Why Obama's plan for drilling in the Atlantic would be disastrous

[Karmadillo]

http://www.counterpunch.org/grossman04292010.html

Spill, Baby, Spill
Blow Out in the Gulf
By KARL GROSSMAN

The massive oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico formed as now an estimated 5,000 barrels of oil (210,000 gallons daily) gush to the surface following an explosion at an oil rig is what other areas of the United States will face under President Barack Obama’s plan to open more offshore waters to oil and gas drilling.

This could be the Atlantic which, in a speech last month, Obama proposed be opened for drilling—despite decades of it being closed because of oil and gas drilling constituting an environmental threat.

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Various reports filed by Interior in response to the litigation admitted major environmental consequences from the drilling. In one, in 1978, in connection with the leasing of the 529,446 Mid-Atlantic acres, Interior said: “Recovery of the affected area from a large spill will be slow, probably requiring a minimum of ten years.” For the anticipated 20-to-25 year lives of the fields, it forecast four large spills of more than 1,000 barrels, 58 spills of 50 to 1,000 barrels and 3,340 spills of up to 50 barrels.

Much of the Atlantic coast—like that of the Gulf of Mexico where oil from the explosion at British Petroleum’s Transocean Deepwater Explorer rig is expected to arrive imminently—is composed of estuaries, bay backs and miles upon miles of fragile wetlands, the spawning and feeding grounds for the chain of marine life. It’s a “soft” coast that would absorb oil like a sop rag. There’s no way to clean oil from wetlands, to clean it off the bottoms of bays, no way to get it off bay bottoms where shellfish live.

The Department of Interior’s 1978 Mid-Atlantic report warned that “adverse effects on commercial fisheries will be encountered” which would include “smothering of shellfish…Finfish and shellfish will suffer mortality from oil spills and flavor may change because of tainting.”

A leading scientist speaking out on off-shore Atlantic oil and gas drilling was the late Dr. Max Blumer of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. He also noted a human-cancer connection. Oil picked up on human skin or taken in through the eating of marine life that had ingested oil could be cancer-causing, he said. “When oil is spilled into the environment we lose control of it,” Dr. Blumer warned. Countermeasures are “effective only if all the oil is recovered immediately after the spill. The technology to achieve this goal does not exist.”

It still does not exist.

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[texastoast]

1. There is no safe technology to do this. Period. n/t

[Karmadillo]

2. Kick

nt

[Karmadillo]

3. One last kick

nt