Rep. Lamar Smith (Republican-Texas) — who has spent his career cozying up to fossil fuel interests, dismissing the threat of climate change and harassing federal climate scientists — is now arguing that pumping the atmosphere full of carbon dioxide is “beneficial” to global trade, crop production and the lushness of the planet.
Rather than buying into “hysteria,” Americans should be celebrating the plus sides of a changing climate, Smith argues in an op-ed published Tuesday in The Daily Signal, a news website published by the conservative Heritage Foundation.
Smith — who has used his power as chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology to push his anti-science views — kicks off his op-ed by claiming Americans’ perception of the phenomenon is “too often determined by their hearing just one side of the story.”
“The benefits of a changing climate are often ignored and under-researched,” Smith said. “Our climate is too complex and the consequences of misguided policies too harsh to discount the positive effects of carbon enrichment.”
Increased carbon dioxide, Smith writes, promotes photosynthesis, resulting in a “greater volume of food production and better quality food” and “lush vegetation” that “assists in controlling water runoff, provides more habitats for many animal species, and even aids in climate stabilization, as more vegetation absorbs more carbon dioxide.” Warmer temperatures, he notes, results in longer growing seasons
“Also, as the Earth warms, we are seeing beneficial changes to the earth’s geography,” he writes. “For instance, Arctic sea ice is decreasing. This development will create new commercial shipping lanes that provide faster, more convenient, and less costly routes between ports in Asia, Europe, and eastern North America. This will increase international trade and strengthen the world economy.”
The op-ed comes roughly two months after Smith led a group of lawmakers on what BuzzFeed described as a “secret tour of the melting Arctic.” The unpublicized, weeklong, multi-stop outing included meeting with climate scientists and learning about how they track the levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, according to BuzzFeed.
While Smith reportedly canceled an interview with BuzzFeed to discuss the trip, Rep. Jerry McNerney (D-Calif.) told the publication that he and Smith had productive discussions about the climate.
Monday’s op-ed would suggest that, while Smith may have accepted the reality of the threat, he’s opted for the when-life-gives-you-lemons-make-lemonade approach.
Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University who sparred with Smith during a March hearing on climate science, told HuffPost via email that “it is clear” Smith is “slowly advancing through the stages of denial ... having apparently now moved from ‘it’s not happening,’ to ’ok—it’s happening, but IT WILL BE GOOD FOR US!”
“One step at a time I suppose,” Mann wrote, “but at least there is some apparent progress toward the truth (that climate change is real, human-caused, and already a problem).”
Joseph Kopser, an aerospace engineer and Army veteran from Austin, Texas, is one of several Democratic candidates vying for a chance to unseat the 16-term Republican in the 2018 midterm election. Reach Monday by phone, Kopser described Smith’s op-ed as “stunning.” And he said it is “exactly” what the late English author George Orwell warned about in his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.
“He is acknowledging the warming planet,” Kopser said. “And he’s trying to use Orwellian speak to say that, ’No, no, no — These terrible things that scientists have talked about and proven and explained why they are terrible for our planet, are actually good things.”
What Smith is doing, Kopser said, is “equivalent to telling somebody who’s in a flood, ‘Oh no no, all this water is going to be great. Just think how much more drinking water you’re going to have available.’ Or somebody in a burning house, “No no, think, you now no longer need a furnace because you have this wonderful heat source all around your house.’”
First elected in 1986, Smith is the 14th longest-serving member of the current U.S. House. The San Antonio native has received more than $700,000 from the oil and gas industry over those years. In his five years as chairman of the science committee, he has worked to defund climate research and harassed federal climate scientists, whom he has accused of playing “fast and loose” with data. He has also sprinted to defend the fossil fuel industry ― namely Exxon Mobil Corp. ― from investigations into their own records on climate change and used his power to stack hearings with coal and chemical lobbyists and climate skeptics.
Burning fossil fuels, Smith writes in his op-ed, has “helped raise the standard of living for billions of people.”
“The use of fossil fuels and the byproducts of carbon enrichment play a large role in advancing the quality of human life by increasing food production to feed our growing population, stimulating the economy, and alleviating poverty.
Bad deals like the Paris Agreement would cost the U.S. billions of dollars, a loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs, and have no discernible impact on global temperatures. Instead of succumbing to fear tactics and exaggerated predictions, we should instead invest in research and technology that can help us better understand the effects of climate change.”
Smith is among a trio of Republicans that nonprofit political action committee 314 Action is targeting for their anti-science views. Smith’s office did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s request for comment Monday.
In a statement Monday, 314 Action founder Shaughnessy Naughton blasted Smith’s op-ed as the latest of his “industry-funded attacks on scientific consensus around the issue” of climate change.
“Rather than playing the hits to the Heritage Foundation’s mouthpiece, I challenge Mr. Smith to explain the benefits of climate change to the displaced people of Isle de Jean Charles or Tangier Island,” said Naughton, referring to two U.S. islands vanishing as ocean levels rise. “If climate scientists can’t convince him, maybe our country’s first climate refugees can.”
• Chris D'Angelo is a journalist for Huffington Post and a former reporter for Kauai's Garden Island News. .
Cat Island, off the Gulf Coast in Louisiana's Plaquemines Parish, was home to a vibrant bird rookery inhabited by brown pelicans, seagulls, spoonbills, and egrets before BP's Deepwater Horizon oil disaster. Five years after the largest oil spill in American history, the barrier island has just about disappeared.
Despite ongoing efforts by former Plaquemines Parish coastal zone manager PJ Hahn to restore the island, only the needed building permits and an engineering plan have been completed.
"Cat Island was ground zero of the oil spill," Hahn told DeSmogBlog.
He thought that the restoration of the island was a no-brainer since, while much of the oil spill's damage was underwater and invisible, the damage to Cat Island was easy to prove. According to Hahn, not only would the island's restoration be necessary for the birds, but it would provide a great public relations move for anyone who helped in the process.
At the time of the spill, Cat Island was approximately five and a half acres, covered by a dense forest of black mangrove trees which were occupied by nesting birds. All that remains now are two small strips of land — less than an acre combined. Mangrove stumps jut out from the broken, shell-covered sandy remains of the island, at times fully submerged during high tide.
"The island was a treasure and it deserves to be restored," Hahn told DeSmogBlog. He continues to advocate for the restoration project he spearheaded.
"It's a hard sell for many since the island doesn't serve as storm protection like other barrier islands that are in the process of being restored since the spill," Hahn said.
But Cat Island and other small barrier islands, some of which have completely eroded since the spill, were perfect bird habitats because they were free of predators. Hahn believes the $6 million restoration price tag is a good investment, one that will pay for itself in dollars generated by the tourism industry. "Bird watchers from all over will come to visit the island," he said.
So far, the parish has raised $3 million of the $6 million needed before the rebuilding process can begin.
Shell, the only oil company to contribute, donated $1 million. Other contributors include the American Bird Conservancy and the federal Coastal Impact Assistance Program. The parish hopes to get the rest of the needed funds from the state's "Restore Act Fund," made up of money from that part of the BP settlement that has already been paid.
Billy Nungesser, Plaquemines Parish president during the spill who is now running for lieutenant governor, had been famous for his fierce criticism of BP. But now it seems he's changed his tune.
During a town hall meeting hosted by Rush Radio in St. Tammany Parish, where residents turned out to express their concerns about the possibility of the first fracking project in their area, Nungesser gushed over the great relationship Plaquemines Parish has with the oil industry, no longer singling out BP as a bad player as he had in the past.
Though he believes residents should have a say regarding what type of industry is welcomed in their community, he said oil companies that operate in his parish "do the right thing."
Referencing the "horrible pictures of the pelicans covered in oil," Nungesser claimed that in the case of "a safety incident or something spilling from a platform, every company has gone beyond the call of duty in our parish to make it right. Oil companies are rebuilding those islands."
But Cat Island is a perfect example that Plaquemines Parish "has not been made whole," according to Hahn. "BP was asked to contribute to rebuilding Cat Island multiple times," Hahn said, "but they haven't given anything to help the project."
Cat Island was not mentioned in a BP report on the condition of the Gulf issued in March which paints a picture of the Gulf Coast on the mend. According to the report, "Available data does not indicate the spill caused any significant long-term population-level impact to species in the Gulf," and "affected areas are recovering faster than predicted."
State and federal agencies involved in the Natural Resources Damage Assessment (NRDA) took issue with BP's report.
"It is inappropriate as well as premature for BP to reach conclusions about impacts from the spill before the completion of the assessment," an NRDA report states. NRDA will determine how much BP and its subcontractors owe for the environmental damages.
When asked what specifically BP has done to restore Cat Island, BP media spokesperson Jason Ryan sent out a statement about other coastal restoration projects the company has contributed to.
BP agreed to pay for restoration projects in advance of NRDA's assessment, which it was not required to do. Several of the projects are underway, but rebuilding Cat Island is not one of them.
The statement from BP points out: "The state loses about a football field worth of wetlands every hour," and that "with regard to Cat Island specifically, it was rapidly eroding before the spill, primarily due to the impacts of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita."
Though BP wouldn't give a "Yes" or " No" as to whether it has contributed to rebuilding Cat Island, the company wrote: "We are studying shoreline erosion on marshes and barrier islands, including Cat Island, to determine if there was any acceleration due to the spill."
The BP spill "totally accelerated" the erosion of Cat Island," Linda Hooper Bui, an entomologist at Louisiana State University, told DeSmogBlog.
Bui has been working on studies of insect life in Barataria Bay that she began prior to the BP oil spill, making her a witness to the ongoing erosion process impacting the island. When plants are stressed they can't hold on to sediment, she explained. And that is what happened when the oil covered the plant life on Cat Island. "You lose the mangrove, you lose the sediment," Bui said.
"Heavily-oiled marshes erode at double the rate of a non-oiled marsh," Melanie Driscoll, Director of Bird Conservation for the Gulf of Mexico and Mississippi flyway for the Audubon Society, told DeSmogBlog, citing a scientific peer-reviewed study done after the BP spill.
"Every year there is a delay restoring the island, there is less area for nesting," Driscoll said. " We need restoration to proceed as soon as possible."
The NWF report cites several scientific studies that document the negative impact the spill had on 20 different species, including the brown pelican, which were Cat Island's main inhabitants.
"The tragedy is brown pelicans were taken off the endangered species list the year before the spill," Hahn said. "If there is no habitat, there are no birds. Who knows if they will come back when we finally get the island rebuilt?"
When Statoil acquired the last of three licenses off Greenland’s west coast in January 2012, oil at more than $110 a barrel made exploring the iceberg-ridden waters an attractive proposition.
Less than two years later, the price of oil had been cut by almost half and Norway’s Statoil, the world’s most active offshore Arctic explorer in 2014, relinquished its interest in all three licenses in December without drilling a single well, Knut Rostad, a spokesman for the state-controlled company, said by e-mail.
Statoil’s decision shows how the plunge in oil, with Brent crude trading at about $45 a barrel, has dealt another blow to companies and governments hoping to tap the largely unexplored Arctic. That threatens to demote the importance of a region already challenged by high costs, environmental concerns, technological obstacles and, in the case of Russia, international sanctions.
“At $50, it just doesn’t make sense,” James Henderson, a senior research fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, said in a Jan. 12 phone interview. “Arctic exploration has almost certainly been significantly undermined for the rest of this decade.”
Estimated Resources The Arctic -- spanning Russia, Norway, Greenland, the U.S. and Canada -- accounts for more than 20 percent of the world’s undiscovered oil and gas resources, including an estimated 134 billion barrels of crude and other liquids and 1,669 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. That’s almost as much oil as Iraq’s proved reserves at the end of 2013 and 50 percent more gas than Russia had booked, BP Plc (BP/)’s Statistical Review of World Energy shows.
Yet, explorers seeking a piece of the Arctic prize have been tripped up for years.
After spending $6 billion searching for oil off Alaska over the past eight years, Royal Dutch Shell in October asked for an extension of licenses as setbacks including a stranded oil rig and lawsuits risk delaying drilling further. Cairn Energy spent $1 billion exploring Greenland’s west coast in 2010 and 2011 without making commercial discoveries, and OAO Gazprom has shelved its Shtokman gas field in the Barents Sea indefinitely on cost challenges.
Ecosystem Concern Environmental group Greenpeace has occupied oil rigs from Norway to Russia, arguing a spill would cause irreparable damage to ecosystems that sustain animals from polar bears to birds and fish. The possibility that economically marginal fields such as Arctic deposits might be stranded as governments adopt stricter climate policies has also shaken some investors.
The Brent crude benchmark fell 1.9 percent to $45.70 a barrel, deepening losses from the lowest closing price since March 2009. Statoil declined 1.4 percent to 127.3 kroner at 9:50 a.m. in Oslo, extending losses to 35 percent since a June high.
As oil companies cut spending to cope with falling prices, already costly and risky Arctic projects will fall down the priority list even if crude is expected to recover by the time production starts, Henderson said. Global capital expenditure will probably drop by more than 20 percent this year, according to a Jan. 9 note from Sanford C. Bernstein.
Like Statoil, Dong Energy A/S and GDF Suez have returned Greenland licenses because exploration has become too expensive, Danish newspaper Politiken reported.
Project Delay Statoil, which cut spending plans to boost shareholder returns even before oil prices started to fall last year, last week signaled it could delay the flagship Johan Castberg project in Norway’s part of the Barents Sea for a third time as it struggles to find a profitable development solution.
Even if the Barents Sea enjoys a milder climate than other parts of the Arctic thanks to the Gulf Stream, it remains a remote region with little infrastructure and logistics.
Statoil failed to boost resources sufficiently after drilling a record nine wells in the Barents Sea last year. It wouldn’t comment on exploration plans for 2015 until a capital market update Feb. 6, spokesman Rostad said.
OAO Rosneft plans to drill tens of wells in the Arctic with partners Statoil, Exxon Mobil Corp. and Eni SpA have been upended by sanctions over Russia’s role in the conflict in Ukraine, limiting access to technology and financing. While Rosneft is turning to potential Asian partners, it may have to delay drilling even after making a billion-barrel find with Exxon in the Kara Sea in September, board member Artur Chilingarov said last month.
Decisions Unlikely “Investment decisions on developments are very unlikely in the next two years,” said Erik Holm Reiso, a partner at Oslo-based consultant Rystad Energy AS. In most of the Arctic, “exploration will be sporadic,” he said.
Still, exploration will go on at a “constant” pace in Norway’s Barents Sea, Holm Reiso said. Lundin Petroleum, a Swedish explorer that made Norway’s biggest oil discovery in the Barents Sea last year, will drill four wells there in 2015, Chief Executive Officer Ashley Heppenstall said in a phone interview yesterday.
“We believe it’s unrealistic that oil prices will stay at these levels forever,” he said. “Ultimately, the viability of the Barents Sea will be driven by how much resources are actually found.”
Don’t look now, but conditions are deteriorating in the western Pacific. Things are turning ugly, with consequences that could prove deadly and spell catastrophe for the global economy.
In Washington, it is widely assumed that a showdown with Iran over its nuclear ambitions will be the first major crisis to engulf the next secretary of defense -- whether it be former Senator Chuck Hagel, as President Obama desires, or someone else if he fails to win Senate confirmation. With few signs of an imminent breakthrough in talks aimed at peacefully resolving the Iranian nuclear issue, many analysts believe that military action -- if not by Israel, then by the United States -- could be on this year’s agenda.
Lurking just behind the Iranian imbroglio, however, is a potential crisis of far greater magnitude, and potentially far more imminent than most of us imagine. China’s determination to assert control over disputed islands in the potentially energy-rich waters of the East and South China Seas, in the face of stiffening resistance from Japan and the Philippines along with greater regional assertiveness by the United States, spells trouble not just regionally, but potentially globally.
Islands, Islands, Everywhere
The possibility of an Iranian crisis remains in the spotlight because of the obvious risk of disorder in the Greater Middle East and its threat to global oil production and shipping. A crisis in the East or South China Seas (essentially, western extensions of the Pacific Ocean) would, however, pose a greater peril because of the possibility of a U.S.-China military confrontation and the threat to Asian economic stability.
The United States is bound by treaty to come to the assistance of Japan or the Philippines if either country is attacked by a third party, so any armed clash between Chinese and Japanese or Filipino forces could trigger American military intervention. With so much of the world’s trade focused on Asia, and the American, Chinese, and Japanese economies tied so closely together in ways too essential to ignore, a clash of almost any sort in these vital waterways might paralyze international commerce and trigger a global recession (or worse).
All of this should be painfully obvious and so rule out such a possibility -- and yet the likelihood of such a clash occurring has been on the rise in recent months, as China and its neighbors continue to ratchet up the bellicosity of their statements and bolster their military forces in the contested areas. Washington’s continuing statements about its ongoing plans for a “pivot” to, or “rebalancing” of, its forces in the Pacific have only fueled Chinese intransigence and intensified a rising sense of crisis in the region. Leaders on all sides continue to affirm their country’s inviolable rights to the contested islands and vow to use any means necessary to resist encroachment by rival claimants. In the meantime, China has increased the frequency and scale of its naval maneuvers in waters claimed by Japan, Vietnam, and the Philippines, further enflaming tensions in the region.
Ostensibly, these disputes revolve around the question of who owns a constellation of largely uninhabited atolls and islets claimed by a variety of nations. In the East China Sea, the islands in contention are called the Diaoyus by China and the Senkakus by Japan. At present, they are administered by Japan, but both countries claim sovereignty over them. In the South China Sea, several island groups are in contention, including the Spratly chain and the Paracel Islands (known in China as the Nansha and Xisha Islands, respectively). China claims all of these islets, while Vietnam claims some of the Spratlys and Paracels. Brunei, Malaysia, and the Philippines also claim some of the Spratlys.
Far more is, of course, at stake than just the ownership of a few uninhabited islets. The seabeds surrounding them are believed to sit atop vast reserves of oil and natural gas. Ownership of the islands would naturally confer ownership of the reserves -- something all of these countries desperately desire. Powerful forces of nationalism are also at work: with rising popular fervor, the Chinese believe that the islands are part of their national territory and any other claims represent a direct assault on China’s sovereign rights; the fact that Japan -- China’s brutal invader and occupier during World War II -- is a rival claimant to some of them only adds a powerful tinge of victimhood to Chinese nationalism and intransigence on the issue. By the same token, the Japanese, Vietnamese, and Filipinos, already feeling threatened by China’s growing wealth and power, believe no less firmly that not bending on the island disputes is an essential expression of their nationhood.
Long ongoing, these disputes have escalated recently. In May 2011, for instance, the Vietnamese reported that Chinese warships were harassing oil-exploration vessels operated by the state-owned energy company PetroVietnam in the South China Sea. In two instances, Vietnamese authorities claimed, cables attached to underwater survey equipment were purposely slashed. In April 2012, armed Chinese marine surveillance ships blocked efforts by Filipino vessels to inspect Chinese boats suspected of illegally fishing off Scarborough Shoal, an islet in the South China Sea claimed by both countries.
The East China Sea has similarly witnessed tense encounters of late. Last September, for example, Japanese authorities arrested 14 Chinese citizens who had attempted to land on one of the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands to press their country’s claims, provoking widespread anti-Japanese protests across China and a series of naval show-of-force operations by both sides in the disputed waters.
On December 13th, the Japanese military scrambled F-15 fighter jets when a Chinese marine surveillance plane flew into airspace near the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands. Another worrisome incident occurred on January 8th, when four Chinese surveillance ships entered Japanese-controlled waters around those islands for 13 hours. Two days later, Japanese fighter jets were again scrambled when a Chinese surveillance plane returned to the islands. Chinese fighters then came in pursuit, the first time supersonic jets from both sides flew over the disputed area. The Chinese clearly have little intention of backing down, having indicated that they will increase their air and naval deployments in the area, just as the Japanese are doing.
While war clouds gather in the Pacific sky, the question remains: Why, pray tell, is this happening now?
Several factors seem to be conspiring to heighten the risk of confrontation, including leadership changes in China and Japan, and a geopolitical reassessment by the United States.
* In China, a new leadership team is placing renewed emphasis on military strength and on what might be called national assertiveness. At the 18th Party Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, held last November in Beijing, Xi Jinping was named both party head and chairman of the Central Military Commission, making him, in effect, the nation’s foremost civilian and military official. Since then, Xi has made several heavily publicized visits to assorted Chinese military units, all clearly intended to demonstrate the Communist Party’s determination, under his leadership, to boost the capabilities and prestige of the country’s army, navy, and air force. He has already linked this drive to his belief that his country should play a more vigorous and assertive role in the region and the world.
In a speech to soldiers in the city of Huizhou, for example, Xi spoke of his “dream” of national rejuvenation: “This dream can be said to be a dream of a strong nation; and for the military, it is the dream of a strong military.” Significantly, he used the trip to visit the Haikou, a destroyer assigned to the fleet responsible for patrolling the disputed waters of the South China Sea. As he spoke, a Chinese surveillance plane entered disputed air space over the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands in the East China Sea, prompting Japan to scramble those F-15 fighter jets.
* In Japan, too, a new leadership team is placing renewed emphasis on military strength and national assertiveness. On December 16th, arch-nationalist Shinzo Abe returned to power as the nation’s prime minister. Although he campaigned largely on economic issues, promising to revive the country’s lagging economy, Abe has made no secret of his intent to bolster the Japanese military and assume a tougher stance on the East China Sea dispute.
In his first few weeks in office, Abe has already announced plans to increase military spending and review an official apology made by a former government official to women forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military during World War II. These steps are sure to please Japan’s rightists, but certain to inflame anti-Japanese sentiment in China, Korea, and other countries it once occupied.
Equally worrisome, Abe promptly negotiated an agreement with the Philippines for greater cooperation on enhanced “maritime security” in the western Pacific, a move intended to counter growing Chinese assertiveness in the region. Inevitably, this will spark a harsh Chinese response -- and because the United States has mutual defense treaties with both countries, it will also increase the risk of U.S. involvement in future engagements at sea.
* In the United States, senior officials are debating implementation of the “Pacific pivot” announced by President Obama in a speech before the Australian Parliament a little over a year ago. In it, he promised that additional U.S. forces would be deployed in the region, even if that meant cutbacks elsewhere. “My guidance is clear,” he declared. “As we plan and budget for the future, we will allocate the resources necessary to maintain our strong military presence in this region.” While Obama never quite said that his approach was intended to constrain the rise of China, few observers doubt that a policy of “containment” has returned to the Pacific.
Indeed, the U.S. military has taken the first steps in this direction, announcing, for example, that by 2017 all three U.S. stealth planes, the F-22, F-35, and B-2, would be deployed to bases relatively near China and that by 2020 60% of U.S. naval forces will be stationed in the Pacific (compared to 50% today). However, the nation’s budget woes have led many analysts to question whether the Pentagon is actually capable of fully implementing the military part of any Asian pivot strategy in a meaningful way. A study conducted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) at the behest of Congress, released last summer, concluded that the Department of Defense “has not adequately articulated the strategy behind its force posture planning [in the Asia-Pacific] nor aligned the strategy with resources in a way that reflects current budget realities.”
This, in turn, has fueled a drive by military hawks to press the administration to spend more on Pacific-oriented forces and to play a more vigorous role in countering China's "bullying" behavior in the East and South China Seas. “[America’s Asian allies] are waiting to see whether America will live up to its uncomfortable but necessary role as the true guarantor of stability in East Asia, or whether the region will again be dominated by belligerence and intimidation,” former Secretary of the Navy and former Senator James Webb wrote in the Wall Street Journal. Although the administration has responded to such taunts by reaffirming its pledge to bolster its forces in the Pacific, this has failed to halt the calls for an even tougher posture by Washington. Obama has already been chided for failing to provide sufficient backing to Israel in its struggle with Iran over nuclear weapons, and it is safe to assume that he will face even greater pressure to assist America’s allies in Asia were they to be threatened by Chinese forces.
Add these three developments together, and you have the makings of a powder keg -- potentially at least as explosive and dangerous to the global economy as any confrontation with Iran. Right now, given the rising tensions, the first close encounter of the worst kind, in which, say, shots were unexpectedly fired and lives lost, or a ship or plane went down, might be the equivalent of lighting a fuse in a crowded, over-armed room. Such an incident could occur almost any time. The Japanese press has reported that government officials there are ready to authorize fighter pilots to fire warning shots if Chinese aircraft penetrate the airspace over the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands. A Chinese general has said that such an act would count as the start of "actual combat." That the irrationality of such an event will be apparent to anyone who considers the deeply tangled economic relations among all these powers may prove no impediment to the situation -- as at the beginning of World War I -- simply spinning out of everyone’s control.
Can such a crisis be averted? Yes, if the leaders of China, Japan, and the United States, the key countries involved, take steps to defuse the belligerent and ultra-nationalistic pronouncements now holding sway and begin talking with one another about practical steps to resolve the disputes. Similarly, an emotional and unexpected gesture -- Prime Minister Abe, for instance, pulling a Nixon and paying a surprise goodwill visit to China -- might carry the day and change the atmosphere. Should these minor disputes in the Pacific get out of hand, however, not just those directly involved but the whole planet will look with sadness and horror on the failure of everyone involved. • Michael Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College, a TomDispatch regular, and the author, most recently, of The Race for What’s Left, just published in paperback. A documentary movie based on his book Blood and Oil can be previewed and ordered at www.bloodandoilmovie.com. You can follow Klare on Facebook by clicking here.
Below is a sharp Ron Paul TV ad that asks us to imagine America as the victim of a foreign occupation, much like the ones the US military has been involved in for the last decade on the Middle East. It proposes that the Chinese have military bases in Texas and makes the point that American citizens would surely attempt to force them out, as would "terrorists" in Iraq or Afghanistan.
Ron Paul, the congressman from Texas, is the only presidential candidate of the Republican or Democratic party running against our foreign military bases and Middle East military adventures to secure foreign oil. I'm with him on that. In fact his position on drugs and other personal freedoms match mine.
Where we part ways boils down to my feeling the need for regulation to protect the environment and a government role in programs for the needy.
But I could overlook a lot to vote for someone with Paul's position on freedom and war.
The video that was above is no longer shared. Click on link to see: Ron Paul TV ad asking us to imagine Chinese overseas military bases in Texas. From (http://youtu.be/SMHBEAeNa-c).
The question Ron Paul's TV ad did not address is the possibility that USA's next war (with Iran) will probably include a front in American itself. It won't be Chinese troops fighting against renegade American terrorists, it will be the US military. Last week Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Bill that includes the possible indefinite detention of US citizen's by the military if they are determined to be "belligerent". The bill states in Subtitle D - Detainee Matters - Section 1031;
"Affirmation of authority of the armed forces to detain covered persons pursuant to the authorization for use of military force... including any person who has committed a belligerent act..."
So much for the US Constitution. So much for Obama. Below a video by Aaron Hawkins from his website Waiting for the Storm. He has been ahead of the curve on our path to war with Iran (WWIII) and is pointing to trouble coming up fast. Be wary.
SUBHEAD: BP received U.S. permission for oil exploration in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
By Katarzyna Klimasinska on 21 October 2011 for Bloomberg News -
(http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-10-21/bp-wins-u-s-gulf-deep-water-plan-approval.html)Image above: Robert Dudley is haloed as he stands before BP corporate logo. From original article.
BP received U.S. permission for oil exploration in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, the first approval since the company’s Macondo well caused the nation’s worst offshore spill last year.
The company must obtain a drilling permit before work can begin in a field about 192 miles (309 kilometers) off the Louisiana coast, according to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which announced approval of the exploration plan today in an e-mailed statement.
“This is definitely progress,” said Iain Armstrong, an analyst at broker Brewin Dolphin Ltd. in London. “I don’t think the ship’s quite turned around yet, but the compass is pointing in the right direction.”
BP Chief Executive Officer Robert Dudley is seeking to revive U.S. output in the Gulf as the lack of new wells drags down production. The London-based company waited almost a year to submit drilling plans while it reviewed safety after President Barack Obama in October 2010 lifted a moratorium on deep-water work imposed after the well blowout and the spill.
BP rose as much as 3.2 percent in London trading after the announcement, and climbed 2.2 percent to 439.4 pence at the close. The stock is up 13 percent this month.
BP is planning to drill Gulf wells in water as deep as 6,034 feet (1,839 meters) in a field known as Kaskida, according to the agency statement. The Macondo well was in about 5,000 feet of water 40 miles south of Louisiana.
BP Safety Compliance
“Our review of BP’s plan included verification of BP’s compliance with the heightened standards that all deep-water activities must meet,” Tommy Beaudreau, the bureau director, said in the statement.
The U.S. decision on BP’s plan was criticized by Representative Edward Markey of Massachusetts, the top Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee.
“Comprehensive safety legislation hasn’t passed Congress, and BP hasn’t paid the fines they owe for their spill, yet BP is being given back the keys to drill in the Gulf,” Markey said. “The major investigations into the BP oil spill disaster are now complete and it is time to assess and levy the fines against BP for its damage to the environment and economy.”
Starting work in the Gulf is part of Dudley’s campaign to repair BP’s standing with investors, regulators and the U.S. public. The company wrote off $41 billion in costs related to the spill caused by a blowout on the Deepwater Horizon rig that killed 11 people.
“This is a company that spent the weeks following the blowout concentrating on its PR strategy, making a series of optimistic claims that were invariably at odds with the unfolding reality,” Ben Stewart, a London based spokesman for environmental group Greenpeace, said in an e-mail. “Now they’ve been let back into the Gulf of Mexico to conduct the kind of drilling operation that nearly bankrupted the company.”
If Washington is uneasy about a Saudi-led foreign force of 1000 soldiers crossing the causeway from Saudi Arabia into Bahrain to take part in a crackdown, it is nonetheless keeping its criticism muted for two reasons.
Firstly, it would welcome an end to the turmoil in the island nation, home to the Fifth Fleet, and secondly, it knows that wagging its finger at Riyadh right now is unlikely to have much effect.
No Arab nation is more important to the United States than Saudi Arabia. It remains a bulwark against Iranian expansionism and a pivotal partner fighting global terrorism. Thus the statement from the White House stressed that the deployment of troops is "not an invasion" and included the mild admonition that they show "respect and restraint" on Bahraini soil.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said yesterday that force was not the answer. "We find what's happening in Bahrain alarming. We think that there is no security answer to the aspirations and demands of the demonstrators. They are on the wrong track."
In any event, anything stronger would not fly because not since the post-9/11 days - when it emerged that most of the hijackers had come from the kingdom - have Saudi-US relations been as testy as they are today.
It probably hasn't helped that in recent weeks the US has tightened the tone of its criticisms of Saudi Arabia by saying that to stave off trouble of its own, Saudi needs to pick up the pace of reforms it has allegedly been pursuing for several years.
Mostly, though, the Saudi leaders have yet to get over how the US handled last month's crisis in Egypt. As the protests intensified in Cairo, the Saudis implored President Barack Obama to stand by their ally, Hosni Mubarak. Egypt, after all, is hardly peripheral to US strategy in the Middle East. Obama cut Mubarak loose anyway.
Raising the temperature now is hardly what Washington wants. It is Saudi Arabia which in recent days has increased oil production to offset the loss of supplies from Libya, helping to avert a global energy shock. And in truth, the overlap of interests between the two countries remains significant as the turmoil in the Middle East persists.
Both want calm to return to Bahrain, neither wants an uprising to take shape in the kingdom and both want to limit Iran's influence in the region.
If Saudi Arabia deemed it necessary to send troops as part of a Gulf Co-operation Council force into Bahrain to protect the monarchy there and to fend off Iran from extending its influence on the peninsula, it was never going to ask permission from the US first. Never mind that its longer-term interests are keeping the US on side as its main supplier of arms and medical care to the ailing King Abdullah.
And that leaves Washington rehearsing all the usual bromides about restraint and respect. But this horse is already out of the stable - or across the causeway - and the US could do nothing about it even if it wanted to.
I race to the front of the WeatherBird II, a research vessel owned by the University of South Florida. There they are, doing their sleek silvery thing, weaving between translucent waves, disappearing under the boat, reappearing in perfect formation on the other side.
After taking my fill of phone video (and very pleased not to have dropped the device into the Gulf of Mexico), I bump into Gregory Ellis, one of the junior scientists aboard.
"Did you see them?" I ask excitedly.
"You mean the charismatic megafauna?" he sneers. "I'll pass."
Ouch. Here I was thinking everyone loves dolphins, especially oceanographers. But it turns out that these particular marine scientists have issues with dolphins. And sea turtles. And pelicans. It's not that they don't like them (a few of the grad students took Flipper pictures of their own). It's just that the charismatic megafauna tend to upstage the decidedly less charismatic creatures under their microscopes. Like the bacteria and phytoplankton that live in the water column, for instance, or 500-year-old coral and the tube worms that burrow next to them, or impossibly small squid the size of a child's fingernail.
Normally these academics would be fine without our fascination. They weren't looking for glory when they decided to study organisms most people either can't see or wish they hadn't. But when the Deepwater Horizon exploded in April 2010, our collective bias toward cute big creatures started to matter a great deal. That's because the instant the spill-cam was switched off and it became clear that there would be no immediate mass die-offs among dolphins and pelicans, at least not on the scale of the Exxon Valdez spill deaths, most of us were pretty much on to the next telegenic disaster. (Chilean miners down a hole—and they've got video diaries? Tell us more!)
It didn't help that the government seemed determined to help move us along. Just three weeks after the wellhead was capped, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) came out with its notorious "oil budget," which prompted White House energy czar Carol Browner to erroneously claim that "the vast majority of the oil is gone." The White House corrected the error (the fate of much of that oil is simply unknown), but the budget nonetheless inspired a flood of stories about how "doom-mongers" had exaggerated the spill's danger and, as the British Daily Mail tabloid indignantly put it, unfairly wronged "one of Britain's greatest companies."
More recently, in mid-December, Unified Area Command, the joint government-BP body formed to oversee the spill response, came out with a fat report that seemed expressly designed to close the book on the disaster. Mike Utsler, BP's Unified Area Commander, summed up its findings like this: "The beaches are safe, the water is safe, and the seafood is safe." Never mind that just four days earlier, more than 8,000 pounds of tar balls were collected on Florida's beaches—and that was an average day. Or that gulf residents and cleanup workers continue to report serious health problems that many scientists believe are linked to dispersant and crude oil exposure.
By the end of the year, investors were celebrating BP's stock rebound, and the company was feeling so emboldened that it revealed plans to challenge the official estimates of how much oil gushed out of its broken wellhead, claiming that the figures are as much as 50 percent too high. If BP succeeds, it could save the company as much as $10.5 billion in damages. The Obama administration, meanwhile, has just given the go-ahead for sixteen deepwater projects to resume in the gulf, well before the Oil Spill Commission's safety recommendations have a hope of being implemented.
For the scientists aboard the WeatherBird II, the recasting of the Deepwater Horizon spill as a good-news story about a disaster averted has not been easy to watch. Over the past seven months, they, along with a small group of similarly focused oceanographers from other universities, have logged dozens of weeks at sea in cramped research vessels, carefully measuring and monitoring the spill's impact on the delicate and little-understood ecology of the deep ocean. And these veteran scientists have seen things that they describe as unprecedented.
Among their most striking findings are graveyards of recently deceased coral, oiled crab larvae, evidence of bizarre sickness in the phytoplankton and bacterial communities, and a mysterious brown liquid coating large swaths of the ocean floor, snuffing out life underneath. All are worrying signs that the toxins that invaded these waters are not finished wreaking havoc and could, in the months and years to come, lead to consequences as severe as commercial fishery collapses and even species extinction.
Perhaps not coincidentally, the most outspoken scientists doing this research come from Florida and Georgia, coastal states that have so far managed to avoid offshore drilling. Their universities are far less beholden to Big Oil than, say, Louisiana State University, which has received tens of millions from the oil giants. Again and again these scientists have used their independence to correct the official record about how much oil is actually out there, and what it is doing under the waves.
One of the most prominent scientists on the BP beat is David Hollander, a marine geochemist at the University of South Florida. Hollander's team was among the first to discover the underwater plumes in May and the first to trace the oil definitively to BP's well. In August, amid the claims that the oil had magically disappeared, Hollander and his colleagues came back from a cruise with samples proving that oil was still out there and still toxic to many marine organisms, just invisible to the human eye.
This research, combined with his willingness to bluntly contradict federal agencies, has made Hollander something of a media darling. When he is not at sea, there is a good chance he is in front of a TV camera. In early December, he agreed to combine the two, allowing me and filmmaker Jacqueline Soohen to tag along on a research expedition in the northern Gulf of Mexico, east of the wellhead.
"Let's go fishing for oil," Hollander says with a broad smile as we get on the boat. A surfer and competitive bike racer in his youth, he is still something of a scrappy daredevil at 52. On the last cruise Hollander slipped and seriously injured his shoulder, and he has been ordered to take it easy this time. But within seconds of being on deck he is hauling equipment and lashing down gear. This is a particularly important task today because a distinctly un-Floridian cold front has descended and winds are whipping up ten-foot swells in the gulf. Getting to our first research station is supposed to take twenty-four hours, but it takes thirty instead. The entire time, the 115-foot WeatherBird II dips and heaves, and so do a few members of the eleven-person scientific team (and yeah, OK, me too).
Luckily, just as we arrive at our destination, about ninety nautical miles from the wellhead, the clouds part and the sea calms. A frenzy of floating science instantly erupts. First to be lowered overboard is the rosette, a cluster of four-foot-high metal canisters that collect water samples from different depths. When the rosette clangs back on deck, the crew swarms around its nozzles, filling up dozens of sample bottles. It looks like they are milking a metal cow. Carefully labeled bottles in tow, they are off to the makeshift laboratory to run the water through an assembly line of tests. Is it showing signs of hydrocarbons? Does it fluoresce under UV light? Does it carry the chemical signature of petroleum? Is it toxic to bacteria and phytoplankton?
A few hours later it's time for the multi-corer. When the instrument, twelve feet high and hoisted by a powerful winch, hits the ocean floor, eight clear cylinders shoot down into the sediment, filling up with sand and mud. The samples are examined under microscopes and UV lights, or spun with centrifugal force, then tested for signs of oil and dispersant. This routine will be repeated at nine more locations before the cruise is done. Each stop takes an average of ten hours, and the scientists are able to sneak in only a couple of hours of sleep between stations.
The WeatherBird II is returning to the precise coordinates where University of South Florida researchers found toxic water and sediment in May and August. At the second stop, Mary Abercrombie, who is testing the water under UV light in a device called a spectrofluorometer, sees something that looks like hydrocarbons from a sample collected seventy meters down—shallow enough to be worrying. But the other tests don't find much of anything. Hollander speculates that this may be because we are still in relatively shallow water and the recent storms have mixed everything up. "We'll probably see more when we go deeper."
Being out in the open gulf today, I find it is impossible not to be awed by nature's capacity to cleanse and renew itself. At the height of the disaster, I had looked down at these waters from a Coast Guard aircraft. What I saw changed me. I realized that I had always counted on the ocean to be a kind of outer space on earth, too mysterious and vast to be fundamentally altered by human activity, no matter how reckless. Now it was covered to the horizon in gassy puddles like the floor of an auto repair shop. Shouting over the roaring engines, a fresh-faced Coast Guard spokesman assured the journalists on board that within months, all the oil would be gone, broken down by dispersants into bite-size morsels for oil-eating microbes, which would, after their petroleum feast, promptly and efficiently disappear—no negative side effects foreseen.
At the time I couldn't believe he could feed us this line with a straight face. Yet here that body of water is, six months later: velvety smooth and, according to the tests conducted on the WeatherBird II, pretty clean, at least so far. Maybe the ocean really is the world's most powerful washing machine: throw in enough dispersant (the petrochemical industry's version of Tide), churn it around in the waves for long enough, and it can get even the toughest oil spills out.
"I despise that message—it's blindly simplified," says Ian MacDonald, a celebrated oceanographer at Florida State University. "The gulf is not all better now. We don't know what we've done to it."
MacDonald is arguably the scientist most responsible for pressuring the government to dramatically increase its estimates of how much oil was coming out of BP's well. He points to the massive quantity of toxins that gushed into these waters in a span of three months (by current estimates, at least 4.1 million barrels of oil and 1.8 million gallons of dispersants). It takes time for the ocean to break down that amount of poison, and before that could happen, those toxins came into direct contact with all kinds of life-forms. Most of the larger animals—adult fish, dolphins, whales—appear to have survived the encounter relatively unharmed. But there is mounting evidence that many smaller creatures—bacteria, phytoplankton, zooplankton, multiple species of larvae, as well as larger bottom dwellers—were not so lucky. These organisms form the base of the ocean's food chain, providing sustenance for the larger animals, and some grow up to be the commercial fishing stocks of tomorrow. One thing is certain: if there is trouble at the base, it won't stay there for long.
According to experiments performed by scientists at the University of South Florida, there is good reason for alarm. When it was out in the gulf in August, the WeatherBird II collected water samples from multiple locations. Back at the university lab, John Paul, a professor of biological oceanography, introduced healthy bacteria and phytoplankton to those water samples and watched what happened. What he found shocked him. In water from almost half of the locations, the responses of the organisms "were genotoxic or mutagenic"—which means the oil and dispersants were not only toxic to these organisms but caused changes to their genetic makeup. Changes like these could manifest in a number of ways: tumors and cancers, inability to reproduce, a general weakness that would make these organisms more susceptible to prey—or something way weirder.
Before we left on the cruise, I interviewed Paul in his lab; he explained that what was so "scary" about these results is that such genetic damage is "heritable," meaning the mutations can be passed on. "It's something that can stand around for a very long time in the Gulf of Mexico," Paul said. "You may be genetically altering populations of fish, or zooplankton, or shrimp, or commercially important organisms.... Is the turtle population going to have more tumors on them? We really don't know. And it'll take three to five years to actually get a handle on that."
The big fear is a recurrence of what happened in Prince William Sound after the Exxon Valdez spill. Some pink salmon, likely exposed to oil in their larval stage, started showing serious abnormalities, including "rare mutations that caused salmon to grow an extra fin or an enlarged heart sac," according to a report in Nature. And then there were the herring. For three years after the spill, herring stocks were robust. But in the fourth year, populations plummeted by almost two-thirds in Prince William Sound and many were "afflicted by a mysterious sickness, characterised by red lesions and superficial bleeding," as Reuters reported at the time. The next year, there were so few fish, and they were so sick, that the herring fishery in Prince William Sound was closed; stocks have yet to recover fully. Since Alaskan herring live for an average of eight years, many scientists were convinced that the crash of the herring stocks was the result of herring eggs and larvae being exposed to oil and toxins years earlier, with the full effects manifesting themselves only when those generations of herring matured (or failed to mature).
Could a similar time bomb be ticking in the gulf? Ian MacDonald at Florida State is convinced that the disturbances beginning to register at the bottom of the food chain are "almost certain to ripple up through other species."
Here is what we know so far. When researchers from Oregon State University tested the waters off Grand Isle, Louisiana, in June, they found that the presence of carcinogenic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) had increased fortyfold in just one month. Kim Anderson, the toxicologist leading the study, described the discovery as "the largest PAH change I've seen in over a decade of doing this." June is spawning season in the gulf—the period, beginning in April, when enormous quantities of eggs and larvae drift in nearly invisible clouds in the open waters: shrimp, crabs, grouper, bluefin tuna, snapper, mackerel, swordfish. For western Atlantic bluefin, which finish spawning in June and are fished as far away as Prince Edward Island, these are the primary spawning grounds.
John Lamkin, a fisheries biologist for NOAA, has admitted that "any larvae that came into contact with the oil doesn't have a chance." So, if a cloud of bluefin eggs passed through a cloud of contaminated water, that one silent encounter could well help snuff out a species already on the brink. And tuna is not the only species at risk. In July Harriet Perry, a biologist at the University of Southern Mississippi, found oil droplets in blue crab larvae, saying that "in my forty-two years of studying crabs I've never seen this." Tellingly, this vulnerability of egg and larvae to oil does not appear to have been considered when the Macondo well was approved for drilling. In the initial exploration plan that BP submitted to the government, the company goes on at length about how adult fish and shellfish will be able to survive a spill by swimming away or by "metaboliz[ing] hydrocarbons." The words "eggs" and "larvae" are never mentioned.
Already there is evidence of at least one significant underwater die-off. In November Penn State biologist Charles Fisher led a NOAA-sponsored expedition that found colonies of ancient sea fans and other coral coated in brown sludge, 1,400 meters down. Nearly all the coral in the area was "dead or in the process of dying," Fisher told me. And he echoed something I heard from many other scientists: in a career of studying these creatures, he has never seen anything like this. There were no underwater pools of oil nearby, but the working theory is that subsea oil and dispersants must have passed through the area like some kind of angel of death.
We may never know what other organisms were trapped in a similarly lethal cloud, and that points to a broader problem: now that we are beyond the oil-covered-birds phase, establishing definitive links between the spill and whatever biogenetic or ecological disturbances are in store is only going to get harder. For instance, we know the coral died because of all the bodies: ghostly coral corpses litter the ocean floor near the wellhead, and Fisher is running tests to see if he can find a definitive chemical link to BP's oil. But that sort of forensics simply won't be possible for the much smaller life forms that are even more vulnerable to BP's toxic cocktail. When larval tuna or squid die, even in huge numbers, they leave virtually no trace. Hollander uses the phrase "cryptic mortality" to describe these phantom die-offs.
All this uncertainty will work in BP's favor if the worst-case scenarios eventually do materialize. Indeed, concerns about a future collapse may go some way toward explaining why BP (with the help of Kenneth Feinberg's Gulf Coast Claims Facility) has been in a mad rush to settle out of court with fishermen, offering much-needed cash now in exchange for giving up the right to sue later. If a significant species of fish like bluefin does crash three or even ten years from now (bluefin live for fifteen to twenty years), the people who took these deals will have no legal recourse. Even if a case did end up in court, beating BP would be tricky. As part of the damage assessment efforts, NOAA scientists are conducting studies that monitor the development of eggs and larvae exposed to contaminated water. But as Exxon's lawyers argued in the Valdez case, wild fish stocks are under a lot of pressure these days—without a direct chemical link to BP's oil, who's to say what dealt the fatal blow?
In a way, the lawyers will have a point, if a disingenuous one. As Ian MacDonald explains, it is precisely the multiple stresses on marine life that continue to make the spill so dangerous. "We don't appreciate the extent to which most populations are right on the edge of survival. It's very easy for populations to go extinct." He points to the sperm whales—there are only about 1,600 of them in the northern Gulf of Mexico, a small enough population that the unnatural death of just a few whales (which breed infrequently and later in life) can endanger the community's survival. Acoustic research has found that some sperm whales responded to the spill by leaving the area, a development that oceanographers find extremely worrying.
One of the things I am learning aboard the WeatherBird II, watching these scientists test for the effects of invisible oil on invisible organisms, is not to trust my eyes. For a few months last year, when BP's oil formed patterns on the surface of these waters that looked eerily like blood, industrial society's impact on the ocean was easy for all to see. But when the oil sank, it didn't disappear; it just joined so much else that the waves are hiding, so many other secrets we count on the ocean to keep. Like the 27,000 abandoned oil and gas wells in the Gulf of Mexico, and the network of unmonitored underwater pipelines that routinely corrode and leak. Like the sewage that cruise ships are entirely free to dump, under federal law, so long as they are more than three miles from shore. Like a dead zone the size of New Jersey. Scientists at Dalhousie University in Halifax predict that if we continue our rates of overfishing, every commercial fish stock in the world could crash by midcentury. And a study published in Nature in July found that global populations of phytoplankton have declined about 40 percent since 1950, linked with "increasing sea surface temperatures"; coral is bleaching and dying for the same reason. And on and on. The ocean's capacity to heal itself from our injuries is not limitless. Yet the primary lesson being extracted from the BP disaster seems to be that "mother nature" can take just about anything we throw at her.
As the WeatherBird II speeds off to the third research station, I find myself thinking about something New Orleans civil rights attorney Tracie Washington told me the last time I was on the Gulf Coast. "Stop calling me resilient," she said. "I'm not resilient. Because every time you say, 'Oh, they're resilient,' you can do something else to me." Washington was talking about the serial disasters that have battered New Orleans. But if the poisoned and perforated gulf could talk, I think it might say the same thing.
On day three of the cruise, things start to get interesting. We are now in the DeSoto Canyon, about thirty nautical miles from the wellhead. The ocean floor is 1,000 meters down, our deepest station yet. Another storm is rolling in, and as the team pulls up the multi-corer, waves swamp the deck. It's clear as soon as we see the mud that something is wrong. Rather than the usual gray with subtle gradations, the cylinders are gray and then, just below the top layer, abruptly turn chocolaty brown. The consistency of the top brown layer is sort of fluffy, what the scientists refer to as "flocculent."
A grad student splits one of the cores lengthwise and lays it out on deck. That's when we see it clearly: separating the gray and brown layers—and looking remarkably like chocolate parfait—is a thick line of black gunk. "That's not normal," Hollander declares. He grabs the mud samples and flags Charles Kovach, a senior scientist with the Florida Department of Environmental Protection. They head to the darkest place on the boat—one of the tiny sleeping quarters crammed with bunk beds. In the pitch darkness they hold an ultraviolet light over the sample, and within seconds we are looking at silvery particles twinkling up from the mud. This is a good indication of oil traces. Hollander saw something similar on the August cruise and was able not only to identify hydrocarbons but to trace them to BP's Macondo well.
Sure enough, after the sediment is put through a battery of chemical tests, Hollander has his results. "Without question, it's petroleum hydrocarbons." The thick black layers are, he says, "rich in hydrocarbons," with the remains of plants and bacteria mixed in. The fluffy brown top layer has less oil and more plant particles, but the oil is definitely there. It will be weeks or even months before Hollander can trace the oil to BP's well, but since he has found BP's oil at this location in the DeSoto Canyon before, that confirmation is likely. If we are fishing for oil, as Hollander had joked, this is definitely a big one.
It strikes me that there is a satisfying irony in the fact that Hollander's cruise found oil that BP would have preferred to stay buried, given that the company indirectly financed the expedition. BP has pledged to spend $500 million on research as part of its spill response and made an early payout of $30 million. But in contrast to the company's much publicized attempts to buy off scientists with lucrative consulting contracts, BP agreed to hand this first tranche over to independent institutions in the gulf, like the Florida Institute of Oceanography, which could allocate it through a peer-review process—no strings attached. Hollander was one of the lucky recipients. This is a model for research in the gulf: paid for by the oil giants that profit so much from its oil and gas, but with no way for them to influence outcomes.
At several more research stations near the wellhead, the WeatherBird II finds the ocean floor coated in similar muck. The closer the boat gets to the wellhead, the more black matter there is in the sediment. And Hollander is disturbed. The abnormal layer of sediment is up to five times thicker than it was when he collected samples here in August. The oil's presence on the ocean floor didn't diminish with time; it grew. And, he points out, "the layer is distributed very widely," radiating far out from the wellhead.
But what concerns him even more are the thick black lines. "That black horizon doesn't happen," he says. "It's consistent with a snuff-out." Healthy sea-floor mud is porous and well oxygenated, with little critters constantly burrowing holes from the surface sand to the deeper mud, in the same way that worms are constantly turning over and oxygenating soil in our gardens. But the dark black lines in the sediment seemed to be acting as a sealant, preventing that flow of life. "Something caused an environmental and community change," Hollander explains. It could have been the sheer volume of matter falling to the bottom, triggering a suffocation effect, or perhaps it was "a toxic response" to oil and dispersants.
Whatever it was, Hollander isn't the only one observing the change. While we are at sea, Samantha Joye, an oceanographer at the University of Georgia, is leading a team of scientists on a monthlong cruise. When she gets back she reports seeing a remarkably similar puddinglike layer of sediment. And in trips to the ocean floor in a submersible, she saw dead crustaceans in the sediment and tube worms that had been "decimated." Ian MacDonald was one of the scientists on the trip. "There were miles of dead worms," he told me. "There was a zone of acute impact of at least eighty square miles. I saw dead sea fans, injured sea fans, brittle stars entangled in its branches. A very large area was severely impacted." More warning signs of a bottom-up disaster.
A week after Hollander returned from the cruise, Unified Area Command came out with its good news report on the state of the spill. Of thousands of water samples taken since August, the report stated, less than 1 percent met EPA definitions of toxicity. It also claimed that the deepwater sediment is largely free from BP's oil, except within about two miles of the wellhead. That certainly came as news to Hollander, who at that time was running tests of oiled sediment collected thirty nautical miles from the wellhead, in an area largely overlooked by the government scientists. Also, the government scientists measured only absolute concentrations of oil and dispersants in the water and sediment before declaring them healthy. The kinds of tests John Paul conducted on the toxicity of that water to microorganisms are simply absent.
Coast Guard Rear Adm. Paul Zukunft, whose name is on the cover of the report, told me of the omission, "That really is a limitation under the Clean Water Act and my authorities as the federal on-scene coordinator." When it comes to oil, "it's my job to remove it"—not to assess its impact on the broader ecosystem. He pointed me to the NOAA-led National Resource Damage Assessment (NRDA) process, which is gathering much more sensitive scientific data to help it put a dollar amount on the overall impact of the spill and seek damages from BP and other responsible parties.
Unlike the individual and class-action lawsuits BP is rushing to settle, it will be years before a settlement is reached. That means more time to wait and see how fish stocks are affected by egg and larvae exposure. And according to Robert Haddad, who heads the NRDA process for NOAA, any settlement will have "reopener clauses" that allow the government to reopen the case should new impacts manifest themselves.
Still, it's not at all clear that NRDA is capable of addressing the dangers being exposed by Hollander and the other independent scientists. The federal damage assessment process is built on the concept of "ecosystem services," which measures the value of nature according to how it serves us. How many fish were fishermen unable to catch because of the disaster? And how many tourism dollars were lost when the oil hit the beaches? Yet when it comes to the place where most of the spill damage was done—the deep ocean—we are in no position to answer such questions. The deep ocean is so understudied that we simply don't know what "service" those dead tube worms and corals would have provided to us. All we know, says MacDonald, is that "the ecosystem depends on these kinds of organisms, and if you start wiping them out, you don't know what happens." He also points out, as many ecologists do, that the entire service model is flawed. Even if it turns out that those tube worms and brittle stars do nothing for us, "they have their own intrinsic value—it matters that these organisms are healthy or not healthy." The spill "is an opportunity for us to find a new way to look at ecological health."
It is more likely, however, that we will continue to assign value only to those parts of nature from which we directly profit. Anything that slips beyond the reach of those crude calculations, either because it is too mysterious or seemingly too trivial, will be considered of no value, its existence left out of environmental risk assessment reports, its death left out of damage assessment lawsuits. And this is what is most disturbing about the latest rush to declare the gulf healthy: we seem to be once again taking refuge in our ignorance, the same kind of willful blindness that caused the disaster in the first place. First came the fateful decision to drill in parts of the earth we do not understand, taking on risks that are beyond our ability to comprehend. Next, when disaster struck, came the decision to use dispersants to sink the oil rather than let it rise to the surface, saving what we do know (the coasts) by potentially sacrificing what we don't know (the depths). And now here we are, squeezing our eyes shut before the results are in, hoping, once again, that what we don't know can't hurt us.
Only about 5 percent of the deep ocean has been explored. The existence of the deep scattering layer—the huge sector of marine life that dwells in the deep but migrates every night toward the surface—was only confirmed by marine biologists in the 1940s. And the revelations are ongoing. Mysterious and otherworldly new species are being discovered all the time.
On board the WeatherBird II, I was constantly struck by the strange simultaneity of discovery and destruction, watching young scientists experiment on fouled sediment drawn up from places science had barely mapped. It's always distressing to witness a beautiful place destroyed by pollution. But there is something particularly harrowing about the realization that we are contaminating places we have never even seen in their natural state. As drilling pushes farther and farther into deep water, risking more disasters in the name of jobs and growth, marine scientists trained to discover the thrillingly unknown will once again be reduced to coroners of the deep, boldly discovering that which we have just destroyed.
Video above: Naomi Klein "Addicted to Risk" at TED. From (http://www.ted.com/talks/naomi_klein_addicted_to_risk.html)
In the two months since the Deepwater Horizon explosion, millions of litres of oil have gushed out of BP's well into the water each day, slowly encroaching on the coastline. Fault Lines' Avi Lewis travels to the drill zone, and learns about the erosion in the wetlands from industry canals and pipelines, the health problems blamed on contaminated air and water from petrochemical refineries.
BP's partner in its damaged, gushing oil well in the Gulf of Mexico has accused the UK-based energy company of "gross negligence and wilful misconduct".
Anadarko Petroleum Corp, owner of a quarter of the well pouring out up to 60,000 barrels per day (9.5 million litres), broke its near-silence on the spill on Friday to squarely pin the blame for the crisis on BP.
"Frankly, we are shocked," Jim Hackett, the chairman and CEO of US-based Anadarko, said in a statement.
"BP's behaviour and actions likely represent gross negligence or wilful misconduct."
BP, on the back foot all week answering tough questions on the Gulf spill and its safety record in general, said it "strongly disagrees" with Anadarko's claims.
Anadarko's shares rose by 2.2 per cent in after-hours trading following Hackett's statement.
In contrast, moments after Anadarko's statement, credit rating agency Moody's cut BP's rating to junk level, citing potential liability from the spill.
Earlier in the day Moody's cut by three notches its rating on BP debt, which is trading around junk levels.
Scrambling for cash
BP is scrambling to line up resources to pay for a $20bn damage claims fund demanded by Barack Obama, the US president.
BP was seeking $1bn in loans from seven different banks, the Reuters news agency said, while US broadcaster CNBC said the energy giant was hoping to raise $5bn with a bond.BP said on June 4 that it had $5bn in cash in addition to $5.25bn in undrawn committed bank lines, and $5.25bn in committed standby bank lines.
Carl-Henric Svanberg, BP's chairman, told broadcaster Sky News Television on Friday that his company had "strong underlying performance - strong cash flow, strong operations".
But Kenneth Feinberg, the man picked by Obama to oversee the $20bn compensation fund, told CBS News on Friday that the amount may not be enough to meet all legitimate claims.
"No one knows for sure yet, but the president made clear, and as I understand it BP went along, that if $20bn is not enough, there will be additional funds provided," he said.
BP's shares are down 26 per cent so far in June, their worst month since the October 1987 stock market crash.
Changing face
Investors appeared unimpressed by the performance of Tony Hayward, BP's chief executive, at a US congressional hearing on Thursday. Legislators accused him of being evasive and of failing to take responsibility for the spill.
Hayward has been sharply criticized for saying he wanted his "life back" after coming under intense pressure as the face of BP throughout the crisis.
On Friday he appeared to be relieved of those duties, with chairman Svanberg saying Hayward would hand over day-to-day handling of the spill to the company's managing director, Robert Dudley.
Svanberg himself was criticized for earlier in the week describing those hurt by the giant oil spill as "small people", a remark for which he later apologized.
Increased collection
On a more positive note, the US Coast Guard admiral leading the US government's relief effort, said BP had increased the amount of oil it was siphoning off from the damaged well to 25,000 barrels (3.97 million litres) on Thursday - the largest amount of oil collected from the gusher yet.
BP's partner in its damaged, gushing oil well in the Gulf of Mexico has accused the UK-based energy company of "gross negligence and wilful misconduct".
Anadarko Petroleum Corp, owner of a quarter of the well pouring out up to 60,000 barrels per day (9.5 million litres), broke its near-silence on the spill on Friday to squarely pin the blame for the crisis on BP.
"Frankly, we are shocked," Jim Hackett, the chairman and CEO of US-based Anadarko, said in a statement.
"BP's behaviour and actions likely represent gross negligence or wilful misconduct."
BP, on the back foot all week answering tough questions on the Gulf spill and its safety record in general, said it "strongly disagrees" with Anadarko's claims.
Anadarko's shares rose by 2.2 per cent in after-hours trading following Hackett's statement.
In contrast, moments after Anadarko's statement, credit rating agency Moody's cut BP's rating to junk level, citing potential liability from the spill.
Earlier in the day Moody's cut by three notches its rating on BP debt, which is trading around junk levels.
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