Thursday, May 27, 2010
By BUCK PARKER
McClatchy-Tribune
It’s hard to fathom how this could happen, but the Interior Department seems determined to allow exploratory drilling off Alaska’s Arctic coast to proceed this July, even in as the catastrophic blowout of an exploratory well threatens to devastate the Gulf of Mexico shoreline from Texas to Florida.
A blowout in the Arctic could be vastly more difficult to cap, contain and clean up, especially if it were to happen just before the onset of winter, when temperatures are frigid, the sea is icing up, and daylight lasts an hour or two a day.
While there were plenty of boats ready to spread booms and take other steps to try to protect beaches and marshes in the Gulf, such emergency equipment simply does not exist near enough to a possible blowout in the Arctic to be of much help.
Polar bears, whales, seals and fish depend on clean Arctic waters, as do the Eskimos who depend on them for their subsistence. There’s no commercial fishery in the Arctic as there is in the Gulf, but that doesn’t make those resources trivial.
All the experts agree that a serious accident in the Arctic would be far more difficult to deal with than the tragedy unfolding in the Gulf. That’s why it’s so hard to understand why the government is being so bull-headed. While Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has delayed the exploratory drilling Shell Oil wants to undertake for 30 days, he still had his lawyers arguing in court recently that the permit issued to Shell was perfectly legal — even though it fails to provide even minimum backup plans in case of an accident.
Here’s what’s so galling. Interior’s Minerals Management Service found the threat of accident so tiny and remote that it refused even to consider it. That was in the Gulf. In the Arctic, with its special problems and challenges, the agency took the same head-in-the-mud position. It’s well nigh incomprehensible.
Buck Parker serves as strategic adviser to Earthjustice, Oakland, Calif., with special emphasis on Arctic issues. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
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