Let’s correct past wrongs in the Arctic

By BUCK PARKER

Environmental groups had high hopes for the Obama administration. They had spent eight years fighting off relentless efforts by the previous administration to eviscerate laws and regulations aimed at protecting our natural heritage and opening nearly all public resources to private exploitation.

The report card, nearly a year into the Obama era, is mixed but mostly admirable. The Environmental Protection Agency has overturned or withdrawn many onerous Bush initiatives. The Forest Service is doing pretty well by the national forests. The Park Service is working to protect Yellowstone from the annual onslaught of snowmobiles. The president will attend the Copenhagen climate talks.

Now, the Interior Department is faced with one of its biggest decision so far: whether to allow oil companies to lease and drill in the Arctic Ocean.

The upcoming Arctic decisions dwarf everything else Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has done so far. Interior’s Minerals Management Service took a step in the wrong direction in October, approving a plan by Shell Oil to drill just offshore from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska next year, without a full environmental analysis. Other important decisions are imminent, including whether to continue offering lease sales, and defend existing leases, in the Arctic Ocean and whether to allow Shell to also drill in the pristine Chukchi Sea in 2010.

Correct course

It is not too late for Salazar’s Interior Department to correct course and protect the Arctic Ocean.

Others in the Obama administration have been urging a more sensible approach to the Arctic Ocean. Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke has closed the Arctic Ocean to commercial fishing until more science about the region is available. The Fish and Wildlife Service proposed to designate large areas of the Arctic Ocean and its coast as critical habitat for polar bears. Recently the head of the Commerce Department’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was unusually blunt: She wrote that until we gather more information about how to clean up oil spills in Arctic conditions, we should close the Arctic Ocean to oil and gas leasing. The recent leak of an oil well in the ocean off Australia that took 10 weeks to plug reminds us all of how difficult it can be to cap a blown well, never mind the dark and sub freezing temperatures of the Arctic out on the ice. President Barack Obama’s Ocean Policy Task Force has also warned Salazar of the need to tread lightly in the Arctic.

Salazar should follow the advice of NOAA and hold off permitting new oil and gas activity in the Arctic until we have a better idea of how to respond when oil inevitably leaks and until we know a lot more about Arctic wildlife.

X Buck Parker is the former executive direct of Earthjustice in Oakland, Calif. and now holds the title strategic adviser. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.