Major Victory -- Shell Oil's Arctic Drilling Stopped
In a huge victory for the Arctic's endangered species, today Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and President Barack Obama announced that Shell Oil company won't be allowed to drill for oil in Alaska's Beaufort and Chukchi seas this year. Shell was scheduled to begin drilling in just 34 days. The win comes in response to intense protests and court challenges by the Center for Biological Diversity and its allies, and the incredible outpouring of emails from our supporters to Obama calling to stop the drilling. Thank you for your unflagging commitment to protect the Arctic."We applaud the Secretary's decision and hope that he permanently ends all new offshore oil drilling in Alaska" said Kierán Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity. "Drilling for oil in icy Arctic waters is like playing Russian roulette. There is no way to clean up a spill there, and endangered species such as polar bears, whales, walruses, and seals are already under too much stress."
Of note, on Tuesday, just days before this major announcement to stop Shell's drilling, Center staff and polar bear mascot Frostpaw greeted President Barack Obama on his visit to San Francisco with an urgent plea to heed the clear risks: Don't let Shell drill in the Arctic this summer. Apparently, the president listened.
Check out our statement on the suspension of Shell's drilling and our call for stronger regulatory measures, and read more about Obama's San Francisco visit in the San Francisco Chronicle.
This morning, President Obama also announced that he's instituting a six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling to review what happened with the BP explosion and spill, to ensure another disaster doesn't happen. It's an important first step, and we support the effort. But the President is allowing shallow-water drilling activities -- in less than 500 feet of water -- to continue. A spill in shallow water can be just as dangerous as deepwater drilling, and the Minerals Management Service's own data, collected over a 15-year period, demonstrates that "well control performance for deepwater drilling was significantly better than for shallow water operations." If the odds of a drilling spill happening at Deepwater Horizon are lower than for the drilling the President is still allowing, we have a lot more work to do.Further, the president's announcement comes after a month of half-steps and broken promises by the Interior Department, which pledged a "moratorium" on oil drilling that turned out to be largely fictional as the administration continued to hand out environmental review-exempted drilling permits like those given to BP before the spill. As Center Senior Counsel Brendan Cummings said, "Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and the Obama administration should not pretend that a six-month review of drilling procedures will change anything. Expanding offshore drilling to all new areas needs to be permanently taken off the table."
We need to stop all new offshore oil drilling, not just delay it. Please take two minutes right now and call the White House to say that a six-month pause on offshore oil drilling isn't enough: We need to permanently ban new offshore drilling. Here's the number: 202-456-1111.
Read more in the E & E News.
Today the Center for Biological Diversity filed suit against Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and the Minerals Management Service to strike down the agency's exemption of 49 Gulf of Mexico offshore drilling projects from all environmental review. Just like BP's Deepwater Horizon drilling plan, all 49 plans in the suit state that no environmental review is necessary because there's essentially no chance of a large oil spill -- and if a spill were to occur, it would be quickly cleaned up with no lasting damage. The plans involve drilling off the coasts of Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, which provide habitat for many imperiled species, including Kemp's ridley and leatherback sea turtles, sperm whales, piping plovers, and bluefin tuna. And they're the very same areas now being devastated by the BP spill. "Secretary Salazar continues to exercise extremely poor judgment in approving these plans without meaningful environmental review," said Miyoko Sakashita, oceans director at the Center. "He seems to have learned nothing from the oil pouring out into the Gulf of Mexico. Since Salazar is unwilling to shut down the use of environmental waivers that even the president has denounced, we are asking the courts to do so." The Center has also filed suit challenging the policy underlying the decisions to exempt Gulf drilling from environmental review, and we've started a legal action to require compliance with marine mammal and endangered species protection laws that have also been ignored in the Gulf.
Get more from the Associated Press and check out our Gulf Disaster Web site for the latest breaking news on what the Center's doing in the Gulf.
With the Gulf spill spewing millions of gallons of oil into key habitat for the Atlantic bluefin tuna, it's more urgent than ever to protect the fish -- so this week, the Center for Biological Diversity filed a scientific petition to place it on the endangered species list. Overfishing has already erased more than 80 percent of the fish's North Atlantic population, and the Gulf disaster is threatening to devastate the western Atlantic population just as it swims to the spill area to spawn. The oil may coat eggs and larvae floating in the sheen, harm adult tuna that breathe oil into their gills, and move up the food chain from algae to tuna in the next few months. BP's heavy use of dispersants known to be deadly to fish only make the outlook worse for the bluefin -- one of the fastest, largest, and most majestic fish in the sea."Bluefin tuna encounter thousands of deadly hooks while migrating across the Atlantic, and now an oil spill will welcome home the survivors," said Catherine Kilduff, petition author and Center Oceans Program attorney. "Oil rigs are scattered throughout essential breeding habitat for bluefin tuna, and protections could force reforms of the Interior Department's lax environmental oversight of the oil industry by limiting drilling to avoid adverse effects on fish and their habitat."
Read more in the Guardian and learn about the bluefin on our brand-new Atlantic bluefin tuna Web page, and check out a map of its essential habitat and the Gulf oil spill.
To save one of the most critically endangered marine mammals on the planet, this Tuesday the Center for Biological Diversity and allies filed suit to earn expanded habitat protections for the great North Atlantic right whale. In 2009, we petitioned to expand the whale's federally protected "critical habitat" to include areas key to the creature's survival -- calving grounds, critical feeding habitat, and the migratory route between calving and feeding grounds. But despite a legal requirement to take action on our petition within 90 days, the National Marine Fisheries Service hasn't responded to it at all. North Atlantic right whales, threatened by commercial fishing, ship strikes, habitat degradation, ocean noise, global warming, ocean acidification, and pollution, now number just 350 individuals. "Critical habitat protections have a proven track record of helping endangered species to survive," said Andrea Treece, a senior attorney with the Center. "The North Atlantic right whale is on the edge of extinction, and further delay of habitat protection may seal the species' fate."
Check out our press release and learn more about the North Atlantic right whale.
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