work like that on the Deepwater Horizon shortly before it exploded, pouring a ceaseless current of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.
Asked about the permits and waivers, officials at the Department of the Interior and the Minerals Management Service, which regulates drilling, pointed to public statements by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, reiterating that the agency had no intention of stopping all new oil and gas production in the gulf.
Department of the Interior officials said in a statement that the moratorium was meant only to halt permits for the drilling of new wells. It was not meant to stop permits for new work on existing drilling projects like the Deepwater Horizon.
But critics say the moratorium has been violated or too narrowly defined to prevent another disaster.
With crude oil still pouring into the gulf and washing up on beaches and in wetlands, President Obama is sending Mr. Salazar and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano back to the region on Monday.
In a toughly worded warning to BP on Sunday, Mr. Salazar said at a news conference outside the company’s headquarters in Houston, “If we find they’re not doing what they’re supposed to be doing, we’ll push them out of the way appropriately.”
Mr. Salazar’s position conflicted with one laid out several hours earlier, by the commandant of the United States Coast Guard, Adm. Thad W. Allen, who said that the oil conglomerate’s access to the mile-deep well site meant that the government could not take over the lead in efforts to stop the leak.
“They have the eyes and ears that are down there,” the admiral said on CNN’s “State of the Union” program. “They are necessarily the modality by which this is going to get solved.”
Since the explosion, federal regulators have been harshly criticized for giving BP’s Deepwater Horizon and hundreds of other drilling projects waivers from full environmental review and for failing to provide rigorous oversight of these projects.
In voicing his frustration with these regulators and vowing to change how they operate, Mr. Obama announced on May 14 a moratorium on drilling new wells and the granting of environmental waivers.
“It seems as if permits were too often issued based on little more than assurances of safety from the oil companies,” Mr. Obama said. “That cannot and will not happen anymore.”
“We’re also closing the loophole that has allowed some oil companies to bypass some critical environmental reviews,” he added in reference to the environmental waivers.
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The Oil Spill’s Impact Hits Home: Local Businesses Hit Hard – NPR.org
The Gulf Coast is filled with people who were just getting back on their feet, nearly five years after Hurricane Katrina. Now, the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is placing their recovery at risk, along with thousands of other families.
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Could the Climate Bill be D.O.A.?
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WASHINGTON – A historic environmental protection bill is in danger after a massive oil spill put a new focus on the perils of offshore drilling, a feature that was supposed to win wider support for the legislation.
The bill, supported by President Barack Obama, calls for new offshore drilling — a concession by environmentalists. But with the tragedy off the Gulf Coast growing daily, even conservationists who have waited a decade for the legislation are now saying it will fail if offshore drilling remains in the bill.
“When you’re trying to resurrect a climate bill that’s face-down in the mud and you want to bring it back to life and get it breathing again, I don’t think you can have offshore drilling against the backdrop of what’s transpiring in the Louisiana wetlands,” said Richard Charter, energy adviser to Defenders of Wildlife. “I think it’s flat-lined.”
Some Democrats, including two of New Jersey’s congressmen and both of its senators, threatened Friday to pull their support if offshore drilling is included in the bill designed to curb emissions of pollution-causing gases blamed for global warming.
Introduction of the legislation was postponed on Monday for an unrelated reason. The bill aims to cut emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020, and it also would expand domestic production of oil, natural gas and nuclear power.
Obama called for new offshore drilling in the Atlantic Ocean from Delaware to central Florida, and the northern waters of Alaska. He also asked Congress to lift a drilling ban in the oil-rich eastern Gulf of Mexico, 125 miles from Florida beaches.
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