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Trouble on Oiled Waters, Pt. 2

Com­ment: BP has bought the Google and Yahoo search words rel­e­vant to research­ing the oil spill in the Gulf of Mex­i­co, with the intent of redi­rect­ing search­es for the pur­pos­es of dam­age con­trol.

“BP buys Google, Yahoo Search Words to Keep Peo­ple away from Real News on Gulf Oil Spill Disaster“by Maryann Tobin; examiner.com;  6/6/2010.

Excerpt: In their most tena­cious effort to con­trol the ‘spin’ on the worst oil spill dis­as­ter in the his­to­ry, BP has pur­chased top inter­net search engine words so they can re-direct peo­ple away from real news on the Deep­wa­ter Hori­zon cat­a­stro­phe.

BP spokesman Toby Odone con­firmed to ABC News that the oil giant had in fact bought inter­net search terms. So now when some­one search­es the words ‘oil spill’,  on the inter­net, the top link will re-direct  them to BP’s offi­cial com­pa­ny web­site. . . .

Per­haps they are look­ing to avoid cov­er­age indi­cat­ing that the dis­as­ter was due to inex­cus­able cor­po­rate error, as appears to be the case.

“Rig Sur­vivors: BP Ordered Short­cut on Day of Blast” By Scott Bron­stein and Wayne Drash; CNN; 6/8/2010.

Excerpt: The morn­ing the Deep­wa­ter Hori­zon oil rig explod­ed, a BP exec­u­tive and a Transocean offi­cial argued over how to pro­ceed with the drilling, rig sur­vivors told CNN’s Ander­son Coop­er in an exclu­sive inter­view.

The sur­vivors’ account paints per­haps the most detailed pic­ture yet of what hap­pened on the deep­wa­ter rig — and the pos­si­ble caus­es of the April 20 explo­sion.

The BP offi­cial want­ed work­ers to replace heavy mud, used to keep the well’s pres­sure down, with lighter sea­wa­ter to help speed a process that was cost­ing an esti­mat­ed $750,000 a day and was already run­ning five weeks late, rig sur­vivors told CNN.

BP won the argu­ment, said Doug Brown, the rig’s chief mechan­ic. “He basi­cal­ly said, ‘Well, this is how it’s gonna be.’ ”

“That’s what the big argu­ment was about,” added Daniel Bar­ron III.

Short­ly after the exchange, chief driller Dewey Revette expressed con­cern and oppo­si­tion too, the work­ers said, and on the drilling floor, they chat­ted among them­selves.

“I don’t ever remem­ber doing this,” they said, accord­ing to Bar­ron.

“I think that’s why Dewey was so reluc­tant to try to do it,” Bar­ron said, “because he did­n’t feel it was the right way to have things done.” . . .

Discussion

9 comments for “Trouble on Oiled Waters, Pt. 2”

  1. As we all know, oil and water don’t mix. Frack­ing waste and water, on the oth­er hand, can mix quite nice­ly. Liv­ing things, which con­tain lots of water, could prob­a­bly mix with that frack­ing waste water too, but it’s not real­ly rec­om­mend­ed:

    Think Progress
    What Cows Can Tell Us About The Dan­gers Of Frack­ing

    by Andrew Brein­er Post­ed on Sep­tem­ber 19, 2013 at 4:43 pm

    Evi­dence on the way frack­ing affects the health of humans is scarce, in large part because drilling com­pa­nies go to great lengths to keep that infor­ma­tion hid­den. That’s why two Cor­nell Uni­ver­si­ty researchers turned to cows to find out just how tox­ic frack­ing pol­lu­tion is. The results were alarm­ing, if not exact­ly sur­pris­ing.

    The study, by Michelle Bam­berg­er and Robert E. Oswald, found that con­se­quences ranged from near-imme­di­ate death to still­births and genet­ic defects in off­spring that per­sist­ed for years after expo­sure to frack­ing waste­water.

    While the authors not­ed that theirs was not a con­trolled exper­i­ment, which wouldn’t be fea­si­ble, two cas­es pro­vid­ed nat­u­ral­ly-occur­ring con­trol groups. On one farm, 60 head of cat­tle drank from an alleged­ly waste­water-pol­lut­ed creek while 36 drank clean water. Of the 60, “21 died and 16 failed to pro­duce calves the fol­low­ing spring. Of the 36 that were not exposed, no health prob­lems were observed, and only one cow failed to breed.”

    But Bam­berg­er and Oswald didn’t just look at live­stock. They also include cas­es of humans and their “com­pan­ion ani­mals” suf­fer­ing the effects of pol­lu­tion. In one case, two home­own­ers “locat­ed with­in two miles of approx­i­mate­ly 25 shale gas wells” saw mul­ti­ple instances of waste­water dump­ing and spillage.

    ...

    Drillers fre­quent­ly spread waste­water on roads near these homes, a prac­tice that in many states is legal, even con­sid­ered a “‘ben­e­fi­cial use’ — for deic­ing and dust sup­pres­sion,” Bam­berg­er and Oswald explained to Cli­mate Progress in an email. “The exam­ple in [this case] was like­ly legal.”

    They argued in the email that expo­sure could be more lim­it­ed with greater reg­u­la­tion, but not solved. The authors said:

    this remains a dan­ger­ous oper­a­tion and there have been well blowouts, for exam­ple, for as long as there has been drilling. Flar­ing, vent­ing, pol­lu­tion from pro­cess­ing plants, etc. will go on regard­less of improved reg­u­la­tion.

    Bam­berg­er and Oswald also raised the ques­tion of food safe­ty. They doc­u­ment sev­er­al cas­es where ani­mals were slaugh­tered after expo­sure to chem­i­cal con­t­a­m­i­nants with­out any test­ing, and entire con­t­a­m­i­nat­ed farms that con­tin­ue pro­duc­ing dairy and meat prod­ucts with­out test­ing. And it is the large scale of today’s hydraulic frac­tur­ing that is mak­ing it so harm­ful, plac­ing “the han­dling of huge vol­umes of tox­ic chem­i­cals and waste prod­ucts, as well as com­pres­sor sta­tions and pro­cess­ing plants, near homes and farms,” Bam­berg­er and Oswald said in an email.

    Since drilling com­pa­nies refuse to reveal the exact chem­i­cals in frack­ing solu­tions, and typ­i­cal­ly set­tle and impose nondis­clo­sure agree­ments on any indi­vid­u­als harmed by the prac­tice, there is near­ly no record of how it impacts people’s health to live near a drilling oper­a­tion. Doc­tors in Penn­syl­va­nia are even barred from reveal­ing to their patients what chem­i­cals they may be poi­soned by.

    Although prop­er­ty own­ers often file suit claim­ing symp­toms like breath­ing prob­lems and burn­ing eyes and skin, they are typ­i­cal­ly forced to drop those claims before the driller will agree to set­tle. That way, there’s nev­er con­fir­ma­tion that frack­ing harms people’s health. This study con­sti­tutes an impor­tant step towards that con­fir­ma­tion.

    That report was from last year, so hope­ful­ly there are even more up to date stud­ies on the impact of frack­ing pol­lu­tants on our health. If not, don’t wor­ry. We’ll have lots more human data points soon­er or lat­er. Like the above study, which did­n’t use data from con­trolled stud­ies (because that would be uneth­i­cal) and instead relied on data from two nat­u­ral­ly-occur­ring con­trol groups, researchers in the future should have plen­ty more nat­u­ral­ly-occur­ring con­trol groups, although they may not be very “nat­u­ral­ly occur­ring”. Either way, these new frack­ing-expo­sure con­trol groups are occur­ing:

    NBC Bay Area
    Waste Water from Oil Frack­ing Inject­ed into Clean Aquifers
    Cal­i­for­nia Dept. of Con­ser­va­tion Deputy Direc­tor admits that errors were made
    By Stephen Stock, Liza Meak, Mark Vil­lar­real and Scott Pham

    Fri­day, Nov 14, 2014 • Updat­ed at 11:52 PM PST

    State offi­cials allowed oil and gas com­pa­nies to pump near­ly three bil­lion gal­lons of waste water into under­ground aquifers that could have been used for drink­ing water or irri­ga­tion.

    Those aquifers are sup­posed to be off-lim­its to that kind of activ­i­ty, pro­tect­ed by the EPA.

    “It’s inex­cus­able,” said Hollin Kret­z­mann, at the Cen­ter for Bio­log­i­cal Diver­si­ty in San Fran­cis­co. “At (a) time when Cal­i­for­nia is expe­ri­enc­ing one of the worst droughts in his­to­ry, we’re allow­ing oil com­pa­nies to con­t­a­m­i­nate what could oth­er­wise be very use­ful ground water resources for irri­ga­tion and for drink­ing. It’s pos­si­ble these aquifers are now con­t­a­m­i­nat­ed irrepara­bly.”

    California’s Depart­ment of Conservation’s Chief Deputy Direc­tor, Jason Mar­shall, told NBC Bay Area, “In mul­ti­ple dif­fer­ent places of the per­mit­ting process an error could have been made.”

    “There have been past issues where per­mits were issued to oper­a­tors that they shouldn’t be inject­ing into those zones and so we’re fix­ing that,” Mar­shall added.

    In “frack­ing” or hydraulic frac­tur­ing oper­a­tions, oil and gas com­pa­nies use mas­sive amounts of water to force the release of under­ground fos­sil fuels. The prac­tice pro­duces large amounts of waste water that must then be dis­posed of.

    Mar­shall said that often times, oil and gas com­pa­nies sim­ply re-inject that waste water back deep under­ground where the oil extrac­tion took place. But oth­er times, Mar­shall said, the waste water is re-inject­ed into aquifers clos­er to the sur­face. Those injec­tions are sup­posed to go into aquifers that the EPA calls “exempt”—in oth­er words, not clean enough for humans to drink or use.

    But in the State’s let­ter to the EPA, offi­cials admit that in at least nine waste water injec­tion wells, the waste water was inject­ed into “non-exempt” or clean aquifers con­tain­ing high qual­i­ty water.

    For the EPA, “non-exempt” aquifers are under­ground bod­ies of water that are “con­tain­ing high qual­i­ty water” that can be used by humans to drink, water ani­mals or irri­gate crops.

    If the waste water re-injec­tion well “went into a non-exempt aquifer. It should not have been per­mit­ted,” said Mar­shall.

    The depart­ment end­ed up shut­ting down 11 wells: the nine that were known to be inject­ing into non-exempt aquifers, and anoth­er two in an abun­dance of cau­tion.

    In its reply let­ter to the EPA, California’s Water Resources Con­trol Board said its “staff iden­ti­fied 108 water sup­ply wells locat­ed with­in a one-mile radius of seven…injection wells” and that The Cen­tral Val­ley Water Board con­duct­ed sam­pling of “eight water sup­ply wells in the vicin­i­ty of some of these… wells.”

    “This is some­thing that is going to slow­ly con­t­a­m­i­nate every­thing we know around here,” said fourth- gen­er­a­tion Kern Coun­ty almond grow­er Tom Frantz, who lives down the road from sev­er­al of the injec­tion wells in ques­tion.

    Accord­ing to state records, as many as 40 water sup­ply wells, includ­ing domes­tic drink­ing wells, are locat­ed with­in one mile of a sin­gle well that’s been inject­ing into non-exempt aquifers.

    That well is locat­ed in an area with sev­er­al homes near­by, right in the mid­dle of a cit­rus grove south­east of Bak­ers­field.

    State records show waste water from sev­er­al sources, includ­ing from the oil and gas indus­try, has gone into the aquifer below where 60 dif­fer­ent water sup­ply wells are locat­ed with­in a one mile radius.

    “That’s a huge con­cern and com­mu­ni­ties who rely on water sup­ply wells near these injec­tion wells have a lot of rea­son to be con­cerned that they’re find­ing high lev­els of arsenic and thal­li­um and oth­er chem­i­cals near­by where these injec­tion wells have been allowed to oper­ate,” said Kret­z­mann.

    “It is a clear wor­ry,” said Juan Flo­res, a Kern Coun­ty com­mu­ni­ty orga­niz­er for the Cen­ter on Race, Pover­ty and The Envi­ron­ment. “We’re in a drought. The worst drought we’ve seen in decades. Prob­a­bly the worst in the his­to­ry of agri­cul­ture in Cal­i­for­nia.”

    “No one from this com­mu­ni­ty will drink from the water from out of their well,” said Flo­res. “The peo­ple are wor­ried. They’re scared.”

    The trade asso­ci­a­tion that rep­re­sents many of California’s oil and gas com­pa­nies says the water-injec­tion is a “paper­work issue.” In a state­ment issued to NBC Bay Area, West­ern States Petro­le­um Asso­ci­a­tion spokesman Tup­per Hull said “there has nev­er been a bona vide claim or evi­dence pre­sent­ed that the paper­work con­fu­sion result­ed in any con­t­a­m­i­na­tion of drink­ing sup­plies near the dis­put­ed injec­tion wells.”

    How­ev­er, state offi­cials test­ed 8 water sup­ply wells with­in a one-mile radius of some of those wells.

    Four water sam­ples came back with high­er than allow­able lev­els of nitrate, arsenic, and thal­li­um.

    Those same chem­i­cals are used by the oil and gas indus­try in the hydraulic frac­tur­ing process and can be found in oil recov­ery waste-water.

    “We are still com­par­ing the test­ing of what was the injec­tion water to what is the test­ed water that came out of these wells to find out if they were back­ground lev­els or whether that’s the result of oil and gas oper­a­tion, but so far it’s look­ing like it’s back­ground,” said James Mar­shall from the Cal­i­for­nia Depart­ment of Con­ser­va­tion.

    Mar­shall acknowl­edged that those chem­i­cals could have come from oil extrac­tion, and not nec­es­sar­i­ly waste­water dis­pos­al.

    “But when those (fur­ther) test results come back, we’ll know for sure,” Mar­shall said.

    ...

    Glug, glug, glug....*gulp*

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | November 18, 2014, 1:06 pm
  2. Thirsty? No? You will be:

    Cal­i­for­nia is let­ting oil com­pa­nies dump their flu­ids and waste where the state gets its drink­ing water
    Asso­ci­at­ed Press

    Ser­dar Tum­goren, Asso­ci­at­ed Press

    Feb. 5, 2015, 2:50 PM

    BAKERSFIELD, Calif. (AP) — Reg­u­la­tors in Cal­i­for­nia, the coun­try’s third-largest oil-pro­duc­ing state, have autho­rized oil com­pa­nies to inject pro­duc­tion flu­ids and waste into what are now fed­er­al­ly pro­tect­ed aquifers more than 2,500 times, risk­ing con­t­a­m­i­na­tion of under­ground water sup­plies that could be used for drink­ing water or irri­ga­tion, state records show.

    While some of the per­mits go back decades, an Asso­ci­at­ed Press analy­sis found that near­ly half of those injec­tion wells — 46 per­cent — were per­mit­ted or began injec­tion in the last four years under Gov. Jer­ry Brown, who has pushed state oil and gas reg­u­la­tors to speed up the per­mit­ting process. And it hap­pened despite warn­ings from the U.S. Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency since 2011 that state reg­u­la­tors were fail­ing to do enough to shield ground­wa­ter reserves from the threat of oil­field pol­lu­tion.

    In Cal­i­for­nia, “we need a big course cor­rec­tion. We need to get the sys­tem back in com­pli­ance,” said Jared Blu­men­feld, region­al admin­is­tra­tor for the EPA. “Cal­i­for­ni­ans expect their water is not being pol­lut­ed by oil pro­duc­ers ... This pos­es that very real dan­ger.”

    The injec­tions are con­ve­nient to oil com­pa­nies because drilling brings up 13 gal­lons of waste­water for every gal­lon of petro­le­um. And one of the eas­i­est dis­pos­al meth­ods is sim­ply to send that waste back under­ground.

    The fed­er­al gov­ern­ment is now demand­ing that state offi­cials take imme­di­ate steps to find and deal with any con­t­a­m­i­na­tion and end oil-indus­try oper­a­tions in all aquifers set aside for fam­i­lies and farms.

    Those water sup­plies are espe­cial­ly vital because Cal­i­for­nia, the nation’s most pop­u­lous state and its agri­cul­tur­al leader, is now enter­ing the fourth year of a his­toric drought.

    State offi­cials acknowl­edge that reg­u­la­tors erred, cit­ing con­fu­sion about the bound­aries of aquifers and oil fields or long-stand­ing state mis­in­ter­pre­ta­tions of fed­er­al water-safe­ty require­ments. The vast major­i­ty of the per­mits were grant­ed after the fed­er­al Safe Drink­ing Water Act in 1974.

    For some of the per­mits, “we don’t know how this got approved,” said Jason Mar­shall, deputy direc­tor of the Cal­i­for­nia Depart­ment of Con­ser­va­tion, which direct­ly reg­u­lates the state’s oil and gas indus­try.

    In one case, reg­u­la­tors signed off on an appli­ca­tion to inject waste­water into a fed­er­al­ly pro­tect­ed aquifer, then real­ized their error and raced to the site.

    “He had done injec­tion for about 20 min­utes,” Mar­shall recalled. “We just said, ‘Stop! You can’t do that. Stop.’ ”

    So far, state offi­cials say they have no evi­dence of water con­t­a­m­i­na­tion. But wor­ries per­sist.

    “The prob­lem with just mon­i­tor­ing (for con­t­a­m­i­nants) is once you see it in the well, it’s too late,” said Tim­o­thy Park­er, an inde­pen­dent Sacra­men­to-based ground­wa­ter expert who has worked for the state Depart­ment of Water Resources and in the oil indus­try. “It’s very dif­fi­cult to clean up an aquifer once it’s con­t­a­m­i­nat­ed.”

    Over the sum­mer, state oil and gas reg­u­la­tors sent the EPA lists of per­mits that allow oil com­pa­nies to inject waste or pro­duc­tion flu­id into aquifers that were pro­tect­ed by the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment. In Decem­ber, the EPA gave the state until Fri­day to draft a plan for halt­ing the prac­tice and bring­ing the state into com­pli­ance with the 1974 Safe Drink­ing Water Act. The state has until 2017 to stop injec­tions into any aquifer that has not been specif­i­cal­ly des­ig­nat­ed for oil-indus­try waste dis­pos­al or drilling.

    Offi­cials are deter­mined to both “man­age the tran­si­tion” back into com­pli­ance with fed­er­al law and to “main­tain a robust oil indus­try,” said Steve Bohlen, head of oil, gas and geot­her­mal resources for the Cal­i­for­nia Depart­ment of Con­ser­va­tion.

    Of the 2,553 injec­tion wells that the state has iden­ti­fied as risk­ing con­t­a­m­i­na­tion of pro­tect­ed aquifers, 1,172 were approved by the state or began injec­tion in the last four years since Brown took office, accord­ing to state records.

    ...

    Most of the per­mits were grant­ed for drilling sites in cen­tral Cal­i­for­ni­a’s Kern Coun­ty, one of the coun­try’s main oil-pro­duc­ing coun­ties. Many of the injec­tion wells are in oil­fields thick with rigs, tanks and dis­pos­al wells. But oth­ers sit among cit­rus groves, row crops and homes.The AP found more than 170 per­mits involved aquifers met both fed­er­al and state stan­dards for poten­tial drink­ing water. That includ­ed at least 27 per­mits that autho­rized injec­tions into aquifers with water state doc­u­ments rat­ed clean enough to tap for drink­ing with­out treat­ment.

    ...

    Note that Kern Coun­ty, where most of the per­mits were grant­ed, faces a trag­i­cal­ly inter­est­ing conun­drum: Moody’s just just down­grad­ed Kern Coun­ty due to a fis­cal emer­gency tied to the plum­met­ing price of oil. So...will Kern Coun­ty find a way to even eas­i­er to drill in order to make up for lost rev­enues or move on to a non-sui­ci­dal eco­nom­ic strat­e­gy?

    Moody’s may cut rat­ing of Cal­i­for­ni­a’s Kern Coun­ty after fis­cal emer­gency
    Sat Jan 31, 2015 1:27am GMT

    By Tim Reid

    LOS ANGELES Jan 30 (Reuters) — Cal­i­for­ni­a’s Kern Coun­ty was put on notice for a pos­si­ble down­grade on Fri­day by rat­ings agency Moody’s Investor Ser­vice, three days after the coun­ty declared a fis­cal emer­gency.

    On Tues­day, Kern Coun­ty in Cal­i­for­ni­a’s Cen­tral Val­ley declared a fis­cal emer­gency, cit­ing plung­ing oil prices and grow­ing pen­sion debt as the main rea­sons for a pro­ject­ed $27 mil­lion gen­er­al fund deficit in fis­cal year 2015/16.

    Moody’s react­ed on Fri­day evening, plac­ing Kern Coun­ty’s cred­it rat­ing under review for pos­si­ble down­grade. The rat­ings agency said the review affect­ed approx­i­mate­ly $86 mil­lion in debt, relat­ed to the coun­ty’s Series 2009A cer­tifi­cates of par­tic­i­pa­tion.

    Kern Coun­ty, with a pop­u­la­tion of about 900,000, lies in the heart of Cal­i­for­ni­a’s oil and gas pro­duc­ing region, and pro­duces more oil than any oth­er of the state’s coun­ties.

    A rough­ly 50 per­cent drop in crude prices since July has cut pro­ject­ed oil-relat­ed prop­er­ty tax rev­enues by $61 mil­lion for fis­cal year 2015/16, Kern offi­cials said on Tues­day. They also said grow­ing unfund­ed pen­sion lia­bil­i­ties were increas­ing strains on the coun­ty bud­get.

    ...

    “In addi­tion to Kern Coun­ty econ­o­my’s con­cen­tra­tion in the oil indus­try, the coun­ty’s cred­it qual­i­ty is chal­lenged by an above aver­age, unfund­ed pen­sion oblig­a­tion and a below aver­age socioe­co­nom­ic pro­file,” Moody’s said.

    By declar­ing a fis­cal emer­gency, Kern offi­cials have the legal author­i­ty to tap into a $40 mil­lion reserve fund to shore up the coun­ty bud­get. It also gives them greater abil­i­ty to cut staffing lev­els and ben­e­fits in the fire depart­ment.

    “By declar­ing a fis­cal emer­gency, Kern offi­cials have the legal author­i­ty to tap into a $40 mil­lion reserve fund to shore up the coun­ty bud­get. It also gives them greater abil­i­ty to cut staffing lev­els and ben­e­fits in the fire depart­ment.” Hmmmm...sounds like they’re stick­ing with sui­ci­dal.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | February 5, 2015, 3:54 pm
  3. Thirsty? No? You will be:

    Cal­i­for­nia is let­ting oil com­pa­nies dump their flu­ids and waste where the state gets its drink­ing water
    Asso­ci­at­ed Press

    Ser­dar Tum­goren, Asso­ci­at­ed Press

    Feb. 5, 2015, 2:50 PM

    BAKERSFIELD, Calif. (AP) — Reg­u­la­tors in Cal­i­for­nia, the coun­try’s third-largest oil-pro­duc­ing state, have autho­rized oil com­pa­nies to inject pro­duc­tion flu­ids and waste into what are now fed­er­al­ly pro­tect­ed aquifers more than 2,500 times, risk­ing con­t­a­m­i­na­tion of under­ground water sup­plies that could be used for drink­ing water or irri­ga­tion, state records show.

    While some of the per­mits go back decades, an Asso­ci­at­ed Press analy­sis found that near­ly half of those injec­tion wells — 46 per­cent — were per­mit­ted or began injec­tion in the last four years under Gov. Jer­ry Brown, who has pushed state oil and gas reg­u­la­tors to speed up the per­mit­ting process. And it hap­pened despite warn­ings from the U.S. Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency since 2011 that state reg­u­la­tors were fail­ing to do enough to shield ground­wa­ter reserves from the threat of oil­field pol­lu­tion.

    In Cal­i­for­nia, “we need a big course cor­rec­tion. We need to get the sys­tem back in com­pli­ance,” said Jared Blu­men­feld, region­al admin­is­tra­tor for the EPA. “Cal­i­for­ni­ans expect their water is not being pol­lut­ed by oil pro­duc­ers ... This pos­es that very real dan­ger.”

    The injec­tions are con­ve­nient to oil com­pa­nies because drilling brings up 13 gal­lons of waste­water for every gal­lon of petro­le­um. And one of the eas­i­est dis­pos­al meth­ods is sim­ply to send that waste back under­ground.

    The fed­er­al gov­ern­ment is now demand­ing that state offi­cials take imme­di­ate steps to find and deal with any con­t­a­m­i­na­tion and end oil-indus­try oper­a­tions in all aquifers set aside for fam­i­lies and farms.

    Those water sup­plies are espe­cial­ly vital because Cal­i­for­nia, the nation’s most pop­u­lous state and its agri­cul­tur­al leader, is now enter­ing the fourth year of a his­toric drought.

    State offi­cials acknowl­edge that reg­u­la­tors erred, cit­ing con­fu­sion about the bound­aries of aquifers and oil fields or long-stand­ing state mis­in­ter­pre­ta­tions of fed­er­al water-safe­ty require­ments. The vast major­i­ty of the per­mits were grant­ed after the fed­er­al Safe Drink­ing Water Act in 1974.

    For some of the per­mits, “we don’t know how this got approved,” said Jason Mar­shall, deputy direc­tor of the Cal­i­for­nia Depart­ment of Con­ser­va­tion, which direct­ly reg­u­lates the state’s oil and gas indus­try.

    In one case, reg­u­la­tors signed off on an appli­ca­tion to inject waste­water into a fed­er­al­ly pro­tect­ed aquifer, then real­ized their error and raced to the site.

    “He had done injec­tion for about 20 min­utes,” Mar­shall recalled. “We just said, ‘Stop! You can’t do that. Stop.’ ”

    So far, state offi­cials say they have no evi­dence of water con­t­a­m­i­na­tion. But wor­ries per­sist.

    “The prob­lem with just mon­i­tor­ing (for con­t­a­m­i­nants) is once you see it in the well, it’s too late,” said Tim­o­thy Park­er, an inde­pen­dent Sacra­men­to-based ground­wa­ter expert who has worked for the state Depart­ment of Water Resources and in the oil indus­try. “It’s very dif­fi­cult to clean up an aquifer once it’s con­t­a­m­i­nat­ed.”

    Over the sum­mer, state oil and gas reg­u­la­tors sent the EPA lists of per­mits that allow oil com­pa­nies to inject waste or pro­duc­tion flu­id into aquifers that were pro­tect­ed by the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment. In Decem­ber, the EPA gave the state until Fri­day to draft a plan for halt­ing the prac­tice and bring­ing the state into com­pli­ance with the 1974 Safe Drink­ing Water Act. The state has until 2017 to stop injec­tions into any aquifer that has not been specif­i­cal­ly des­ig­nat­ed for oil-indus­try waste dis­pos­al or drilling.

    Offi­cials are deter­mined to both “man­age the tran­si­tion” back into com­pli­ance with fed­er­al law and to “main­tain a robust oil indus­try,” said Steve Bohlen, head of oil, gas and geot­her­mal resources for the Cal­i­for­nia Depart­ment of Con­ser­va­tion.

    Of the 2,553 injec­tion wells that the state has iden­ti­fied as risk­ing con­t­a­m­i­na­tion of pro­tect­ed aquifers, 1,172 were approved by the state or began injec­tion in the last four years since Brown took office, accord­ing to state records.

    ...

    Most of the per­mits were grant­ed for drilling sites in cen­tral Cal­i­for­ni­a’s Kern Coun­ty, one of the coun­try’s main oil-pro­duc­ing coun­ties. Many of the injec­tion wells are in oil­fields thick with rigs, tanks and dis­pos­al wells. But oth­ers sit among cit­rus groves, row crops and homes.The AP found more than 170 per­mits involved aquifers met both fed­er­al and state stan­dards for poten­tial drink­ing water. That includ­ed at least 27 per­mits that autho­rized injec­tions into aquifers with water state doc­u­ments rat­ed clean enough to tap for drink­ing with­out treat­ment.

    ...

    Note that Kern Coun­ty, where most of the per­mits were grant­ed, faces a trag­i­cal­ly inter­est­ing conun­drum: Moody’s just just down­grad­ed Kern Coun­ty due to a fis­cal emer­gency tied to the plum­met­ing price of oil. So...will Kern Coun­ty find a way to even eas­i­er to drill in order to make up for lost rev­enues or move on to a non-sui­ci­dal eco­nom­ic strat­e­gy?

    Moody’s may cut rat­ing of Cal­i­for­ni­a’s Kern Coun­ty after fis­cal emer­gency
    Sat Jan 31, 2015 1:27am GMT

    By Tim Reid

    LOS ANGELES Jan 30 (Reuters) — Cal­i­for­ni­a’s Kern Coun­ty was put on notice for a pos­si­ble down­grade on Fri­day by rat­ings agency Moody’s Investor Ser­vice, three days after the coun­ty declared a fis­cal emer­gency.

    On Tues­day, Kern Coun­ty in Cal­i­for­ni­a’s Cen­tral Val­ley declared a fis­cal emer­gency, cit­ing plung­ing oil prices and grow­ing pen­sion debt as the main rea­sons for a pro­ject­ed $27 mil­lion gen­er­al fund deficit in fis­cal year 2015/16.

    Moody’s react­ed on Fri­day evening, plac­ing Kern Coun­ty’s cred­it rat­ing under review for pos­si­ble down­grade. The rat­ings agency said the review affect­ed approx­i­mate­ly $86 mil­lion in debt, relat­ed to the coun­ty’s Series 2009A cer­tifi­cates of par­tic­i­pa­tion.

    Kern Coun­ty, with a pop­u­la­tion of about 900,000, lies in the heart of Cal­i­for­ni­a’s oil and gas pro­duc­ing region, and pro­duces more oil than any oth­er of the state’s coun­ties.

    A rough­ly 50 per­cent drop in crude prices since July has cut pro­ject­ed oil-relat­ed prop­er­ty tax rev­enues by $61 mil­lion for fis­cal year 2015/16, Kern offi­cials said on Tues­day. They also said grow­ing unfund­ed pen­sion lia­bil­i­ties were increas­ing strains on the coun­ty bud­get.

    ...

    “In addi­tion to Kern Coun­ty econ­o­my’s con­cen­tra­tion in the oil indus­try, the coun­ty’s cred­it qual­i­ty is chal­lenged by an above aver­age, unfund­ed pen­sion oblig­a­tion and a below aver­age socioe­co­nom­ic pro­file,” Moody’s said.

    By declar­ing a fis­cal emer­gency, Kern offi­cials have the legal author­i­ty to tap into a $40 mil­lion reserve fund to shore up the coun­ty bud­get. It also gives them greater abil­i­ty to cut staffing lev­els and ben­e­fits in the fire depart­ment.

    “By declar­ing a fis­cal emer­gency, Kern offi­cials have the legal author­i­ty to tap into a $40 mil­lion reserve fund to shore up the coun­ty bud­get. It also gives them greater abil­i­ty to cut staffing lev­els and ben­e­fits in the fire depart­ment.” Hmmmm...sounds like they’re stick­ing with sui­cide.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | February 5, 2015, 3:54 pm
  4. Remem­ber the case of the dis­ap­pear­ing Macon­do spill oil and Corex­it, the mys­tery prod­uct used by BP to cause oil from the Macon­do oil spill to sink and dis­perse? The BP spill cleanup work­ers no doubt remem­ber, although some of the details might be hazy due to the mem­o­ry loss cleanup work­ers expe­ri­enced years after the dis­as­ter. Here’s a look back at how BP unleashed the Blob upon the Lit­tle Mer­maid and the rest of her friends in the sea. Espe­cial­ly her friends on the sea floor:

    ABC NEws
    Oil From the BP Spill Found at Bot­tom of Gulf
    Sept. 12, 2010
    By MATT GUTMAN and KEVIN DOLAK

    Oil from the BP spill has not been com­plete­ly cleared, but miles of it is sit­ting at the bot­tom of the Gulf of Mex­i­co, accord­ing to a study cur­rent­ly under way.

    Pro­fes­sor Saman­tha Joye of the Depart­ment of Marine Sci­ences at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Geor­gia, who is con­duct­ing a study on a research ves­sel just two miles from the spill zone, said the oil has not dis­ap­peared, but is on the sea floor in a lay­er of scum.

    “We’re find­ing it every­where that we’ve looked. The oil is not gone,” Joye said. “It’s in places where nobody has looked for it.”

    All 13 of the core sam­ples Joye and her UGA team have col­lect­ed from the bot­tom of the gulf are show­ing oil from the spill, she said.

    In an inter­view with ABC News from her ves­sel, Joye said the oil can­not be nat­ur­al seep­age into the gulf, because the cores they’ve test­ed are show­ing oil only at the top. With nat­ur­al seep­age, the oil would spread from the top to the bot­tom of the core, she said.

    “It looks like you just took a strip of very sticky mate­r­i­al and just passed it through the water col­umn and all the stuff from the water col­umn got stuck to it, and got trans­port­ed to the bot­tom,” Joye said. “I know what a nat­ur­al seep looks like — this is not nat­ur­al seep­age.”

    In some areas the oily mate­r­i­al that Joye describes is more than two inch­es thick. Her team found the mate­r­i­al as far as 70 miles away from BP’s well.

    “If we’re see­ing two and half inch­es of oil 16 miles away, God knows what we’ll see close in — I real­ly can’t even guess oth­er than to say it’s going to be a whole lot more than two and a half inch­es,” Joye said.

    This oil remain­ing under­wa­ter has large impli­ca­tions for the state of sea life at the bot­tom of the gulf.

    Joye said she spent hours study­ing the core sam­ples and was unable to find any­thing oth­er than bac­te­ria and microor­gan­isms liv­ing with­in.

    “There is noth­ing liv­ing in these cores oth­er than bac­te­ria,” she said. “I’ve yet to see a liv­ing shrimp, a liv­ing worm, noth­ing.”

    Stud­ies con­duct­ed by the Uni­ver­si­ty of Geor­gia and the Uni­ver­si­ty of South Flori­da caused con­tro­ver­sy back in August when they found that almost 80 per­cent of the oil that leaked from BP’s well is still out in the waters of the Gulf.

    Their report stood in stark con­trast to that of the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment, which on Aug. 4 declared that 74 per­cent of the oil was gone, hav­ing bro­ken down or been cleaned up.

    “A report out today by our sci­en­tists shows that the vast major­i­ty of the spilled oil has been dis­persed or removed from the water,” Pres­i­dent Oba­ma said in August.

    The stud­ies by Joye and oth­er sci­en­tists found that what the gov­ern­ment had report­ed to the pub­lic only meant that the oil still lurked, invis­i­ble in the water.

    Though ini­tial­ly deny­ing the claim, BP — and the Nation­al Ocean­ic and Atmos­pher­ic Admin­is­tra­tion — acknowl­edged the exis­tence of the dis­persed oil. BP sub­se­quent­ly pledged $500 mil­lion for gulf research.

    ...

    “The con­cen­tra­tions that are cur­rent­ly out there in var­i­ous loca­tions are high enough to have a tox­ic effect on marine life,” said Charles Hop­kin­son, also of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Geor­gia’s marine sci­ences pro­gram.

    NOAA Admin­is­tra­tor Jane Lubchen­co, the gov­ern­men­t’s top ocean sci­en­tist, has acknowl­edged con­cerns over the effects of dis­solved oil, but has said that chem­i­cal dis­per­sants had large­ly done their job.

    “Nobody should be sur­prised,” Joye said. “When you apply large scale dis­per­sants, it goes to the bot­tom — it sed­i­ments out. It gets sticky.”

    As Dr. Joye point­ed out:

    “There is noth­ing liv­ing in these cores oth­er than bac­te­ria,” she said. “I’ve yet to see a liv­ing shrimp, a liv­ing worm, noth­ing.”

    ...

    “Nobody should be surprised...When you apply large scale dis­per­sants, it goes to the bot­tom — it sed­i­ments out. It gets sticky.” That sounds about right. Espe­cial­ly just months after an acci­dent on that scale.

    Well that sounds night­mar­ish. And when you hear some­thing like that four months after a blob attack, you should­n’t be sur­prised when you read about things like large num­bers of dol­phin deaths in the blob-impact­ed region. You also prob­a­bly should­n’t be very sur­prised that BP vehe­ment­ly denies that its blob had any­thing to do with with the dol­phin deaths:

    Think Progress
    Unusu­al String Of Bot­tlenose Dol­phin Deaths Linked To BP Oil Spill

    by Emi­ly Atkin Post­ed on Feb­ru­ary 13, 2015 at 11:30 am

    An “unusu­al mor­tal­i­ty event” among marine mam­mals — pri­mar­i­ly bot­tlenose dol­phins — in the north­ern Gulf of Mex­i­co has been linked to BP’s his­toric 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mex­i­co.

    In research pub­lished Wednes­day in the jour­nal PloS One, a team of marine sci­en­tists from across the coun­try doc­u­ment­ed a large clus­ter of dol­phin strand­ings and deaths in the Gulf of Mex­i­co between 2010 and June 2013. Of those strand­ings and deaths, they said, most occurred in areas impact­ed by the 2010 BP Deep­wa­ter Hori­zon oil spill.

    “[T]he loca­tion, tim­ing, and mag­ni­tude of dol­phin strand­ing trends observed fol­low­ing the [BP] oil spill, par­tic­u­lar­ly statewide for Louisiana, Mis­sis­sip­pi, and Alaba­ma, over­lap with the loca­tion and mag­ni­tude of oil dur­ing and the year fol­low­ing [the] spill,” the research reads. “In com­par­i­son, the [Gulf of Mex­i­co] coasts of Flori­da and Texas expe­ri­enced lit­tle to no oil­ing, and … these areas lacked sig­nif­i­cant annu­al, statewide increas­es in strand­ed dol­phins.”

    The peer-reviewed research is just the lat­est link­ing the Deep­wa­ter Hori­zon spill to extreme health prob­lems in dol­phins, par­tic­u­lar­ly in Louisiana’s Barataria Bay. In a pre­vi­ous study pub­lished in 2013, sci­en­tists have said that the 4.2 mil­lion bar­rels of oil sloshed into the Gulf of Mex­i­co may be linked to dete­ri­o­rat­ing dol­phin health includ­ing miss­ing teeth, lung dis­ease, and hor­mon­al imbal­ances. That study was fund­ed by BP.

    “I’ve nev­er seen such a high preva­lence of very sick ani­mals,” said Nation­al Ocean­ic and Atmos­pher­ic Admin­is­tra­tion researcher Lori Schwacke, the lead author of the 2013 study.

    BP has vehe­ment­ly denied that the oil spill was the direct cause of any adverse impacts to dol­phin health. Indeed, nei­ther of the stud­ies imply direct cau­sa­tion — they mere­ly note an over­lap in the time of the spill and the dis­cov­ery of sick or dead ani­mals. BP has also not­ed that pri­or to the spill, there had been lit­tle to no stud­ies of dol­phin health, mak­ing it dif­fi­cult to dis­cern whether those prob­lems were ongo­ing. Health assess­ments of the Gulf have shown oth­er con­di­tions unre­lat­ed to the oil spill that are detri­men­tal to marine mam­mal health, includ­ing oth­er types of pol­lu­tion and cold tem­per­a­tures. Because of that vari­abil­i­ty, the oil giant has made the case that the spill “didn’t ruin the Gulf.”

    “It’s impor­tant to note that unfor­tu­nate­ly these large die-offs of dol­phins aren’t unusu­al,” the com­pa­ny said in a state­ment to the Times-Picayune. “The study states that there were ten [unusu­al mor­tal­i­ty events] involv­ing bot­tlenose dol­phins doc­u­ment­ed in the Gulf pri­or to 2010. Over the past years there have been dol­phin UMEs relat­ing to dol­phins all over the world, with no con­nec­tion to oil spills.”

    Wednesday’s research also acknowl­edges that the BP oil spill was not the ini­tial cause of the unusu­al mor­tal­i­ty event, not­ing that the blowout hap­pened approx­i­mate­ly 3 months after sci­en­tists had already declared that an unusu­al mor­tal­i­ty event among bot­tle­neck dol­phins was occur­ring in the imme­di­ate area. But it spec­u­lates that the spill may have have wors­ened the sit­u­a­tion. It says that “large increas­es in mor­tal­i­ties of birds, tur­tles, and mam­mals” were doc­u­ment­ed in the days and months fol­low­ing the oil release, and point­ed out that the longest clus­ter of dol­phin deaths occurred in Louisiana’s Barataria Bay between August 2010 and Decem­ber 2011, where oil from the spill was present.

    ...

    The court case over how much mon­ey BP should be liable for the 2010 spill — the largest in U.S. his­to­ry — is ongo­ing. Just last month, a Louisiana fed­er­al judge ruled that BP should only be held respon­si­ble for spilling 3.19 mil­lion bar­rels of oil into the Gulf, which is about a mil­lion bar­rels few­er than the U.S. government’s 4.2 mil­lion bar­rel esti­mate. Because of that rul­ing, BP’s max­i­mum fine of $18 bil­lion was decreased to $13.7 bil­lion.

    Might the blob attack have some­thing to do with the dol­phin deaths? BP obvi­ous­ly does­n’t think so, sug­gest­ing that it could be due to oth­er types of pol­lu­tion. Aha.

    And, of course, since it was a blob attack that did­n’t just include the sea, but also the sur­round­ing coastal region , we also prob­a­bly should­n’t be sur­prised if the blob attack­’s left a lot of human sur­vivors that are going to be feel­ing the dol­phins’ pain for many years to come:

    Eagle Ford Texas
    Chem­i­cal dis­per­sant still wreak­ing hav­oc in Louisiana

    2/10/2015

    Maris­sa Hall | Shale Plays Media

    After the Deep­wa­ter Hori­zon dis­as­ter in 2010, BP and the U.S. Coast Guard used a chem­i­cal dis­per­sant called Corexit—the same chem­i­cal used dur­ing the cleanup of the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989—to break down oil slicks. The dis­per­sant then caused those slicks to sink below the sur­face of the Gulf of Mex­i­co. As a result, oil is still wash­ing up on the shores of Louisiana today and caus­ing irrepara­ble dam­age to marine life. Chem­i­cal expo­sure is also hav­ing last­ing effects on Louisianans, par­tic­u­lar­ly those with mem­bers who aid­ed in cleanup.

    Vice News made its way to New Orleans to inves­ti­gate an issue that’s com­mon­ly rec­og­nized across the state. Soon after cleanup began, work­ers start­ed report­ing out­breaks of lesions and boils on their skin as well as res­pi­ra­to­ry irri­ta­tion. Men, women and chil­dren alike across Louisiana’s coast­line are suf­fer­ing from skin and res­pi­ra­to­ry con­di­tions that doc­tors strug­gle to treat.

    Accord­ing to the Cen­ter for Bio­log­i­cal Diver­si­ty, dis­per­sants like Corex­it break down oil slicks by chem­i­cal­ly forc­ing it into small­er droplets, which are then water sol­u­ble. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, this means that the com­bi­na­tion of Corexit—already labeled a tox­ic chem­i­cal with a high risk for humans—and crude oil can then absorb into the body, human or oth­er­wise.

    Marine tox­i­col­o­gy Dr. Riki Ott told Vice News, “Corex­it is def­i­nite­ly a poi­son by itself. The trou­ble is so is oil, and when oil and Corex­it com­bine, it’s actu­al­ly way worse than either alone, because Corex­it pulls it into the body, into cells.” Research shows that crude oil com­bined with Corex­it is actu­al­ly 52 per­cent more tox­ic.

    How­ev­er, almost two mil­lion gal­lons of Corex­it were used in the after­math of BP’s dis­as­ter. Because Corex­it is effec­tive at break­ing up the oil, much of it sank below the Gulf’s sur­face. Today, Louisianans have become accus­tomed to see­ing oil along their coast­lines as well as in seafood pro­duced from the Gulf.

    ...

    In relat­ed news, BP refutes new study find­ing oil embed­ded in Gulf floor.

    As we can see, the BP blob attack and its Corex­it ‘cure’ are still syn­er­giz­ing away in the Gulf and sur­round­ing regions. And maybe still on the sea floor. And in the bod­ies of the blob’s vic­tims.

    But in all fair­ness to BP, it real­ly did make a valid point when the it sug­gest­ed that the dol­phin deaths could have been due to some sort of pol­lu­tion. It’s true. Some oth­er forms of pol­lu­tion that had noth­ing to do with an oil/Corexit blob attack could cer­tain­ly have played role.

    Like plas­tic. Plas­tic has long-pol­lut­ed the Gulf of Mex­i­co and the rest of the seas. Although you might not know it if you just set out count­ing the plas­tic. Yes, it turns out that oil isn’t the only petro­le­um prod­uct we’re dump­ing into the oceans capa­ble of a dis­ap­pear­ing act:

    Vox
    We dump 8 mil­lion tons of plas­tic into the ocean each year. Where does it all go?

    Updat­ed by Brad Plumer on Feb­ru­ary 12, 2015, 2:00 p.m. ET

    What hap­pens to all our plas­tic bot­tles and lids and con­tain­ers after we toss them out?

    The vast major­i­ty of plas­tic trash ends up in land­fills, just sit­ting there and tak­ing thou­sands of years to degrade. A small­er frac­tion gets recy­cled (about 9 per­cent in the Unit­ed States).

    But there’s anoth­er big chunk that finds its way into the oceans, either from peo­ple chuck­ing lit­ter into water­ways or from storm-water runoff car­ry­ing plas­tic debris to the coasts. And sci­en­tists have long wor­ried that all this plas­tic could have adverse effects on marine life.

    Now we can final­ly quan­ti­fy this prob­lem: A new study in Sci­ence cal­cu­lates that between 5 and 13 mil­lion met­ric tons of plas­tic waste made it into the ocean in 2010 alone. What’s more, the authors esti­mate this amount could more than quadru­ple by 2025 with­out bet­ter waste man­age­ment.

    And here’s anoth­er sur­prise twist: We still don’t know where most of that ocean plas­tic actu­al­ly ends up. A sep­a­rate study last year in the Pro­ceed­ings of the Nation­al Acad­e­my of Sci­ences iden­ti­fied mas­sive swirling garbage patch­es in each of the world’s oceans that con­tain up to 35,000 tons of plas­tic.

    Yet those patch­es account­ed for less than 1 per­cent of the plas­tic thought to be in the oceans — and no one quite knows where the oth­er 99 per­cent went. One pos­si­bil­i­ty is that marine crea­tures are eat­ing the rest of the plas­tic and it’s some­how enter­ing the food chain. But that’s still unclear.

    The new Sci­ence study, led by Jen­na R. Jam­beck of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Geor­gia, was the first since the 1970s to try to quan­ti­fy how much of our plas­tic waste on land ends up in the ocean each year.

    The authors looked at plas­tic pro­duc­tion rates, data on waste man­age­ment and dis­pos­al in 193 dif­fer­ent coastal coun­tries. Putting this all togeth­er, they esti­mat­ed that the world threw out 275 mil­lion met­ric tons of plas­tic waste in 2010 (much of it from plas­tic pack­ag­ing).

    They then esti­mat­ed that between 4.7 and 12.7 mil­lion met­ric tons made its way to sea — with a best esti­mate of 8 mil­lion tons. That’s enough to cov­er the world’s entire coast­line.

    ...

    What’s more, the researchers find, the amount of plas­tic waste could quadru­ple (or worse) by 2025 unless bet­ter waste-man­age­ment tech­niques are adopt­ed — like recy­cling or a reduc­tion in pack­ag­ing mate­ri­als used.

    So where does this ocean plas­tic go?

    Many peo­ple have heard of the Great Pacif­ic garbage patch — a mas­sive patch of trash that’s accu­mu­lat­ed in a swirling sub­trop­i­cal gyre in north­ern Pacif­ic Ocean. Ocean cur­rents car­ry trash from far and wide into this vor­tex.

    And it turns out that there are at least five of these float­ing garbage patch­es around the world. That’s accord­ing to a sep­a­rate 2014 study in The Pro­ceed­ings of the Nation­al Acad­e­my of Sci­ences, led by Andres Cózar of the Uni­ver­si­dad de Cadiz based on the results of a 2010 cir­cum­nav­i­ga­tion cruise.

    These garbage patch­es aren’t vis­i­ble from up high — or even from a pass­ing boat — since most of the plas­tic is bob­bing just beneath the sur­face, and most of the par­ti­cles are small­er than 1 cen­time­ter in diam­e­ter. Over time, the plas­tic bits get bro­ken down into ever small­er pieces as they get bat­tered by waves and degrad­ed by the sun.

    ..

    And yet, what was most sur­pris­ing to researchers was that these plas­tic garbage patch­es weren’t even big­ger. There should be mil­lions of tons of plas­tic in the oceans. But these sub­trop­i­cal gyres only con­tained up to 35,000 tons. In par­tic­u­lar, there seemed to be much less plas­tic small­er than 1 mil­lime­ter in diam­e­ter than expect­ed. So where did the rest go?

    In the PNAS paper, the authors offer a cou­ple of pos­si­ble expla­na­tions for why they did­n’t find near­ly as much float­ing plas­tic as they expect­ed. The most trou­bling is that fish and oth­er organ­isms are eat­ing all the plas­tic:

    1) Maybe the plas­tic is wash­ing back ashore. The prob­lem with this hypoth­e­sis is that most of the “miss­ing” plas­tic is less than 1 mil­lime­ter in diam­e­ter. It’s unclear why only small­er bits would have washed up ashore.

    2) Per­haps the plas­tic some­how breaks down into real­ly, real­ly tiny, unde­tectable pieces. This is pos­si­ble, although the authors note that “there is no rea­son to assume that the rate of solar-induced frag­men­ta­tion increased since the 1980s.”

    3) Maybe small organ­isms are grow­ing on some of the plas­tic bits, caus­ing them to get heav­ier and sink deep­er into the ocean. This is also pos­si­ble, although oth­er stud­ies have found that when these plas­tic pieces sink, the organ­isms on them typ­i­cal­ly die and the plas­tic bobs back up to the sur­face.

    4) Plank­ton and fish are eat­ing the plas­tic. This one’s a more plau­si­ble hypoth­e­sis. After all, the tiny plas­tic bits that seem to have van­ished are small enough to be eat­en by zoo­plank­ton, who are known to munch on plas­tic. The authors also argue that mesopelag­ic fish beneath the sur­face may be eat­ing a lot of plas­tic too — and, per­haps, poop­ing it out down to the ocean bot­tom. This needs fur­ther test­ing though.

    Assum­ing fish are eat­ing all that plas­tic and it’s enter­ing the food chain, it’s still unclear how dan­ger­ous that is. Obvi­ous­ly some marine organ­isms, like seabirds, can get diges­tive prob­lems (and can die) if they eat large pieces of plas­tic. But what about very tiny pieces? There’s some evi­dence that tox­ic chem­i­cals can cling to plas­tic in the ocean and accu­mu­late — but there’s still scant research on how much harm this might actu­al­ly do as it pass­es through the food chain.

    5) Plas­tic is accu­mu­lat­ing in the ice caps. Mean­while, a sep­a­rate 2014 study in Earth­’s Future sug­gest­ed that a great deal of microplas­tic is accu­mu­lat­ing in the polar ice caps. As sea ice forms and expands, the argu­ment goes, it essen­tial­ly “scav­enges” the plas­tic from the sea­wa­ter. This, too, might be part of the sto­ry.

    6) Some­one’s esti­mat­ing wrong. Alter­na­tive­ly, it’s always pos­si­ble that sci­en­tists’ best esti­mates of how much plas­tic is actu­al­ly enter­ing the oceans are incor­rect. That might help explain the dis­crep­an­cy.

    Either way, some­thing does­n’t add up — the cur­rent num­bers sug­gest that the vast major­i­ty of plas­tic trash in the ocean is van­ish­ing, and no one seems to know where it went.

    “Yet those patch­es account­ed for less than 1 per­cent of the plas­tic thought to be in the oceans — and no one quite knows where the oth­er 99 per­cent went”

    So there you have it: Our civ­i­liza­tion’s proud lega­cy not only includes a giant Corexit/oil blob that’s man­aged to embed itself into the seafloor of the Gulf of Mex­i­co; the giant plas­tic garbage patch­es we all know and love rep­re­sent only 1% of the plas­tic we dump in the oceans and no one knows where the rest went. Where do we come up with all of our bright ideas for ocean man­age­ment? Who knows, although pre­sum­ably not from the oceanog­ra­phers. It’s anoth­er one of those mys­ter­ies.

    In relat­ed news...

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | February 14, 2015, 6:55 pm
  5. Of course that’s what hap­pened:

    Think Progress
    Oil And Gas Com­pa­nies Won’t Have To Pay For Dam­age Caused To Louisiana’s Coast, Judge Rules
    BY KATIE VALENTINE POSTED ON FEBRUARY 15, 2015 AT 11:57 AM

    Oil and gas com­pa­nies won’t have to pay for decades of dam­age to Louisiana’s coast, after a law­suit filed against the com­pa­nies in 2013 was thrown out on Fri­day.

    U.S. Dis­trict Judge Nanette Jolivette Brown dis­missed the law­suit, which was filed by the South­east Louisiana Flood Pro­tec­tion Author­i­ty-East against near­ly 100 fos­sil fuel com­pa­nies. The suit, which the New York Times called the “most ambi­tious envi­ron­men­tal law­suit ever,” could have cost the indus­try bil­lions of dol­lars for its con­tri­bu­tion to the ero­sion of Louisiana’s coast. The state’s coast­line los­es about a foot­ball field’s worth of land every hour, and the wells drilled by the oil and gas indus­try have been esti­mat­ed by the Inte­ri­or Depart­ment to have caused any­where from 15 to 59 per­cent of the ero­sion. The law­suit would have prompt­ed the indus­try to help pay for the esti­mat­ed $50 bil­lion in coastal restora­tion and pro­tec­tion that Louisiana will need over the next sev­er­al years.

    Louisiana Gov. Bob­by Jin­dal ®, who had long opposed the law­suit and signed a bill last year to quash it — leg­is­la­tion that was lat­er found uncon­sti­tu­tion­al — praised the judge’s deci­sion, as did the state’s oil and gas indus­try, which called the law­suit “ill-con­ceived, unwise and divi­sive.”

    The oil and gas indus­try may not be off the hook quite yet, how­ev­er — the Flood Pro­tec­tion Author­i­ty is expect­ed to appeal the judge’s deci­sion to toss out the law­suit.

    Louisiana has lost about 1,900 square miles of land since the 1930s, and the U.S. Geo­log­i­cal Sur­vey esti­mates that the state’s coastal wet­lands could dis­ap­pear in as lit­tle as 200 years.

    That’s bad news for the state’s coastal com­mu­ni­ties, which get some pro­tec­tion from storm surge from the wet­lands. Sea lev­el rise is like­ly to exac­er­bate the land loss prob­lem: coastal Louisiana has seen its sea lev­el rise at a rate that’s rough­ly dou­ble the glob­al rate over the last 50 years.

    ...

    John Bar­ry, for­mer vice chair­man of the Flood Pro­tec­tion Author­i­ty who helped cre­ate the law­suit against the 97 oil and gas com­pa­nies, told the Nation­al Jour­nal last year that the law­suit was seek­ing to hold the oil and gas indus­try account­able for its dam­age to the coast­line, espe­cial­ly since the indus­try itself admits that it’s respon­si­ble for 36 per­cent of the wet­lands loss.

    “Peo­ple want to call me an envi­ron­men­tal activist, but this is not about activism. This is about law and order,” Bar­ry said. “The law required [com­pa­nies] to clean up after them­selves, and they didn’t do it.”

    Well, that was pre­dictably depress­ing, espe­cial­ly since the group that brought this law­suit was­n’t some coali­tion of pri­vate envi­ron­men­tal groups. The South­east Louisiana Flood Pro­tec­tion Author­i­ty-East was cre­at­ed as part of a state law fol­low­ing the Kat­ri­na dis­as­ter to over­see flood pro­tec­tion efforts.

    So an orga­ni­za­tion set up by the state of Louisiana fol­low­ing the biggest flood­ing dis­as­ter in Lou­siana’s his­to­ry with the mis­sion of prepar­ing for and pre­vent­ing future floods, just had its biggest ini­tia­tive yet for financ­ing those efforts flood pre­ven­tion efforts tossed out into the sea:

    Judge toss­es coastal dam­age suit against oil com­pa­nies
    Post­ed on Feb­ru­ary 13, 2015 at 6:50 pm by Asso­ci­at­ed Press

    NEW ORLEANS — A law­suit filed in 2013 by a Louisiana flood board that sought dam­ages — poten­tial­ly in the bil­lions of dol­lars — from scores of oil, gas and pipeline com­pa­nies over ero­sion of the state’s frag­ile coast was thrown out Fri­day evening by a fed­er­al judge.

    U.S. Dis­trict Judge Nanette Jolivette Brown dis­missed the suit in a com­plex 49-page rul­ing.

    The South­east Louisiana Flood Pro­tec­tion Author­i­ty-East had claimed in the law­suit that coastal drilling and dredg­ing activ­i­ties con­tributed to the loss of coastal wet­lands that form a nat­ur­al hur­ri­cane pro­tec­tion buffer for New Orleans.

    The law­suit caused a polit­i­cal furor in Louisiana. The suit’s back­ers said it was nec­es­sary to hold ener­gy com­pa­nies account­able for decades of dam­age and that it was one of the state’s few hopes for fund­ing coastal pro­tec­tion and restora­tion efforts with an esti­mat­ed price tag of at least $50 bil­lion over the com­ing decades.

    Gov. Bob­by Jin­dal and oil indus­try lead­ers con­demned it as an attack on a vital indus­try and said it under­mined the state’s efforts to pro­tect and restore the coast. The Leg­is­la­ture passed a bill to kill the law­suit although a state judge lat­er declared that law uncon­sti­tu­tion­al, a rul­ing that was under appeal.

    “We are grat­i­fied by this court’s rul­ing to dis­miss this ill-con­ceived, unwise and divi­sive lit­i­ga­tion, which we have con­tend­ed all along was noth­ing more than an attempt to sub­vert the exist­ing legal and reg­u­la­to­ry process­es,” Greg Beuer­man, spokesman for Shell, Chevron and BP, said in an email. Those three were among more than 90 com­pa­nies, some big, some small, named in the law­suit. At least one small defen­dant set­tled and oth­ers were removed for var­i­ous rea­sons. Brown said there were 88 defen­dants at the time of her rul­ing.

    “We appre­ci­ate the judge’s rul­ing and are pleased that this friv­o­lous law­suit has come to an end,” Jin­dal spokes­woman Shan­non Bates Dirmann said in an emailed state­ment.

    Attor­neys for the SLFPA‑E, which over­sees New Orleans area lev­ee boards and bears many of the costs of pro­tect­ing the region from floods, were not imme­di­ate­ly avail­able for com­ment.

    The law­suit orig­i­nal­ly was filed in state court in the sum­mer of 2013. The oil com­pa­nies suc­ceed­ed in mov­ing it to fed­er­al court, where Brown, after months of hear­ings and court fil­ings, grant­ed a motion to dis­miss the case. The com­pa­nies said that the SLFPA‑E had failed to make a valid claim under the law. Brown agreed. Her 49-page rul­ing dealt with the per­mits under which the ener­gy com­pa­nies oper­at­ed and arcane law and court prece­dents gov­ern­ing drainage and the rights and oblig­a­tions of landown­ers.

    The law­suit thrust the lit­tle known SLFPA‑E into a polit­i­cal firestorm. The board, com­prised of flood experts, engi­neers and lay peo­ple from oth­er pro­fes­sions, had been formed as part of a flood con­trol reform effort fol­low­ing the cat­a­stroph­ic lev­ee fail­ures of Hur­ri­cane Kat­ri­na in 2005. Jin­dal replaced some mem­bers as their terms expired, includ­ing his­to­ri­an and author John Bar­ry, who con­tin­ued to fight for the suit even after his ouster from the board.

    ...

    “The suit’s back­ers said it was nec­es­sary to hold ener­gy com­pa­nies account­able for decades of dam­age and that it was one of the state’s few hopes for fund­ing coastal pro­tec­tion and restora­tion efforts with an esti­mat­ed price tag of at least $50 bil­lion over the com­ing decades.
    Well, Louisiana prob­a­bly did­n’t need all that lost land any­ways...and pre­sum­ably feels the same way about the remain­ing coasts...

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | February 16, 2015, 9:42 am
  6. Oh great: BP has appar­ent­ly “lost faith in the con­cil­ia­to­ry approach it had been pur­su­ing and decid­ed to fight every­thing” regard­ing the envi­ron­men­tal dam­age to the Macon­do dis­as­ter. For instance, how do we know the Rhode Island-sized oily “bath­tub ring” sit­ting on the sea floor sur­round­ing the dis­as­ter area was­n’t seep­ing nat­u­ral­ly from the sea floor? Yep:

    Bloomberg News
    BP Labors to Cast Doubt on Gulf Spill Study It Dis­likes

    by Bryan Gru­ley and Bradley Olson
    8:00 PM CDT
    March 11, 2015

    (Bloomberg) — BP Plc has apol­o­gized again and again for the 2010 Gulf of Mex­i­co oil spill. Late­ly the com­pa­ny has been sound­ing less remorse­ful.

    Take a look at “The Whole Sto­ry.” It’s a web page oper­at­ed by the Lon­don-based com­pa­ny that reg­u­lar­ly address­es what BP calls “mis­in­for­ma­tion” about the region’s recov­ery and legal issues sur­round­ing the 130 mil­lion-gal­lon (500 mil­lion-liter) spill, the largest in U.S. his­to­ry.

    BP recent­ly spent 525 words on what it termed the “ques­tion­able sci­ence” behind a study by oceanog­ra­ph­er Jeff Chan­ton address­ing an abid­ing mys­tery: What hap­pened to the crude that nev­er washed ashore? His find­ing: As much as 5 per­cent of the oil that poured from the Macon­do well set­tled at the bot­tom of the gulf, poten­tial­ly dam­ag­ing the ecosys­tem for years.

    The study was “prob­lem­at­ic in many ways,” accord­ing to BP’s Whole Sto­ry page. Chan­ton didn’t prove sed­i­ment he sam­pled was direct­ly linked to Macon­do, instead of oil seep­ing nat­u­ral­ly from the sea floor, accord­ing to the BP report.

    The web­site address­es a broad range of issues relat­ed to the spill. That includes research that, in many cas­es, BP paid for itself through an ini­tia­tive it funds, but doesn’t con­trol in any way. Access to the $500 mil­lion fund is deter­mined sole­ly by a sep­a­rate pan­el of aca­d­e­mics, appoint­ed through dis­cus­sions with the White House, Gulf state gov­ern­ments and BP.

    Chanton’s research is among the stud­ies paid for by that fund. A pro­fes­sor at Flori­da State Uni­ver­si­ty in Tal­la­has­see, Chan­ton said he sticks by his method­ol­o­gy for the study, which was pub­lished in the peer-reviewed jour­nal Envi­ron­men­tal Sci­ence & Tech­nol­o­gy.

    The company’s response sur­prised him, he said.

    “It’s fine for (BP) to have their say,” Chan­ton said in an inter­view. “I just don’t under­stand why they aren’t tak­ing cred­it. They’re fund­ing all this work. Why aren’t they proud?”

    Oblig­a­tion to Speak

    BP, mean­while, said it has an oblig­a­tion to speak out on research it doesn’t view as telling the full sto­ry.

    “Mis­in­for­ma­tion per­sists about the recov­ery of the Gulf,” said BP’s Geoff Mor­rell, senior vice pres­i­dent for U.S. com­mu­ni­ca­tions & exter­nal affairs, speak­ing gen­er­al­ly. “Advo­ca­cy groups cher­ry-pick facts and mis­rep­re­sent stud­ies to paint an incom­plete and inac­cu­rate pic­ture. This leads to a nar­row, one-sided per­spec­tive, in which stud­ies that demon­strate that the Gulf is recov­er­ing are often over­looked.”

    As the five-year anniver­sary of the spill nears, BP is wag­ing a pub­lic cam­paign to pro­mote the idea that the gulf has large­ly recov­ered. The company’s pub­lic state­ments have hewed clos­er to the adver­sar­i­al tone of lit­i­ga­tion than the con­cil­ia­to­ry stance the com­pa­ny struck imme­di­ate­ly fol­low­ing the well blowout, which killed 11 men and fouled Gulf Coast beach­es from Texas to Flori­da.

    ‘Sen­sa­tion­al­iz­ing’ Reports

    On its State of the Gulf web­site, in speech­es and on social media, BP has crit­i­cized researchers, plain­tiffs’ lawyers and the media for “sen­sa­tion­al­iz­ing” envi­ron­men­tal dam­age to the gulf. Recent tar­gets include a study sug­gest­ing the spill hurt bot­tlenose dol­phin pop­u­la­tions and a research team’s admis­sion that it may have over­stat­ed the impact on recre­ation­al fish­ing.

    At the same time, BP has tout­ed stud­ies sug­gest­ing brown pel­i­cans, red snap­per and kill­fish have held up well. The com­pa­ny has repeat­ed­ly men­tioned the $28 bil­lion spent so far in cleanup and oth­er costs, and high­light­ed evi­dence that Gulf tourism remains strong.

    BP is mak­ing its pub­lic-rela­tions push even as a fed­er­al judge is decid­ing whether to sock the com­pa­ny with a max­i­mum penal­ty of $13.7 bil­lion under U.S. clean-water laws. BP has argued the fine should be much low­er.

    Jim McGrath, a part­ner in Hous­ton-based strate­gic com­mu­ni­ca­tions firm Begala McGrath, said BP’s respons­es shouldn’t sur­prise any­one. ’’At some point, any com­pa­ny would say, enough is enough, and we’re fight­ing back, and they’ve obvi­ous­ly reached that point,’’ he said

    Run­ning Tal­ly

    BP lawyers have defend­ed the com­pa­ny in U.S. Dis­trict Judge Carl Barbier’s New Orleans court­room. The company’s pub­lic-rela­tions spe­cial­ists have been equal­ly as defen­sive on the State of the Gulf web­site, includ­ing a run­ning tal­ly of false claims by indi­vid­u­als involved in “instances of fraud that have result­ed in crim­i­nal charges and con­vic­tions.” The tal­ly reached $19.9 mil­lion as of March 3.

    It also offers copies of news­pa­per and mag­a­zine ads BP has pub­lished, as well as press releas­es.

    “Check­book diplo­ma­cy only goes so far,” said McGrath, who is cur­rent­ly a spokesman for for­mer Pres­i­dent George H.W. Bush. “At some point, you’re going to have to engage in the court of pub­lic opin­ion.”

    The most com­bat­ive fea­ture is The Whole Sto­ry page, where in more than 80 posts, BP has attacked research and media reports it believes over­state spill-relat­ed threats to the gulf. It start­ed in Octo­ber 2013, after the set­tle­ment nego­ti­a­tions with the U.S. and affect­ed states col­lapsed.

    ‘Lost Faith’

    That’s when “BP lost faith in the con­cil­ia­to­ry approach it had been pur­su­ing and decid­ed to fight every­thing,” said David Uhlmann, a Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan law pro­fes­sor and for­mer chief of the U.S. Jus­tice Department’s envi­ron­men­tal crimes sec­tion, in an inter­view.

    Bat­tling simul­ta­ne­ous­ly on legal and pub­lic-image fronts could back­fire, accord­ing to Uhlmann, who is not involved in any BP-relat­ed lit­i­ga­tion.

    “BP’s pub­lic rela­tions cam­paign will have no effect on the judge, except to the extent that it annoys him and leads him to con­clude that BP is not accept­ing respon­si­bil­i­ty and should pay a larg­er fine.”

    BP’s approach bears some resem­blance to Exxon Mobil Corp.’s efforts to min­i­mize pub­lic and finan­cial dam­age after the tanker Valdez dumped more than 10 mil­lion gal­lons of oil into Alaska’s Prince William Sound in 1989. Exxon went to the extremes of tail­ing a boat full of gov­ern­ment researchers in a cruise ship and sub­poe­naing thou­sands of their records, accord­ing to the 2012 book “Pri­vate Empire” by Steve Coll.

    “Any legal action we took was as a con­se­quence of the terms and con­di­tions of the set­tle­ment with the state of Alas­ka and the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment,” Exxon spokesman Alan Jef­fers said.

    ...

    ‘Pro­longed Oil­ing’

    The study led by Venn-Wat­son on behalf of the Nation­al Ocean­ic and Atmos­pher­ic Admin­is­tra­tion stopped short of blam­ing the oil spill for the deaths of hun­dreds of dol­phins while not­ing that cer­tain clus­ters over­lapped “with loca­tions that received heavy and pro­longed oil­ing.”

    In a Whole Sto­ry post, BP dis­missed the study as repeat­ing pri­or research show­ing the deaths had lit­tle to do with oil.

    “Unfor­tu­nate­ly, large die-offs of bot­tlenose dol­phins aren’t unusu­al,” BP said.

    Venn-Wat­son said the company’s remarks, while tech­ni­cal­ly accu­rate, were mis­lead­ing. The researchers couldn’t yet prove oil caused dol­phin deaths but did high­light evi­dence sug­gest­ing the spill con­tributed, she said. “It appears BP chose to talk about the lim­i­ta­tions (of the study) and not how strong or weak they were,” said Venn-Wat­son.

    In con­trast, BP high­light­ed a study pub­lished in the Jour­nal of Field Ornithology’s Decem­ber issue that con­clud­ed the Gulf’s brown pel­i­can pop­u­la­tion had sur­vived the spill fair­ly intact. “Mul­ti­ple stud­ies have demon­strat­ed that any impacts to the Gulf’s bird pop­u­la­tion were lim­it­ed and were fol­lowed by a strong recov­ery,” BP wrote.

    Scott T. Wal­ter, a Tulane Uni­ver­si­ty research fel­low who led the pel­i­can study, said BP’s char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of the research was accu­rate, while cau­tion­ing that pel­i­can prob­lems could sur­face in com­ing years. With the Exxon Valdez spill, “there were long-rang­ing effects on birds up to nine years after the spill,” Wal­ter said.

    Might ‘pro­longed oil­ing’ have con­tributed to an unusu­al spike in dol­phin die offs in the Gulf? That seems like a very rea­son­able con­clu­sion, espe­cial­ly since that’s the con­clu­sion marine researchers are arrive at after study­ing the phe­nom­e­na.

    But as BP points out, we can’t be sure the deaths are due to all that pro­longed oil­ing. After all, large die-offs of bot­tlenose dol­phins aren’t unusu­al, so who knows what’s killing them. It could be all sorts of dif­fer­ent caus­es. For instance...:

    Newsweek
    Whales Are Being Killed by Noise Pol­lu­tion
    By Ben Wol­ford / April 2, 2014 9:52 AM EDT

    After a Eubal­ae­na glacialis whale dies, it floats. Moby-Dick-era whalers knew this and gave the species—treasured for its high blub­ber content—its com­mon name: They’re the “right whale” to hunt. Now, with only around 500 of them left in the wild, North Atlantic right whales are the most endan­gered whale species in the world.

    Har­poons are no longer their ene­my. Eight out of 10 right whales bear the scars left behind by acci­den­tal encoun­ters with fish­ing rope, one Geor­gia wildlife offi­cial told Newsweek. These thick lines can wrap so tight­ly around the whales that they die from lac­er­a­tions. Right whales are also unique­ly dis­posed to col­li­sions with ships. By nature, they swim toward boat nois­es, which often leads to grue­some acci­dents.

    Worse yet, as the oil and gas indus­try lob­bies for per­mis­sion to drill off­shore, sci­en­tists say the deaf­en­ing noise from seis­mic oil explo­ration could spawn dev­as­tat­ing con­se­quences. Extreme noise pol­lu­tion has been known to kill hun­dreds of whales and dol­phins at a time. In the worst case, they say it could some­day lead to an extinc­tion right before our eyes. “We’re fill­ing their ocean with noise,” says Christo­pher W. Clark, a senior sci­en­tist at Cor­nell Uni­ver­si­ty. He tells Newsweek that, “their whole social net­work is depen­dent on call­ing back and forth.” It’s how they find food and stick togeth­er. He believes the con­stant groan of ship engines has already con­tributed to slow repro­duc­tion of the large, aquat­ic mam­mals.

    There’s evi­dence that jar­ring­ly loud nois­es could also lead to a surge in mass strand­ings, the dead­ly phe­nom­e­na in which droves of marine mam­mals flop ashore. Sci­en­tists know these ground­ings have hap­pened for mil­lions of years. In 2010, for exam­ple, archae­ol­o­gists inves­ti­gat­ed the fos­sils of 40 whales mys­te­ri­ous­ly beached 5 mil­lion years ago in Chile. The cause of such ancient strand­ings may nev­er be proved, but one recent study attrib­uted their deaths to tox­ic algae.

    There is no sin­gle cause, and most mass strand­ings go unex­plained. Increas­ing evi­dence, how­ev­er, sug­gests man-made sound might be dri­ving up their occur­rences. Beaked whales are per­haps the most sen­si­tive to sound. Under nor­mal cir­cum­stances, they’re known to safe­ly dive thou­sands of feet in search of food. But when they hear loud nois­es, they dive recklessly—sometimes to the point where they die from the bends.

    Research also sug­gests that nois­es may lead to strand­ings. In a 2009 study, “Beaked Whale Strand­ings and Naval Exer­cis­es,” Amer­i­can sci­en­tists report­ed that there were 136 doc­u­ment­ed mass strand­ings of beaked whales between 1874 and 2004. All but 10 hap­pened after the advent of high-pow­ered mil­i­tary sonar in 1950. Some inves­ti­ga­tions have express­ly linked strand­ings to sonar.

    The instru­ments used by the oil and gas indus­try could be equal­ly destruc­tive. Seis­mic sur­veys use sound waves to paint 3‑D images of what’s under the sea floor. Based on these images, sci­en­tists can deter­mine the best places to drill test wells. That’s great for the bot­tom line, but not so good for near­by wildlife. A mass strand­ing of around 100 mel­on-head­ed whales in Mada­gas­car in 2008 prompt­ed an inter­na­tion­al inves­ti­ga­tion, and the Inter­na­tion­al Whal­ing Com­mis­sion deter­mined seis­mic sur­veys for Exxon­Mo­bil to be the cause.

    The sur­veys involve loud air guns blast­ed every 16 sec­onds. A gov­ern­ment pro­to­col requires that no ani­mals be exposed to noise greater than 180 deci­bels. By com­par­i­son, stand­ing a stone’s throw from a jet engine sounds like 140 deci­bels. But it’s worse under­wa­ter, where sound car­ries much far­ther than it does through air. There’s evi­dence, for exam­ple, of behav­ior changes among hump­back whales more than 120 miles away from loud noise sources, Scott Kraus, vice pres­i­dent of research at the New Eng­land Aquar­i­um, tells Newsweek.

    In Feb­ru­ary, the Inte­ri­or Depart­ment released a high­ly antic­i­pat­ed report endors­ing the envi­ron­men­tal safe­ty of nine pro­pos­als from oil and gas com­pa­nies to con­duct seis­mic sur­veys off the coast between Flori­da and Delaware. It said that most of the harm­ful effects of sound can be mit­i­gat­ed and clears the way for drilling once the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion’s tem­po­rary ban, enact­ed after the Deep­wa­ter Hori­zon dis­as­ter, is lift­ed in 2017.

    The Inte­ri­or Depart­ment acknowl­edged the pos­si­bil­i­ty of wildlife deaths because of exces­sive noise, but it’s not easy to cal­cu­late an exact num­ber. For exam­ple, among bot­tlenose dol­phins (like Flip­per) the num­ber of deaths and injuries could be 2,091 annu­al­ly, or it could be 11,748. Caus­es that are cit­ed range from col­li­sions with sur­vey ves­sels to the bends to direct injury from con­cus­sive sound waves.

    Marine biol­o­gists most­ly wor­ry about long-term effects. They believe that because noise and oth­er obstruc­tions are mak­ing it dif­fi­cult for North Atlantic right whales to find food, they have had a hard time keep­ing birth rates ahead of mor­tal­i­ty rates. In good con­di­tions, the whales alert one anoth­er when, for exam­ple, one finds a nice patch of plank­ton, but amid the drone of ships these alerts are dif­fi­cult to hear. One 2012 study co-authored by Kraus found that right whales suf­fer from chron­ic stress; ships have them con­stant­ly on edge.

    In response to an inter­view request, the Amer­i­can Petro­le­um Insti­tute point­ed to its pre­vi­ous state­ments on the envi­ron­men­tal impact of these sur­veys. “Like all off­shore oper­a­tions, seis­mic sur­veys are high­ly reg­u­lat­ed, and sur­vey­ors fol­low strict guide­lines to pro­tect marine life,” said Erik Mil­i­to, a direc­tor at the insti­tute, at a recent press con­fer­ence.

    Those guide­lines involve a slow ramp-up of audio lev­els, meant to give ani­mals time to clear out. Then dur­ing the seis­mic sur­vey­ing, two gov­ern­ment-cer­ti­fied third-par­ty con­trac­tors con­stant­ly scan the area with binoc­u­lars. If some­thing wan­ders into the area, they stop the work until the ani­mal leaves.

    Mil­i­to says off­shore drilling between 2017 and 2035 could cre­ate 280,000 jobs, extract 1.3 mil­lion bar­rels of oil per day and gen­er­ate $51 bil­lion in tax revenue—if seis­mic sur­veys are allowed to go for­ward. The oil and gas indus­try is con­fi­dent envi­ron­men­tal safe­guards are effec­tive, and ulti­mate­ly the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion agrees. The envi­ron­men­tal study “ana­lyzes the best avail­able sci­en­tif­ic infor­ma­tion, which indi­cates that the poten­tial for seis­mic air­gun noise to phys­i­cal­ly injure endan­gered whales is very lim­it­ed and would only occur if an ani­mal was in very close prox­im­i­ty (meters) of a large air­gun source,” says Caren Mad­sen, a spokes­woman for the Inte­ri­or Depart­men­t’s Bureau of Ocean Ener­gy Man­age­ment.

    ...

    And in case you’re curi­ous, yes, the off­shore drilling indus­try employs seis­mic sur­vey­ing tech­niques in the Gulf of Mex­i­co. But don’t wor­ry, Flip­per will be fine. Or deaf. Or dead. But if he’s deaf or dead that had noth­ing to do with the pro­longed oil­ing or seis­mic explo­rations or any­thing relat­ed to human activ­i­ties, espe­cial­ly BP’s activ­i­ties.

    So stop wor­ry­ing about the dol­phins. Or, bet­ter yet, start wor­ry­ing about the dol­phins and all the evil things they would do to you if they ever got the chance. At least BP cares about you. Real­ly!

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | March 13, 2015, 8:58 am
  7. Good news for Cal­i­for­nia: The state may have hit a ‘water wind­fall’. That’s accord­ing to the results of a recent study by Stan­ford researchers of the vol­ume and qual­i­ty of under­ground water reserves deep­er than the 1,000 feet nor­mal­ly sur­veyed for fresh­wa­ter usage.

    Of course, there are a few catch­es to using this water. For instance, if you suck all that water out of the ground, the ground might sink even more.

    Also, if Cal­i­for­nia wants to even­tu­al­ly drink this water, it can’t pol­lute it with frack­ing and oil drilling pol­lu­tion. That would seem like an obvi­ous and avoid­able catch, but since the study also found that almost one in three of the deep water reser­voirs they stud­ied had oil or gas activ­i­ties run­ning direct­ly on top of them, it’s an unfor­tu­nate­ly large catch:

    Stan­ford News

    Stan­ford sci­en­tists find ‘water wind­fall’ beneath California’s Cen­tral Val­ley

    New research indi­cates that Cal­i­for­ni­a’s Cen­tral Val­ley har­bors three times more ground­wa­ter than pre­vi­ous­ly esti­mat­ed, but chal­lenges to using it include pump­ing costs, ground sub­si­dence and pos­si­ble con­t­a­m­i­na­tion from frack­ing and oth­er oil and gas activ­i­ties.

    By Ker Than
    June 27, 2016

    California’s drought-strick­en Cen­tral Val­ley har­bors three times more ground­wa­ter than pre­vi­ous­ly esti­mat­ed, Stan­ford sci­en­tists have found. Access­ing this water in an eco­nom­i­cal­ly fea­si­ble way and safe­guard­ing it from pos­si­ble con­t­a­m­i­na­tion from oil and gas activ­i­ties, how­ev­er, will be chal­leng­ing.

    “It’s not often that you find a ‘water wind­fall,’ but we just did,” said study co-author Robert Jack­son, the Michelle and Kevin Dou­glas Provos­tial Pro­fes­sor at Stan­ford. “There’s far more fresh water and usable water than we expect­ed.”

    The research, pub­lished in the jour­nal Pro­ceed­ings of the Nation­al Acad­e­my of Sci­ences the week of June 27, high­lights the need to bet­ter char­ac­ter­ize and pro­tect deep ground­wa­ter aquifers not only in Cal­i­for­nia but in oth­er parched regions as well.

    “Our find­ings are rel­e­vant to a lot of oth­er places where there are water short­ages, includ­ing Texas, Chi­na and Aus­tralia,” said study co-author Mary Kang, a post­doc­tor­al asso­ciate at Stan­ford School of Earth, Ener­gy & Envi­ron­men­tal Sci­ences.

    A fresh look at ground­wa­ter

    Pre­vi­ous esti­mates of ground­wa­ter in Cal­i­for­nia are based on data that are decades old and only extend to a max­i­mum depth of 1,000 feet, and often less. Until now, lit­tle was known about the amount and qual­i­ty of water in deep­er aquifers.

    “Water a thou­sand feet down used to be too expen­sive to use,” said Jack­son, who is also a senior fel­low at Stan­ford Woods Insti­tute for the Envi­ron­ment and at the Pre­court Insti­tute for Ener­gy. “Today it’s used wide­ly. We need to pro­tect all of our good qual­i­ty water.”

    ...

    In the new study, Jack­son and Kang used data from 938 oil and gas pools and more than 35,000 oil and gas wells to char­ac­ter­ize both shal­low and deep ground­wa­ter sources in eight Cal­i­for­nia coun­ties.

    The researchers con­clud­ed that when deep­er sources of ground­wa­ter are fac­tored in, the amount of usable ground­wa­ter in the Cen­tral Val­ley increas­es to 2,700 cubic kilo­me­ters – or almost triple the state’s cur­rent esti­mates.

    Com­pli­ca­tions to con­sid­er

    While this is good news for Cal­i­for­nia, the find­ings also raise some con­cerns. First, much of the water is 1,000 to 3,000 feet under­ground, so pump­ing it will be more expen­sive. With­out prop­er stud­ies, tap­ping these deep­er aquifers might also exac­er­bate the ground sub­si­dence – the grad­ual sink­ing of the land – that is already hap­pen­ing through­out the Cen­tral Val­ley. Ground­wa­ter pump­ing from shal­low aquifers has already caused some regions to drop by tens of feet.

    Fur­ther­more, some of the deep aquifer water is also brinier – high­er in salt con­cen­tra­tion – than shal­low­er water, so desali­na­tion or oth­er treat­ment will be required before it can be used for agri­cul­ture or for drink­ing.

    Anoth­er con­cern the Stan­ford sci­en­tists uncov­ered is that oil and gas drilling activ­i­ties are occur­ring direct­ly into as much as 30 per­cent of the sites where the deep ground­wa­ter resources are locat­ed. For exam­ple, in Kern Coun­ty, where the core of California’s oil and gas indus­try is cen­tered near the city of Bak­ers­field, one in every six cas­es of oil and gas activ­i­ties was occur­ring direct­ly into fresh­wa­ter aquifers. For use­able water – water that the U.S. Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency deems drink­able if treat­ed – the num­ber was one in three.

    Jack­son and Kang stress that just because a com­pa­ny has hydrauli­cal­ly frac­tured or used some oth­er chem­i­cal treat­ment near an aquifer doesn’t mean that the water is ruined.

    “What we are say­ing is that no one is mon­i­tor­ing deep aquifers. No one’s fol­low­ing them through time to see how and if the water qual­i­ty is chang­ing,” Kang said. “We might need to use this water in a decade, so it’s def­i­nite­ly worth pro­tect­ing.”

    “Anoth­er con­cern the Stan­ford sci­en­tists uncov­ered is that oil and gas drilling activ­i­ties are occur­ring direct­ly into as much as 30 per­cent of the sites where the deep ground­wa­ter resources are locat­ed. For exam­ple, in Kern Coun­ty, where the core of California’s oil and gas indus­try is cen­tered near the city of Bak­ers­field, one in every six cas­es of oil and gas activ­i­ties was occur­ring direct­ly into fresh­wa­ter aquifers. For use­able water – water that the U.S. Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency deems drink­able if treat­ed – the num­ber was one in three.

    A tripling of the state’s water reserve esti­mates. Exact­ly what Cal­i­for­nia needs. What spec­tac­u­lar news. Now all the state needs to do is not do some­thing total­ly insane like poi­son the water before it slurps it up years from now.

    And in unfor­tu­nate­ly relat­ed news, there’s a high prob­a­bil­i­ty that Cal­i­for­nia will have a major deep ground water con­t­a­m­i­na­tion issue in com­ing decades...

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | June 27, 2016, 6:14 pm
  8. This is one of those sto­ries that rais­es the ques­tion of whether or not the fos­sil fuel indus­try isn’t yet sat­is­fied with its eco­log­i­cal dam­age and active­ly try­ing to take it to the next lev­el Guess what just hap­pens to reside on Cush­ing, Okla­homa, an area that’s seen so much frack­ing that it’s now the most seis­mi­cal­ly active area of the low­er 48 states: 15 per­cent of the oil stored in the US stored in hun­dreds of tanks known as “tank farms”, mak­ing it the largest store of oil in the world. Plus there’s a nexus of 14 major oil pipelines con­nect­ing through there. And, again, this is now the most seis­mi­cal­ly active area in the low­er 48 states.

    So guess who is design­ing the oil con­tain­ers and pipelines in that area to ensure they can with­stand the grow­ing fre­quen­cy and inten­si­ty off all the frack­ing-induced earth­quakes: the Amer­i­can Petro­le­um Insti­tute. What could pos­si­bly go wrong?

    Politi­co

    How Man-made Earth­quakes Could Crip­ple the U.S. Econ­o­my

    Mas­sive tanks in Okla­homa brim with unre­fined oil, but they weren’t designed to han­dle the rash of seis­mic activ­i­ty caused by frack­ing-relat­ed activ­i­ty.

    Sep­tem­ber 14, 2017
    By KATHRYN MILES

    When Hur­ri­cane Har­vey made land­fall in Texas, U.S. oil refin­ing plum­met­ed to record lows. Now, near­ly three weeks lat­er, six key refiner­ies remain shut down and an addi­tion­al 11 are either strug­gling to come back on line or oper­at­ing at a sig­nif­i­cant­ly reduced rate. That slow­down, cou­pled with pre­dic­tions of decreased demand in the wake of Hur­ri­cane Irma and the dev­as­tat­ing earth­quake that struck Mex­i­co last week, has shift­ed oil pres­sures in oth­er places, too. And none may be quite as vul­ner­a­ble as the tank farms in Cush­ing, Okla­homa.

    Dubbed the “Pipeline Cross­roads of the World,” Cush­ing is the nexus of 14 major pipelines, includ­ing Key­stone, which alone has the poten­tial to trans­port as much as 600,000 bar­rels of oil a day. The small Okla­homa town is also home to the world’s largest store of oil, which sits in hun­dreds of enor­mous tanks there. Pri­or to this recent spate of nat­ur­al dis­as­ters, Cush­ing oil lev­els were already high. They’ve increased near­ly a mil­lion bar­rels, to near­ly 60 mil­lion bar­rels, since Har­vey hit.

    This con­cen­tra­tion of oil, about 15 per­cent of U.S. demand, is one rea­son the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­ri­ty has des­ig­nat­ed Cush­ing “crit­i­cal infra­struc­ture,” which it defines as assets that, “whether phys­i­cal or vir­tu­al, are con­sid­ered so vital to the Unit­ed States that their inca­pac­i­ta­tion or destruc­tion would have a debil­i­tat­ing effect on secu­ri­ty, nation­al eco­nom­ic secu­ri­ty, nation­al pub­lic health or safe­ty, or any com­bi­na­tion there­of.”

    The biggest poten­tial cause of that inca­pac­i­ta­tion? Accord­ing to Home­land Secu­ri­ty, it’s not ter­ror­ism or mechan­i­cal mal­func­tion. It’s nat­ur­al dis­as­ter. And here’s the prob­lem: When most of the Cush­ing tanks were con­struct­ed, the most log­i­cal cause of any such dis­as­ter seemed like a cat­a­stroph­ic tor­na­do. No one antic­i­pat­ed swarms of earth­quakes. But that’s what began occur­ring about five years ago, when waste­water injec­tion and oth­er frack­ing-relat­ed activ­i­ties changed the seis­mic face of Okla­homa in dra­mat­ic fash­ion. Two hours before that dead­ly quake in Mex­i­co, for instance, a mag­ni­tude 4.3 tem­blor shook Cen­tral Okla­homa, knock­ing out pow­er for thou­sands. The earth­quake, which had an epi­cen­ter just 100 miles north­west of Cush­ing, was the 186th quake in Okla­homa this year to reg­is­ter a mag­ni­tude 3.0 or high­er.

    This man-made seis­mic­i­ty has changed the land­scape of Okla­homa sig­nif­i­cant­ly, from a state with one of the low­est seis­mic rates in the coun­try to the most seis­mi­cal­ly active in the low­er 48, says Ken Erd­mann, senior vice pres­i­dent at Matrix Engi­neer­ing, the firm that designs, fab­ri­cates and builds many of the tanks in places like Cush­ing. “It’s not nat­ur­al. It’s not Moth­er-nature based.”

    That’s a prob­lem, he says, because the sta­tis­ti­cal analy­sis used to estab­lish safe envi­ron­men­tal loads is based on his­tor­i­cal intervals—both the aver­age and max­i­mums of events like snow­fall or wind or seis­mic activ­i­ty.

    “When those lev­els become man-made induced num­bers,” says Erd­mann, “sta­tis­tics are no longer real­ly rel­e­vant.”

    But while the num­ber of earth­quakes and their inten­si­ty have increased in recent years, the strength of the reg­u­la­to­ry appa­ra­tus in place to ensure their safe­ty hasn’t kept pace. Over­sight of the tanks has been left to a tiny agency buried inside the Depart­ment of Trans­porta­tion that was nev­er intend­ed to serve this role. And the safe­ty stan­dards, which one earth­quake expert calls the weak­est per­mis­si­ble, were cre­at­ed by an indus­try trade group rather than the gov­ern­ment agency. For those inclined to con­tem­plate worst-case sce­nar­ios, the prospect of an earth­quake rup­tur­ing the Cush­ing tanks would be an envi­ron­men­tal cat­a­stro­phe far greater than the Exxon Valdez spill.

    ***

    When most of these tanks were con­struct­ed, seis­mic activ­i­ty in Okla­homa was neg­li­gi­ble. In 2011, the state expe­ri­enced a 5.6 quake. Last year, it had a 5.8—the same mag­ni­tude as the quake that rocked Wash­ing­ton, D.C., and much of the East­ern seaboard six years ago. That Okla­homa event top­pled the exte­ri­ors of his­toric build­ings and prompt­ed the Pawnee nation to declare a state of emer­gency. Seis­mol­o­gists at the Unit­ed States Geo­log­i­cal Sur­vey say the area around Cush­ing is capa­ble of an even stronger quake—maybe even a 7.0. Earth­quake mag­ni­tude is mea­sured expo­nen­tial­ly, which means that a 7.0 quake would be 15 times larg­er than the biggest one to hit Okla­homa so far. And it would release over 60 times as much ener­gy.

    What would it do to the Cush­ing tanks? I posed that ques­tion to each of the five largest oil com­pa­nies there.

    Michael Barnes, senior man­ag­er of U.S. Oper­a­tions and Project Com­mu­ni­ca­tions at Enbridge, which holds near­ly half the oil at Cush­ing, says it’s the company’s pol­i­cy not to com­ment on spec­u­la­tive ques­tions such as mine “because by their very nature they are hypo­thet­i­cal.” What he would say is that the com­pa­ny reg­u­lar­ly par­tic­i­pates in safe­ty drills, work­shops and oth­er activ­i­ties. That includes pro­to­cols prepar­ing for seis­mic activ­i­ty.

    “In the event of an earth­quake, pro­ce­dures are in place to respond quick­ly and con­firm Enbridge tanks and oth­er facil­i­ties were not impact­ed and can con­tin­ue to oper­ate safe­ly,” says Barnes. “This includes dis­patch­ing tech­ni­cians and oth­er experts to per­form visu­al inspec­tions and check instru­men­ta­tion on tanks, pipes, motors and pumps.”

    I received a sim­i­lar response from the oth­er ener­gy com­pa­nies with major Cush­ing hold­ings: that they have pro­ce­dures and pro­to­cols for nat­ur­al dis­as­ters, but that they would not com­ment on the spe­cif­ic designs of their tanks, nor how those tanks would fare in a major earth­quake.

    Get­ting an answer out of the gov­ern­ment can be just as frus­trat­ing. A big part of the prob­lem is the Byzan­tine sys­tem of gov­ern­men­tal agen­cies reg­u­lat­ing these tank farms. This over­sight varies from state to state. In Okla­homa, most ener­gy con­cerns are con­trolled by the Okla­homa Cor­po­ra­tion Com­mis­sion. But, says spokesper­son Matt Skin­ner, the OCC only reg­u­lates intrastate pipelines and tanks.

    “If any part of that oil leaves the state or comes from else­where,” says Skin­ner, “it becomes total­ly out­side of our juris­dic­tion.”

    Deter­min­ing that juris­dic­tion is no easy mat­ter. The Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency reg­u­lates “non-trans­porta­tion-relat­ed oil stor­age tanks,” but that excludes farms like Cush­ing, which are tied to pipelines. The offi­cial I talked to at the EPA couldn’t tell me who reg­u­lates Cush­ing, nor could the spokesper­son for the Depart­ment of Ener­gy, which over­sees our country’s petro­le­um reserve sites. The Depart­ment of Trans­porta­tion reg­u­lates oil and gas pipelines unless they cross fed­er­al lands, in which case they are the purview of the Bureau of Land Man­age­ment or the mil­i­tary. Gas and oil pro­duced on the out­er con­ti­nen­tal shelf falls under the Depart­ment of the Inte­ri­or, which works in con­cert with the Depart­ment of Trans­porta­tion to reg­u­late its move­ment.

    I called those offices as well, ask­ing whether they knew what agency reg­u­lat­ed tanks like the ones at Cush­ing. No one I spoke to knew—including at the pub­lic affairs office of the Depart­ment of Trans­porta­tion. As it turns out, a tiny office in the DOT known as the Pipeline and Haz­ardous Mate­ri­als Safe­ty Admin­is­tra­tion reg­u­lates the tanks. Estab­lished by Pres­i­dent George W. Bush in 2004, PHMSA was intend­ed to increase secu­ri­ty around the trans­porta­tion of haz­ardous flu­ids like gas and oil. As such, it was nev­er real­ly meant to gov­ern sta­tion­ary stor­age. I asked its spokesper­son what seis­mic reg­u­la­tions are in place for tank farms like Cush­ing. He referred me to Appen­dix C of the Pipeline Safe­ty Reg­u­la­tions. And it is true that there are seis­mic con­sid­er­a­tions there: pro­vi­sions regard­ing safe­ty report­ing, any “unin­tend­ed” or “abnor­mal” move­ment of a pipeline, or reduced capac­i­ty of a pipeline because of seis­mic activ­i­ty. But none of these con­sid­er­a­tions men­tions stor­age tanks per se. I asked that same spokesper­son to direct me toward the lan­guage relat­ing to tanks. He has yet to respond.

    None of this sur­pris­es the OCC’s Skin­ner. “I’ve gone through the stan­dards a bunch of times,” he says. “I haven’t found any relat­ing to tanks and seis­mic activ­i­ty.”

    ***

    If the gov­ern­ment isn’t explic­it­ly reg­u­lat­ing the abil­i­ty of the tanks to with­stand an earth­quake, then who is? Turns out that what stan­dards do exist are cre­at­ed by the Amer­i­can Petro­le­um Insti­tute, a nation­al trade orga­ni­za­tion rep­re­sent­ing the oil and gas indus­try. And the stan­dards are not over­ly rig­or­ous, say seis­mol­o­gists.

    Tom Heaton, pro­fes­sor of geo­physics and direc­tor of the Earth­quake Engi­neer­ing Research Lab­o­ra­to­ry at the Cal­i­for­nia Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy, says most, if not all, of the tanks in Cush­ing are built to the weak­est indus­try design stan­dards. He thinks even a mod­er­ate quake could be enough to vio­lent­ly push the oil from one side of the tank to anoth­er. In geo­log­i­cal terms, the phe­nom­e­non is known as a seiche: an inter­nal wave or oscil­la­tion of a body of water. The more oil in a tank, the more dan­ger­ous that seiche becomes.

    That makes tank farms like Cush­ing par­tic­u­lar­ly vul­ner­a­ble in the face of oth­er nat­ur­al dis­as­ters like Har­vey and Irma as oil and pipeline com­pa­nies engage in a kind of shell game for oil stor­age—full tanks do bet­ter in high wind con­di­tions like hur­ri­canes and tor­na­does; they fare far worse in earth­quakes.

    And cer­tain­ly there is prece­dent for the kind of dam­age Heaton pre­dicts. In the years after the 1994 North­ridge earth­quake in Cal­i­for­nia, the Nation­al Insti­tute of Stan­dards and Tech­nol­o­gy found evi­dence of seis­mi­cal­ly induced oil-tank dam­age going back as far as the 1930s and as recent­ly as the 1994 quake, some of which was cat­a­stroph­ic.

    But Ken Erd­mann is cir­cum­spect about just how much dam­age a major quake might wreak on the Cush­ing tank farms. In addi­tion to his role at Matrix, Erd­mann also heads up the API com­mit­tee that cre­ates stan­dards for the tanks. He says it’s true that the ones in Cush­ing weren’t built for mod­er­ate or severe quakes, and that the shak­ing caused by one would almost cer­tain­ly be “beyond allow­able lim­its” for the API stan­dards uti­lized at the Okla­homa farms. Prob­a­bly, he says, you’d see buck­ling and defor­ma­tion of the tanks rather than full fail­ure.

    The real prob­lem, he says, would be the pipelines them­selves, says Ron Rip­ple, Mervin Bovaird pro­fes­sor of ener­gy busi­ness and finance at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Tul­sa. Rip­ple esti­mates that an earth­quake or oth­er dis­as­ter would have to knock out half those tanks to have a real impact on the mar­ket. Of big­ger con­cern to him are the pipelines, which con­trol a larg­er vol­ume of oil. He points to the Octo­ber 2016 explo­sion of the Colo­nial pipeline in rur­al Alaba­ma as a corol­lary. The result­ing fire kept crews from repair­ing the pipeline prop­er for six days. Dur­ing that time, oil com­mod­i­ty prices jumped 60 percent—the high­est spike in near­ly a decade. Exporters clam­ored to find work-arounds, includ­ing tankers capa­ble of mov­ing the oil by sea. As a con­se­quence, freight car­go rates increased by near­ly 40 per­cent. Mean­while, motorists in South­ern states rushed the pumps, ele­vat­ing prices there, too—forcing the gov­er­nor of Geor­gia to issue an exec­u­tive order warn­ing about price goug­ing.

    It wouldn’t be unrea­son­able, says Rip­ple, to see a sim­i­lar sce­nario were the Cush­ing pipelines to go down. The Colo­nial pipeline moves about 100 mil­lion gal­lons of oil and gaso­line a day—about the equiv­a­lent of the Sea­way pipeline, just one of the more than a dozen that con­verge on this town. That pipeline was also shut down in late 2016, after author­i­ties in Cush­ing noticed a spill. The effect of that shut­down had the oppo­site effect, push­ing the price of U.S. oil below $50 a bar­rel, as inter­na­tion­al traders wor­ried they wouldn’t get their deliv­er­ies.

    “Prices move through the mar­kets fair­ly quick­ly,” says Rip­ple. “We tend to see oppor­tunis­tic changes in prices right after an event. Some of those look like a pret­ty close cause-and-effect rela­tion­ship between sup­ply and demand. Oth­er times, you’ll see impacts that leave us all scratch­ing our heads. In the end, you just don’t know how the mar­ket and con­sumers will react.”

    John­son Bridg­wa­ter, direc­tor of the Okla­homa chap­ter of the Sier­ra Club, says he’s mind­ful of the eco­nom­ic effects of such a spill, but it’s the impact on the land­scape and the peo­ple who occu­py it that most con­cerns him. Imag­ine, says Bridg­wa­ter, if Ripple’s sce­nario of los­ing half the tanks came to fruition.

    “That’s 50 mil­lion bar­rels,” he says. “We’d be look­ing at our own on-land Exxon Valdez.”

    Worse, actu­al­ly. The Valdez was car­ry­ing just over a mil­lion bar­rels of oil. A quar­ter of that spilled. And light crude, the kind of oil stored in Cush­ing, pos­es par­tic­u­lar chal­lenges to an envi­ron­ment, often killing ani­mals or plants on con­tact and emit­ting dan­ger­ous fumes that can kill both human and ani­mal res­i­dents.

    “This would not be a sim­ple cleanup,” says Bridg­wa­ter. “You’d have an unin­hab­it­able com­mu­ni­ty for a long time.”

    ...

    ———-

    “How Man-made Earth­quakes Could Crip­ple the U.S. Econ­o­my” by KATHRYN MILES; Politi­co; 09/14/2017

    “Dubbed the “Pipeline Cross­roads of the World,” Cush­ing is the nexus of 14 major pipelines, includ­ing Key­stone, which alone has the poten­tial to trans­port as much as 600,000 bar­rels of oil a day. The small Okla­homa town is also home to the world’s largest store of oil, which sits in hun­dreds of enor­mous tanks there. Pri­or to this recent spate of nat­ur­al dis­as­ters, Cush­ing oil lev­els were already high. They’ve increased near­ly a mil­lion bar­rels, to near­ly 60 mil­lion bar­rels, since Har­vey hit.”

    The largest store of oil in the world. So much that the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­ri­ty labels it “crit­i­cal infra­struc­ture”. Crit­i­cal infra­struc­ture now at risk from man-made earth­quakes:

    ...
    This con­cen­tra­tion of oil, about 15 per­cent of U.S. demand, is one rea­son the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­ri­ty has des­ig­nat­ed Cush­ing “crit­i­cal infra­struc­ture,” which it defines as assets that, “whether phys­i­cal or vir­tu­al, are con­sid­ered so vital to the Unit­ed States that their inca­pac­i­ta­tion or destruc­tion would have a debil­i­tat­ing effect on secu­ri­ty, nation­al eco­nom­ic secu­ri­ty, nation­al pub­lic health or safe­ty, or any com­bi­na­tion there­of.”

    The biggest poten­tial cause of that inca­pac­i­ta­tion? Accord­ing to Home­land Secu­ri­ty, it’s not ter­ror­ism or mechan­i­cal mal­func­tion. It’s nat­ur­al dis­as­ter. And here’s the prob­lem: When most of the Cush­ing tanks were con­struct­ed, the most log­i­cal cause of any such dis­as­ter seemed like a cat­a­stroph­ic tor­na­do. No one antic­i­pat­ed swarms of earth­quakes. But that’s what began occur­ring about five years ago, when waste­water injec­tion and oth­er frack­ing-relat­ed activ­i­ties changed the seis­mic face of Okla­homa in dra­mat­ic fash­ion. Two hours before that dead­ly quake in Mex­i­co, for instance, a mag­ni­tude 4.3 tem­blor shook Cen­tral Okla­homa, knock­ing out pow­er for thou­sands. The earth­quake, which had an epi­cen­ter just 100 miles north­west of Cush­ing, was the 186th quake in Okla­homa this year to reg­is­ter a mag­ni­tude 3.0 or high­er.
    ...

    But don’t wor­ry, this crit­i­cal infra­struc­ture, which could crip­ple the US econ­o­my if dis­as­ter strikes it, is build to meet a stan­dard. A stan­dard cre­at­ed by the petro­le­um lob­by, who of course has the pub­lic inter­est at heart:

    ...
    If the gov­ern­ment isn’t explic­it­ly reg­u­lat­ing the abil­i­ty of the tanks to with­stand an earth­quake, then who is? Turns out that what stan­dards do exist are cre­at­ed by the Amer­i­can Petro­le­um Insti­tute, a nation­al trade orga­ni­za­tion rep­re­sent­ing the oil and gas indus­try. And the stan­dards are not over­ly rig­or­ous, say seis­mol­o­gists.

    Tom Heaton, pro­fes­sor of geo­physics and direc­tor of the Earth­quake Engi­neer­ing Research Lab­o­ra­to­ry at the Cal­i­for­nia Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy, says most, if not all, of the tanks in Cush­ing are built to the weak­est indus­try design stan­dards. He thinks even a mod­er­ate quake could be enough to vio­lent­ly push the oil from one side of the tank to anoth­er. In geo­log­i­cal terms, the phe­nom­e­non is known as a seiche: an inter­nal wave or oscil­la­tion of a body of water. The more oil in a tank, the more dan­ger­ous that seiche becomes.

    That makes tank farms like Cush­ing par­tic­u­lar­ly vul­ner­a­ble in the face of oth­er nat­ur­al dis­as­ters like Har­vey and Irma as oil and pipeline com­pa­nies engage in a kind of shell game for oil storage—full tanks do bet­ter in high wind con­di­tions like hur­ri­canes and tor­na­does; they fare far worse in earth­quakes.
    ...

    “Tom Heaton, pro­fes­sor of geo­physics and direc­tor of the Earth­quake Engi­neer­ing Research Lab­o­ra­to­ry at the Cal­i­for­nia Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy, says most, if not all, of the tanks in Cush­ing are built to the weak­est indus­try design stan­dards.”

    Well done, petro­le­um indus­try. And the tank farms aren’t even the biggest poten­tial source of spills:

    ...
    The real prob­lem, he says, would be the pipelines them­selves, says Ron Rip­ple, Mervin Bovaird pro­fes­sor of ener­gy busi­ness and finance at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Tul­sa. Rip­ple esti­mates that an earth­quake or oth­er dis­as­ter would have to knock out half those tanks to have a real impact on the mar­ket. Of big­ger con­cern to him are the pipelines, which con­trol a larg­er vol­ume of oil. He points to the Octo­ber 2016 explo­sion of the Colo­nial pipeline in rur­al Alaba­ma as a corol­lary. The result­ing fire kept crews from repair­ing the pipeline prop­er for six days. Dur­ing that time, oil com­mod­i­ty prices jumped 60 percent—the high­est spike in near­ly a decade. Exporters clam­ored to find work-arounds, includ­ing tankers capa­ble of mov­ing the oil by sea. As a con­se­quence, freight car­go rates increased by near­ly 40 per­cent. Mean­while, motorists in South­ern states rushed the pumps, ele­vat­ing prices there, too—forcing the gov­er­nor of Geor­gia to issue an exec­u­tive order warn­ing about price goug­ing.

    ...

    John­son Bridg­wa­ter, direc­tor of the Okla­homa chap­ter of the Sier­ra Club, says he’s mind­ful of the eco­nom­ic effects of such a spill, but it’s the impact on the land­scape and the peo­ple who occu­py it that most con­cerns him. Imag­ine, says Bridg­wa­ter, if Ripple’s sce­nario of los­ing half the tanks came to fruition.

    “That’s 50 mil­lion bar­rels,” he says. “We’d be look­ing at our own on-land Exxon Valdez.”

    Worse, actu­al­ly. The Valdez was car­ry­ing just over a mil­lion bar­rels of oil. A quar­ter of that spilled. And light crude, the kind of oil stored in Cush­ing, pos­es par­tic­u­lar chal­lenges to an envi­ron­ment, often killing ani­mals or plants on con­tact and emit­ting dan­ger­ous fumes that can kill both human and ani­mal res­i­dents.

    “This would not be a sim­ple cleanup,” says Bridg­wa­ter. “You’d have an unin­hab­it­able com­mu­ni­ty for a long time.”
    ...

    “This would not be a sim­ple cleanup, You’d have an unin­hab­it­able com­mu­ni­ty for a long time.”

    And don’t for­get, all of this could have been avoid­ed if the state gov­ern­ment of Okla­homa had sim­ply exer­cised a basic lev­el of cau­tion in reg­u­lat­ing its frack­ing indus­try. But it did­n’t, so here we are, with the world’s largest store of oil sit­ting on a man-made earth­quake machine.

    So with that nation­al security/ecological night­mare in mind (and don’t for­get that eco­log­i­cal night­mares are nation­al secu­ri­ty night­mares on their own) it’s worth ask­ing what the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment might final­ly do about this sit­u­a­tion. And as the fol­low­ing arti­cle about the cur­rent head of the Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency, for­mer Okla­homa Attor­ney Gen­er­al Scott Pruitt, makes clear, if the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment does inter­vene it’s prob­a­bly not going to be the EPA doing it:

    The Atlantic

    Could Scott Pruitt Have Fixed Okla­homa’s Earth­quake Epi­dem­ic?

    Crit­ics say he could have done much more to help the state’s cit­i­zens.

    Robin­son Mey­er Jan 18, 2017

    Scott Pruitt is Oklahoma’s attor­ney gen­er­al and Don­ald Trump’s nom­i­nee to lead the U.S. Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency. He has an inter­est­ing envi­ron­men­tal record, to say the least.

    In the past few years, he has cast doubt on one of the cen­tral find­ings of cli­mate sci­ence. He has sued the EPA to block it from enforc­ing rules against region­al smog and air­borne mer­cury pol­lu­tion. At one point, he copy-and-past­ed a let­ter from an oil com­pa­ny onto offi­cial state let­ter­head, added his sig­na­ture, and mailed it to the agency he will soon run.

    He even has a long-run­ning ker­fuf­fle about chick­en­shit. Drew Edmond­son, Pruitt’s pre­de­ces­sor, alleged that Tyson Foods and oth­er poul­try com­pa­nies were dump­ing too much chick­en manure into the Illi­nois Riv­er. The riv­er had become choked with tox­ic algae. But after becom­ing attor­ney gen­er­al in 2011, Pruitt dropped that case, down­grad­ing it to a vol­un­tary inves­ti­ga­tion. He simul­ta­ne­ous­ly dis­man­tled his office’s in-house envi­ron­men­tal-pro­tec­tion unit. The poul­try indus­try lat­er donat­ed at least $40,000 to his reelec­tion cam­paign.

    ...

    Okla­homa has been ailed this decade by an “induced-earth­quake” prob­lem, the con­se­quences of which have wrecked walls, win­dows, and prop­er­ty val­ues around the state. In a nor­mal year—that is, in almost any before 2009—the state only saw one or two quakes. It now expe­ri­ences one to two quakes per day. In 2015, it endured 857 earth­quakes with a mag­ni­tude of 3.0 or high­er, more than struck the rest of the low­er 48 states com­bined.

    These tremors are not nat­u­ral­ly occur­ring. They are caused by waste­water injec­tion, a process in which mil­lion of gal­lons of salty water are pumped deep under­ground. This water is often a by-prod­uct of frack­ing, the nat­ur­al-gas min­ing process that has spread across the coun­try and rev­o­lu­tion­ized the U.S. ener­gy indus­try.

    Dur­ing Pruitt’s time as attor­ney gen­er­al, Okla­homa devel­oped the worst human-made-earth­quake prob­lem in the coun­try. The state as a whole was slow to deal with the prob­lem, and, for many years, it did not admit the quakes had a human ori­gin. After that, it neglect­ed to rapid­ly slow the rate of waste­water injec­tion. This has allowed medi­um-scale earth­quakes to con­tin­ue: In Novem­ber, a 5.0‑magnitude quake dam­aged the struc­tures of down­town Cush­ing, Okla­homa.

    John­son Bridg­wa­ter, the direc­tor of the Sier­ra Club’s Okla­homa chap­ter, says that the fail­ure to address the quakes lies with every state offi­cial, Pruitt includ­ed.

    “There are var­i­ous places where the attor­ney general’s office could have stepped in to fix this over­all prob­lem,” he told me. “Its job is to pro­tect cit­i­zens. Oth­er states were proac­tive and took these issues on.” He crit­i­cized Pruitt for stay­ing “com­plete­ly silent” in the face of a major envi­ron­men­tal prob­lem for the state’s tax­pay­ers.

    Bridgwater’s con­cerns have been echoed by the nation­al Sier­ra Club. “When a a 2015 report from the Okla­homa Geo­log­i­cal Sur­vey found a direct link between oil and gas min­ing and increased destruc­tion and prop­er­ty dam­age from earth­quakes, Pruitt did noth­ing, even though as attor­ney gen­er­al he is respon­si­ble for pro­tect­ing Okla­homans,” said a state­ment from the orga­ni­za­tion last month.

    This alle­ga­tion is true, as it goes. There was a human-made earth­quake epi­dem­ic in Pruitt’s home state, and the best thing you can say about his response is that it didn’t exist. But how much respon­si­bil­i­ty did Pruitt plau­si­bly bear for the slow-mov­ing dis­as­ter? And what could he have done about it?

    Okla­homa is not the only state to have seen a surge in earth­quakes this decade. Near­ly every state in its region—Texas, Kansas, Arkansas, and Colorado—watched the num­ber of earth­quakes rise in the years after 2008. So did oth­er states that embraced hydraulic frac­tur­ing, like Ohio, Penn­syl­va­nia, and New York.

    Each of these states respond­ed to the phe­nom­e­non dif­fer­ent­ly, says Cliff Frohlich, a seis­mol­o­gist at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas at Austin. “If I were to gen­er­al­ize, I’d say it depends strong­ly on the impor­tance of petro­le­um in the var­i­ous states,” he told me. “The states that have been more sluggish—or careful—are the states that have a big finan­cial invest­ment in oil and gas. But at the same time, those were also the states that had more his­to­ry with it.”

    The var­i­ous state respons­es present a nat­ur­al exper­i­ment, of sorts. Arkansas saw tem­blors spike in fre­quen­cy before Okla­homa did. It had a hand­ful of earth­quakes in 2008, then 37 in 2009, and then a whop­ping 772 in 2010. In July 2011, the state’s pan­icked oil and gas com­mis­sion issued a blan­ket mora­to­ri­um on new injec­tion wells, and the epi­dem­ic imme­di­ate­ly began to sub­side.

    Texas and Okla­homa have been more cir­cum­spect. In some cas­es, this cau­tion came from a long his­to­ry of oil drilling in the state. “Peo­ple in the oil patch would say, with truth, that they’d been pump­ing stuff into the ground for decades and it had not caused earth­quakes,” Frohlich says.

    Okla­homa was also hurt by its own geol­o­gy. In Texas, under­ground waste­water tends to trav­el to the near­est fault and cause small slips. This trig­gers local, shal­low quakes that don’t trav­el far. But in Okla­homa, the rock can absorb waste­water for years with­out show­ing it. Over time, all that built-up flu­id pres­sur­izes entire for­ma­tions and caus­es deep faults to unclamp and slip. This cre­ates “swarms” or “clouds” of earth­quakes, as dozens of minor but harm­ful quakes strike the same region repeat­ed­ly over a mat­ter of days.

    Okla­homa was also extreme­ly slow to acknowl­edge that humans were caus­ing the quakes to occur. By 2013, sci­en­tists at the U.S. Geo­log­i­cal Sur­vey had made it clear that injec­tion wells were increas­ing the state’s seis­mic risk. Yet it wasn’t until April 2015 that the state gov­ern­ment of Okla­homa admit­ted that oil and gas activ­i­ty was caus­ing the earth­quake epi­dem­ic. By that time, there were an aver­age of two quakes per day.

    Through­out this long peri­od, Pruitt did noth­ing. He did not issue a state­ment about the quakes. He did not announce action to stop them. He did not resus­ci­tate the state attor­ney general’s envi­ron­men­tal-pro­tect unit, which he had pre­vi­ous­ly tak­en apart.

    Per­haps he had noth­ing to do. Oklahoma’s cor­po­ra­tion com­mis­sion is charged with reg­u­lat­ing waste­water injec­tion, as is the state’s sec­re­tary of ener­gy and envi­ron­ment. If the state was lax in its response, the fault pri­mar­i­ly lies with those two offices.

    But experts con­fid­ed that there were a num­ber of legal ques­tions on which Pruitt could have engaged. The state’s earth­quake epi­dem­ic cre­at­ed a num­ber of thorny legal prob­lems on which the people’s lawyer could have spo­ken. These include:

    1. As Arkansas and Kansas began restrict­ing waste­water injec­tion, com­pa­nies oper­at­ing in those states began import­ing water across state lines into Okla­homa. Firms work­ing in Col­orado and Texas also import­ed brine. In 2015, min­ing com­pa­nies brought 2.4 mil­lions bar­rels of waste­water into Okla­homa, where it was inject­ed far under­ground.

    The state’s cor­po­ra­tion com­mis­sion has said it can­not stop the waste­water com­ing into the state because it would vio­late the Constitution’s inter­state-com­merce clause. Yet this is a legal opin­ion, and Scott Pruitt said noth­ing about this issue. (Nor did Okla­homa offi­cials seek a new law from Con­gress restrict­ing the trade.)

    2. Oth­er Soon­ers found that even if they did pur­chase earth­quake insur­ance, it did not cov­er their claims. In Sep­tem­ber of last year, for instance, the town of Pawnee expe­ri­enced a 5.8‑magnitude tem­blor, the worst quake ever record­ed in the state. The shak­ing dis­lodged walls, cab­i­nets, and floor­ing.

    With­in a month of the event, Pawnee res­i­dents had filed 274 claims to insur­ance providers. Only four were paid out, in part because the insur­ance com­pa­nies don’t cov­er dam­age that occurs as a result of the quake after the shak­ing stops. Pruitt’s office has done noth­ing, and said noth­ing, about the 270 unpaid claims.

    3. No one has ever been able to answer the biggest under­ly­ing legal ques­tion behind all the earth­quakes: Who is liable? In Novem­ber, the res­i­dents of Pawnee sought an answer and filed a class-action law­suit against 27 oil com­pa­nies oper­at­ing in the area.

    The state of Okla­homa, through Pruitt’s office, could have tak­en the side of its cit­i­zens and joined the case as an “inter­venor.” It did not.

    And while it is true that Pruitt does not reg­u­late oil and gas extrac­tion in Okla­homa, oth­er attor­neys gen­er­al have involved them­selves in dif­fi­cult frack­ing cas­es. In Penn­syl­va­nia, Attor­ney Gen­er­al Kath­leen Kane sued mul­ti­ple frack­ing com­pa­nies, alleg­ing that they had vio­lat­ed envi­ron­men­tal laws and leaked tox­ic chem­i­cals into the water sup­ply. Her elect­ed suc­ces­sor, Josh Shapiro, won his elec­tion in part by promis­ing to go even hard­er on frack­ers.

    Per­haps Pruitt has been dis­tract­ed by his own alle­giances. Harold Hamm is an oil bil­lion­aire who first made his for­tune by frack­ing the shale deposits of North Dako­ta. He believes in the moral imper­a­tive to frack: “Every time we can’t drill a well in Amer­i­ca, ter­ror­ism is being fund­ed,” he told the Repub­li­can Nation­al Con­ven­tion last year. “Every oner­ous reg­u­la­tion puts Amer­i­can lives at risk.”

    As recent­ly as last year, and despite all avail­able evi­dence, he also believed that waste­water injec­tion did not cause earth­quakes. He was chair­man of Pruitt’s reelec­tion cam­paign in 2014.

    Until they get an answer, the vast major­i­ty of Okla­homans have had to deal with repair costs them­selves. One of those Okla­homans is Mark Davies, a pro­fes­sor of social and eco­log­i­cal ethics at Okla­homa City Uni­ver­si­ty. His home is in one of the safer areas of the state, yet quakes have made small cracks in its ceil­ing and exter­nal stonework. He has han­dled the costs pri­vate­ly.

    “Attor­ney Gen­er­al Pruitt has been quite proac­tive in rela­tion to law­suits that are sup­port­ive of the oil and gas industry—for exam­ple, his law­suit against the Clean Pow­er Plan—but [he has been] notably absent in his response to induced seis­mic­i­ty,” he told me in an email. “The ques­tion is, Could Pruitt have been more involved to pro­tect Okla­homa and its cit­i­zens in rela­tion to the detri­men­tal effects of induced seis­mic­i­ty? I think the answer to this ques­tion is yes.”

    Rex Buchanan has a dis­tinct out­look on Oklahoma’s prob­lems, as he spent many years ana­lyz­ing them from the north. Buchanan was act­ing direc­tor of the Kansas Geo­log­i­cal Sur­vey from 2010 to 2016, where he led that state’s approach to its own induced-seis­mic­i­ty epi­dem­ic. He retired last year after near­ly four decades with the state agency.

    His role meant that he spent many days in his south­ern neigh­bor state, talk­ing about earth­quakes. ( “I drove from Lawrence to Okla­homa City more than I would ever want to remem­ber,” he told me. “We were treat­ing this as a region­al issue.”) He watched both states come to grips with their earth­quake prob­lems and begin to address them. In Kansas, he even did the address­ing.

    “Through all that time, I nev­er dealt with any­one in the Okla­homa attor­ney general’s office,” he says. “Before [Scott Pruitt] was nom­i­nat­ed for that post, I nev­er even heard his name.”

    This wasn’t unusu­al, he cau­tioned. It mir­rored how the Kansas state gov­ern­ment han­dled earth­quakes. In Kansas, he had been asked by the gov­er­nor to fix the prob­lem, and the attor­ney gen­er­al was not involved. In Okla­homa, the state’s cor­po­ra­tion com­mis­sion­ers and its sec­re­tary of ener­gy, Mike Ming, took the lead.

    “Now, hav­ing said that, the sit­u­a­tion in Okla­homa is way dif­fer­ent than it is in any oth­er state,” Buchanan told me. “Okla­homa is much worse, in terms of sheer num­ber and mag­ni­tude of earth­quakes. They’ve had class-action law­suits, they’ve had Supreme Court cas­es. There were days in this process where I felt sor­ry for myself, but it was pret­ty easy to look at Okla­homa and not feel so bad.”

    And the attor­ney gen­er­al could have had a role in man­ag­ing quakes, he said. “These are peo­ple suf­fer­ing dam­age to their homes and busi­ness­es. But they can’t point to any spe­cif­ic well, and they can’t point to any spe­cif­ic com­pa­ny. You’ve got peo­ple suf­fer­ing dam­age, with what I couldn’t see as a recourse. That’s an impor­tant legal ques­tion, I think,” he told me. It remains unre­solved.

    Okla­homa final­ly began to impose reg­u­la­tions on waste­water injec­tion last year. Its reg­u­la­tions are con­sid­ered among the meek­est in the coun­try. Bridg­wa­ter wants the state to act more aggressively—it still waits to to react to big quakes instead of proac­tive­ly plan­ning for new ones, he alleges.

    An inde­pen­dent report released last month by Stan­ford seis­mol­o­gists says that the state is on the right track, though it could move faster. In 2017, Okla­homa faces a 40 per­cent risk of anoth­er major earth­quake. The state will not return to nor­mal seis­mic­i­ty until the end of the 2020s.

    ———-

    “Could Scott Pruitt Have Fixed Okla­homa’s Earth­quake Epi­dem­ic?” by Robin­son Mey­er; The Atlantic; 01/18/2017

    And while it is true that Pruitt does not reg­u­late oil and gas extrac­tion in Okla­homa, oth­er attor­neys gen­er­al have involved them­selves in dif­fi­cult frack­ing cas­es. In Penn­syl­va­nia, Attor­ney Gen­er­al Kath­leen Kane sued mul­ti­ple frack­ing com­pa­nies, alleg­ing that they had vio­lat­ed envi­ron­men­tal laws and leaked tox­ic chem­i­cals into the water sup­ply. Her elect­ed suc­ces­sor, Josh Shapiro, won his elec­tion in part by promis­ing to go even hard­er on frack­ers.”

    This is the cur­rent head of the EPA. Because appar­ent­ly we aren’t col­laps­ing the bios­phere fast enough.

    Of course, in Pruit­t’s defense, as attor­ney gen­er­al he was­n’t the state offi­cial in charge of reg­u­lat­ing the frack­ing indus­try. But as the arti­cle made clear, he did have the pow­er to inter­vene at a legal lev­el but that nev­er hap­pened. For super mys­te­ri­ous rea­sons:

    ...
    Per­haps Pruitt has been dis­tract­ed by his own alle­giances. Harold Hamm is an oil bil­lion­aire who first made his for­tune by frack­ing the shale deposits of North Dako­ta. He believes in the moral imper­a­tive to frack: “Every time we can’t drill a well in Amer­i­ca, ter­ror­ism is being fund­ed,” he told the Repub­li­can Nation­al Con­ven­tion last year. “Every oner­ous reg­u­la­tion puts Amer­i­can lives at risk.”

    As recent­ly as last year, and despite all avail­able evi­dence, he also believed that waste­water injec­tion did not cause earth­quakes. He was chair­man of Pruitt’s reelec­tion cam­paign in 2014.”
    ...

    A frack­ing bil­lion­aire was chair­man of Pruit­t’s 2014 cam­paign. What a shock­er. And at least by cre­at­ing our own man-made earth­quakes under an area of “crit­i­cal infra­struc­ture” the US is send­ing a sig­nal to ter­ror­ists “don’t both­er attack­ing this crit­i­cal infrastructure...we got this!” It’s a very inno­v­a­tive counter-ter­ror­ism strat­e­gy.

    But per­haps the real shock­er in this sit­u­a­tion is that Okla­homa appears to have belat­ed start­ed reg­u­lat­ing the frack­ing waste­water injec­tions last year. And accord­ing to an inde­pen­dent report the state is on track to return to “nor­mal seis­mic­i­ty” in the next decade:

    ...
    Okla­homa final­ly began to impose reg­u­la­tions on waste­water injec­tion last year. Its reg­u­la­tions are con­sid­ered among the meek­est in the coun­try. Bridg­wa­ter wants the state to act more aggressively—it still waits to to react to big quakes instead of proac­tive­ly plan­ning for new ones, he alleges.

    An inde­pen­dent report released last month by Stan­ford seis­mol­o­gists says that the state is on the right track, though it could move faster. In 2017, Okla­homa faces a 40 per­cent risk of anoth­er major earth­quake. The state will not return to nor­mal seis­mic­i­ty until the end of the 2020s.

    But note that the report pre­dict­ing a return to nor­mal seis­mic­i­ty bases that pre­dic­tion on the assump­tion that Okla­homa actu­al­ly sticks with its new reg­u­la­tions and does­n’t some­how make the sit­u­a­tion worse. Which, of course, is an open ques­tion. A very open ques­tion thanks to Scott Pruitt. Of course, in his defense, he’s has help. A lot of help.

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | September 15, 2017, 2:18 pm
  9. Here’s a fas­ci­nat­ing new piece of envi­ron­men­tal research that’s a reminder of how rapid­ly human­i­ty is careen­ing towards con­flicts over chang­ing water sup­plies due to cli­mate change and oth­er man-made activ­i­ties: The first study based on all of the data col­lect­ed over 14 years by the Grav­i­ty Recov­ery and Cli­mate Exper­i­ment (GRACE) was just released. GRACE was a NASA-led mis­sion start­ed in 2002. It involved two satel­lites cir­cling the globe in tan­dem about 220 kilo­me­tres apart. Extreme­ly small changes in the sep­a­ra­tion of these satel­lites, down to a dis­tance of one-tenth the width of a human hair, was made pos­si­ble by a microwave link between the two satel­lites. That abil­i­ty to detect extreme­ly tiny per­tur­ba­tions in the satel­lites can, in turn, be used to detect extreme­ly small changes in the grav­i­ta­tion­al pull on the satel­lites as they trav­el across the globe. And that, in turn, can be used to infer the pres­ence of ground water. So human­i­ty is get­ting its first look at a 14 year glob­al study on glob­al water sup­plies and, sur­prise!, the data points towards rapid­ly chang­ing water sup­plies that are like­ly to lead to future con­flicts and crises:

    The Globe and Mail

    ‘This is an eye-open­er’: Changes in glob­al water sup­ply hint at future con­flicts and crises

    Ivan Seme­niuk Sci­ence reporter
    Pub­lished May 16, 2018
    Updat­ed

    By com­bin­ing 14 years’ worth of satel­lite data, sci­en­tists have cap­tured a star­tling por­trait of the world’s water sup­ply under­go­ing rapid trans­for­ma­tion. The new analy­sis points to areas where there is increas­ing poten­tial for con­flict as a grow­ing demand for water col­lides with the impacts of cli­mate change. In Cana­da, the maps shows shift­ing water sup­plies that include wet­ter, more flood-prone regions in many areas of the coun­try but a gen­er­al dry­ing out in the west­ern sub-Arc­tic.

    “This is an eye-open­er,” said Roy Brouw­er, an econ­o­mist and exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Waterloo’s Water Insti­tute who was not involved in the analy­sis. “It rais­es aware­ness that things are chang­ing and that in some areas some­thing has to hap­pen to counter and antic­i­pate some of the cat­a­stro­phes that may be wait­ing for us in the not-so-far future.”

    The analy­sis is based on data from the Grav­i­ty Recov­ery and Cli­mate Exper­i­ment, or GRACE, a NASA-led mis­sion launched in 2002 that involved two satel­lites cir­cling the globe in tan­dem about 220 kilo­me­tres apart. A microwave link between the two satel­lites allowed sci­en­tists to pre­cise­ly mon­i­tor minus­cule changes in their sep­a­ra­tion down to a dis­tance of 10 microns, or about one-tenth the width of a human hair.

    The set­up cre­at­ed a sort of fly­ing weight scale that mean the satel­lites could be used to mea­sure slight region­al vari­a­tions in Earth’s grav­i­ta­tion­al pull. Many of those vari­a­tions are due to geo­log­i­cal fea­tures, such as moun­tain ranges, that do not vary over time. But by tak­ing mea­sure­ments over many years, the satel­lite also picked up changes that are large­ly due to the move­ment of mas­sive amounts of water at or near Earth’s sur­face.

    Researchers have pub­lished many results based on GRACE data but the new analy­sis, pub­lished Wednes­day in the jour­nal Nature, marks the first time all avail­able obser­va­tions from the mis­sion, from April, 2002, to March, 2016, have been ana­lyzed and assem­bled to pro­vide a com­pre­hen­sive map of water trends around the world. Those trends encom­pass changes in where water is stored across Earth’s sur­face, includ­ing ground­wa­ter, soil mois­ture, glac­i­ers, snow cov­er and sur­face water. The result sug­gests a water land­scape that is chang­ing fast on a glob­al scale, in large part due to human activ­i­ty and cli­mate change.

    “The human fin­ger­print is all over what we see in the map,” said Jay Famigli­et­ti, a water-resource expert affil­i­at­ed with NASA’s Jet Propul­sion Lab­o­ra­to­ry in Pasade­na, Calif., and the incom­ing direc­tor of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Saskatchewan’s Glob­al Insti­tute for Water Secu­ri­ty.

    Dr. Famigli­et­ti, a co-author on the Nature study, has played a cen­tral role in inter­pret­ing data from the GRACE mis­sion over its life­time. He added that the new analy­sis point­ed to pro­found changes in the Earth’s water resources that should serve as a wake-up call for pol­i­cy mak­ers.

    “There are impli­ca­tions in that map for food secu­ri­ty, for water secu­ri­ty and for human secu­ri­ty in terms of things like con­flict and cli­mate refugees,” he said.

    In total, Dr. Famigli­et­ti and his col­leagues iden­ti­fied 34 region­al trends in water stor­age observed by GRACE. Some are like­ly due to nat­ur­al vari­a­tions over the time that the obser­va­tions were tak­en. For exam­ple, the Ama­zon basin looks like its get­ting wet­ter because the area has been recov­er­ing from a drought. The same is like­ly the case for a region cen­tred on the Cana­di­an Prairies and parts of the Unit­ed States. Over the long term, those trends may fade away.

    The most obvi­ous changes are clear­ly due to cli­mate change and relate to ice loss in the polar regions and in some moun­tain­ous areas such as Alas­ka and the south­ern por­tions of the Andes in South Amer­i­ca. Oth­ers show places where humans have direct­ly affect­ed water stor­age.

    One exam­ple is a large swatch of dimin­ish­ing water sup­ply across parts of the Mid­dle East, includ­ing Syr­ia and Iraq. The short­age is relat­ed to dam build­ing in Turkey and overuse of ground­wa­ter, both of which have exac­er­bat­ed an already com­plex and volatile polit­i­cal sit­u­a­tion in the region.

    Sim­i­lar short­falls in India reflect the impact of sub­si­dized elec­tric­i­ty, which has cre­at­ed a “per­verse incen­tive” that makes it inex­pen­sive to pump out more ground­wa­ter than can be replen­ished, said Dr. Brouw­er.

    Over­all, the map shows how the world’s water is increas­ing­ly mov­ing from nat­ur­al store­hous­es such as glac­i­ers to human-built reser­voirs, a change that comes with plen­ty of polit­i­cal fall­out when that water cross­es inter­na­tion­al bound­aries, said Aaron Wolf, an expert in water-relat­ed con­flict at Ore­gon State Uni­ver­si­ty.

    ...

    ———-

    “‘This is an eye-open­er’: Changes in glob­al water sup­ply hint at future con­flicts and crises” by Ivan Seme­niuk; The Globe and Mail; 05/16/2018

    “By com­bin­ing 14 years’ worth of satel­lite data, sci­en­tists have cap­tured a star­tling por­trait of the world’s water sup­ply under­go­ing rapid trans­for­ma­tion. The new analy­sis points to areas where there is increas­ing poten­tial for con­flict as a grow­ing demand for water col­lides with the impacts of cli­mate change. In Cana­da, the maps shows shift­ing water sup­plies that include wet­ter, more flood-prone regions in many areas of the coun­try but a gen­er­al dry­ing out in the west­ern sub-Arc­tic.”

    A star­tling por­trait of rapid trans­for­ma­tion points towards an increas­ing poten­tial for con­flict. That’s pret­ty much what we should expect at this point for any­thing involv­ing the envi­ron­ment. And sure enough, that’s what the most com­pre­hen­sive map­ping of glob­al water sup­plies found. Thanks to some amaz­ing satel­lite tech­nol­o­gy:

    ...
    The analy­sis is based on data from the Grav­i­ty Recov­ery and Cli­mate Exper­i­ment, or GRACE, a NASA-led mis­sion launched in 2002 that involved two satel­lites cir­cling the globe in tan­dem about 220 kilo­me­tres apart. A microwave link between the two satel­lites allowed sci­en­tists to pre­cise­ly mon­i­tor minus­cule changes in their sep­a­ra­tion down to a dis­tance of 10 microns, or about one-tenth the width of a human hair.

    The set­up cre­at­ed a sort of fly­ing weight scale that mean the satel­lites could be used to mea­sure slight region­al vari­a­tions in Earth’s grav­i­ta­tion­al pull. Many of those vari­a­tions are due to geo­log­i­cal fea­tures, such as moun­tain ranges, that do not vary over time. But by tak­ing mea­sure­ments over many years, the satel­lite also picked up changes that are large­ly due to the move­ment of mas­sive amounts of water at or near Earth’s sur­face.
    ...

    And note that it’s not just cli­mate change dri­ving these water sup­ply changes. It’s oth­er human activ­i­ty like sim­ply extract­ing ground water at a faster rate than it can be replaced. And that includes one area with rapid­ly dwin­dling ground water sup­plies that’s already prone to con­flict: the Mid­dle East:

    ...
    Researchers have pub­lished many results based on GRACE data but the new analy­sis, pub­lished Wednes­day in the jour­nal Nature, marks the first time all avail­able obser­va­tions from the mis­sion, from April, 2002, to March, 2016, have been ana­lyzed and assem­bled to pro­vide a com­pre­hen­sive map of water trends around the world. Those trends encom­pass changes in where water is stored across Earth’s sur­face, includ­ing ground­wa­ter, soil mois­ture, glac­i­ers, snow cov­er and sur­face water. The result sug­gests a water land­scape that is chang­ing fast on a glob­al scale, in large part due to human activ­i­ty and cli­mate change.

    “The human fin­ger­print is all over what we see in the map,” said Jay Famigli­et­ti, a water-resource expert affil­i­at­ed with NASA’s Jet Propul­sion Lab­o­ra­to­ry in Pasade­na, Calif., and the incom­ing direc­tor of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Saskatchewan’s Glob­al Insti­tute for Water Secu­ri­ty.

    Dr. Famigli­et­ti, a co-author on the Nature study, has played a cen­tral role in inter­pret­ing data from the GRACE mis­sion over its life­time. He added that the new analy­sis point­ed to pro­found changes in the Earth’s water resources that should serve as a wake-up call for pol­i­cy mak­ers.

    “There are impli­ca­tions in that map for food secu­ri­ty, for water secu­ri­ty and for human secu­ri­ty in terms of things like con­flict and cli­mate refugees,” he said.

    In total, Dr. Famigli­et­ti and his col­leagues iden­ti­fied 34 region­al trends in water stor­age observed by GRACE. Some are like­ly due to nat­ur­al vari­a­tions over the time that the obser­va­tions were tak­en. For exam­ple, the Ama­zon basin looks like its get­ting wet­ter because the area has been recov­er­ing from a drought. The same is like­ly the case for a region cen­tred on the Cana­di­an Prairies and parts of the Unit­ed States. Over the long term, those trends may fade away.

    The most obvi­ous changes are clear­ly due to cli­mate change and relate to ice loss in the polar regions and in some moun­tain­ous areas such as Alas­ka and the south­ern por­tions of the Andes in South Amer­i­ca. Oth­ers show places where humans have direct­ly affect­ed water stor­age.

    One exam­ple is a large swatch of dimin­ish­ing water sup­ply across parts of the Mid­dle East, includ­ing Syr­ia and Iraq. The short­age is relat­ed to dam build­ing in Turkey and overuse of ground­wa­ter, both of which have exac­er­bat­ed an already com­plex and volatile polit­i­cal sit­u­a­tion in the region.

    Sim­i­lar short­falls in India reflect the impact of sub­si­dized elec­tric­i­ty, which has cre­at­ed a “per­verse incen­tive” that makes it inex­pen­sive to pump out more ground­wa­ter than can be replen­ished, said Dr. Brouw­er.

    Over­all, the map shows how the world’s water is increas­ing­ly mov­ing from nat­ur­al store­hous­es such as glac­i­ers to human-built reser­voirs, a change that comes with plen­ty of polit­i­cal fall­out when that water cross­es inter­na­tion­al bound­aries, said Aaron Wolf, an expert in water-relat­ed con­flict at Ore­gon State Uni­ver­si­ty.
    ...

    And don’t for­get that cli­mate change and a dev­as­tat­ing drought was a like­ly ini­tial dri­ver for the Syr­i­an civ­il war. So where there’s prob­a­bly going to be some wars between nations over scare water resources, there’s prob­a­bly going to be even more wars that break out in the form of civ­il wars as soci­eties buck­le under the stress of shrink­ing water sup­plies.

    So that’s a high­ly dis­turb­ing piece of research. Kind of a night­mare if you think about it.

    But at least now we know. After all, imag­ine how much worse if would be if the we nev­er did the study in the first place and weren’t even try­ing to track all these changes. Or worse, imag­ine if these changes were being tracked but the research was being sup­pressed for polit­i­cal rea­sons. That would be a very dif­fer­ent kind of night­mare. Kind of like the night­mare sit­u­a­tion cur­rent man­i­fest­ing in the Unit­ed States:

    Politi­co

    White House, EPA head­ed off chem­i­cal pol­lu­tion study

    The inter­ven­tion by Scott Pruitt’s aides came after one White House offi­cial warned the find­ings would cause a ‘pub­lic rela­tions night­mare.’

    By ANNIE SNIDER

    05/14/2018 12:43 PM EDT
    Updat­ed 05/14/2018 02:05 PM EDT

    Scott Pruitt’s EPA and the White House sought to block pub­li­ca­tion of a fed­er­al health study on a nation­wide water-con­t­a­m­i­na­tion cri­sis, after one Trump admin­is­tra­tion aide warned it would cause a “pub­lic rela­tions night­mare,” new­ly dis­closed emails reveal.

    The inter­ven­tion ear­ly this year — not pre­vi­ous­ly dis­closed — came as HHS’ Agency for Tox­ic Sub­stances and Dis­ease Reg­istry was prepar­ing to pub­lish its assess­ment of a class of tox­ic chem­i­cals that has con­t­a­m­i­nat­ed water sup­plies near mil­i­tary bases, chem­i­cal plants and oth­er sites from New York to Michi­gan to West Vir­ginia.

    The study would show that the chem­i­cals endan­ger human health at a far low­er lev­el than EPA has pre­vi­ous­ly called safe, accord­ing to the emails.

    “The pub­lic, media, and Con­gres­sion­al reac­tion to these num­bers is going to be huge,” one uniden­ti­fied White House aide said in an email for­ward­ed on Jan. 30 by James Herz, a polit­i­cal appointee who over­sees envi­ron­men­tal issues at the OMB. The email added: “The impact to EPA and [the Defense Depart­ment] is going to be extreme­ly painful. We (DoD and EPA) can­not seem to get ATSDR to real­ize the poten­tial pub­lic rela­tions night­mare this is going to be.”

    More than three months lat­er, the draft study remains unpub­lished, and the HHS unit says it has no sched­uled date to release it for pub­lic com­ment. Crit­ics say the delay shows the Trump admin­is­tra­tion is plac­ing pol­i­tics ahead of an urgent pub­lic health con­cern — some­thing they had feared would hap­pen after agency lead­ers like Pruitt start­ed plac­ing indus­try advo­cates in charge of issues like chem­i­cal safe­ty.

    Sen. Mag­gie Has­san (D‑N.H.) called the delay “deeply trou­bling” on Mon­day, urg­ing Pruitt and Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump “to imme­di­ate­ly release this impor­tant study.”

    “Fam­i­lies who have been exposed to emerg­ing con­t­a­m­i­nants in their drink­ing water have a right to know about any health impacts, and keep­ing such infor­ma­tion from the pub­lic threat­ens the safe­ty, health, and vital­i­ty of com­mu­ni­ties across our coun­try,” Has­san said, cit­ing POLITI­CO’s report­ing of the issue.Details of the inter­nal dis­cus­sions emerged from EPA emails released to the Union of Con­cerned Sci­en­tists under the Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion Act.

    ...

    The White House referred ques­tions about the issue to HHS, which con­firmed that the study has no sched­uled release date.

    Pruitt‘s chief of staff, Ryan Jack­son, defend­ed EPA’s actions, telling POLITICO the agency was help­ing “ensure that the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment is respond­ing in a uni­form way to our local, state, and Con­gres­sion­al con­stituents and part­ners.”

    Still, Pruitt has faced steady crit­i­cism for his han­dling of sci­ence at the agency, even before the recent spate of ethics inves­ti­ga­tions into his upscale trav­els and deal­ings with lob­by­ists. In his year lead­ing EPA, he has over­hauled sev­er­al sci­en­tif­ic advi­so­ry pan­els to include more indus­try rep­re­sen­ta­tives and recent­ly ordered lim­its on the kinds of sci­en­tif­ic stud­ies the agency will con­sid­er on the health effects of pol­lu­tion.

    On the oth­er hand, Pruitt has also called water pol­lu­tion one of his sig­na­ture pri­or­i­ties.

    The chem­i­cals at issue in the HHS study have long been used in prod­ucts like Teflon and fire­fight­ing foam, and are con­t­a­m­i­nat­ing water sys­tems around the coun­try. Known as PFOA and PFOS, they have been linked with thy­roid defects, prob­lems in preg­nan­cy and cer­tain can­cers, even at low lev­els of expo­sure.

    The prob­lem has already proven to be enor­mous­ly cost­ly for chem­i­cals man­u­fac­tur­ers. The 3M Co., which used them to make Scotch­guard, paid more than $1.5 bil­lion to set­tle law­suits relat­ed to water con­t­a­m­i­na­tion and per­son­al injury claims.

    But some of the biggest lia­bil­i­ties reside with the Defense Depart­ment, which used foam con­tain­ing the chem­i­cals in exer­cis­es at bases across the coun­try. In a March report to Con­gress, the Defense Depart­ment list­ed 126 facil­i­ties where tests of near­by water sup­plies showed the sub­stances exceed­ed the cur­rent safe­ty guide­lines.

    A gov­ern­ment study con­clud­ing that the chem­i­cals are more dan­ger­ous than pre­vi­ous­ly thought could dra­mat­i­cal­ly increase the cost of cleanups at sites like mil­i­tary bases and chem­i­cal man­u­fac­tur­ing plants, and force neigh­bor­ing com­mu­ni­ties to pour mon­ey into treat­ing their drink­ing water sup­plies.

    The dis­cus­sions about how to address the HHS study involved Pruit­t’s chief of staff and oth­er top aides, includ­ing a chem­i­cal indus­try offi­cial who now over­sees EPA’s chem­i­cal safe­ty office.

    Herz, the OMB staffer, for­ward­ed the email warn­ing about the study’s “extreme­ly painful” con­se­quences to EPA’s top finan­cial offi­cer on Jan. 30. Lat­er that day, Nan­cy Beck, deputy assis­tant admin­is­tra­tor for EPA’s Office of Chem­i­cal Safe­ty and Pol­lu­tion Pre­ven­tion, sug­gest­ed ele­vat­ing the study to OMB’s Office of Infor­ma­tion and Reg­u­la­to­ry Affairs to coor­di­nate an inter­a­gency review. Beck, who worked as a tox­i­col­o­gist in that office for 10 years, sug­gest­ed it would be a “good neu­tral arbiter” of the dis­pute.

    OMB/OIRA played this role quite a bit under the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion, but under Oba­ma they just let each agency do their own thing...,” Beck wrote in one email that was released to UCS.

    Beck, who start­ed at OMB in 2002, worked on a sim­i­lar issue involv­ing per­chlo­rate, an ingre­di­ent in rock­et fuel — linked with thy­roid prob­lems and oth­er ail­ments — that has leached from defense facil­i­ties and man­u­fac­tur­ing sites into the drink­ing water of at least 20 mil­lion Amer­i­cans. Beck stayed on at OMB into the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion, leav­ing the office in Jan­u­ary 2012 and going to work for the Amer­i­can Chem­istry Coun­cil, where she was senior direc­tor for reg­u­la­to­ry sci­ence pol­i­cy until join­ing EPA last year.

    Yogin Kothari, a lob­by­ist with the Union of Con­cerned Sci­en­tists, called Beck­’s Jan­u­ary email “extreme­ly trou­bling because it appears as though the White House is try­ing to inter­fere in a sci­ence-based risk assess­ment.”

    Envi­ron­men­tal­ists say such inter­fer­ence was rou­tine dur­ing the Bush admin­is­tra­tion.

    “It’s why the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion issued a call for sci­en­tif­ic integri­ty poli­cies across the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment,” Kothari said in an email to POLITICO. “Dr. Beck should know first­hand that the Bush admin­is­tra­tion side­lined sci­ence at every turn, giv­en that she spent time at OMB dur­ing that time.”

    Soon after the Trump White House raised con­cerns about the impend­ing study, EPA chief of staff Ryan Jack­son reached out to his HHS coun­ter­part, as well as senior offi­cials in charge of the agency over­see­ing the assess­ment to dis­cuss coor­di­nat­ing work among HHS, EPA and the Pen­ta­gon. Jack­son con­firmed the out­reach last week, say­ing it is impor­tant for the gov­ern­ment to speak with a sin­gle voice on such a seri­ous issue.

    “EPA is eager to par­tic­i­pate in and, con­tribute to a coor­di­nat­ed approach so each fed­er­al stake­hold­er is ful­ly informed on what the oth­er stake­hold­ers’ con­cerns, roles, and exper­tise can con­tribute and to ensure that the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment is respond­ing in a uni­form way to our local, state, and Con­gres­sion­al con­stituents and part­ners,” Jack­son told POLITICO via email.

    Pruitt has made address­ing per- and poly­flu­o­roalkyl sub­stances, or PFAS, a pri­or­i­ty for EPA. The unpub­lished HHS study focused on two spe­cif­ic chem­i­cals from this class, PFOA and PFOS.

    States have been plead­ing with EPA for help, and experts say that con­t­a­m­i­na­tion is so wide­spread, the chem­i­cals are found in near­ly every water sup­ply that gets test­ed.

    In Decem­ber, the Trump admin­is­tra­tion’s nom­i­nee to head the agen­cy’s chem­i­cal safe­ty office, indus­try con­sul­tant Michael Dour­son, with­drew his nom­i­na­tion after North Car­oli­na’s Repub­li­can sen­a­tors said they would not sup­port him, in large part because of their state’s strug­gles with PFAS con­t­a­m­i­na­tion. Dour­son­’s pre­vi­ous research on the sub­ject has been crit­i­cized as too favor­able to the chem­i­cal indus­try.

    Short­ly after Dour­son­’s nom­i­na­tion was dropped, Pruitt announced a “lead­er­ship sum­mit” with states to dis­cuss the issue sched­uled for next week.

    In 2016, the agency pub­lished a vol­un­tary health advi­so­ry for PFOA and PFOS, warn­ing that expo­sure to the chem­i­cals at lev­els above 70 parts per tril­lion, total, could be dan­ger­ous. One part per tril­lion is rough­ly the equiv­a­lent of a sin­gle grain of sand in an Olympic-sized swim­ming pool.

    The updat­ed HHS assess­ment was poised to find that expo­sure to the chem­i­cals at less than one-sixth of that lev­el could be dan­ger­ous for sen­si­tive pop­u­la­tions like infants and breast­feed­ing moth­ers, accord­ing to the emails.

    Dave Andrews, a senior sci­en­tist with the Envi­ron­men­tal Work­ing Group, said those con­clu­sions line up with recent stud­ies on the health effects of PFAS.

    “They are look­ing at very sub­tle effects like increased risk of obe­si­ty for chil­dren exposed in womb, low­ered immune response, and child­hood vac­cines becom­ing not as effec­tive,” Andrews said.

    The HHS doc­u­ment at issue is called a tox­i­co­log­i­cal pro­file, which describes the dan­gers of a chem­i­cal based on a review of pre­vi­ous sci­en­tif­ic stud­ies. It would car­ry no reg­u­la­to­ry weight itself, but could fac­tor into cleanup require­ments at Super­fund sites.

    EPA sci­en­tists, includ­ing career staffers, were already talk­ing with the HHS researchers about the dif­fer­ences in their two approach­es to eval­u­at­ing the chem­i­cals when offi­cials at the White House raised alarm in late Jan­u­ary, the emails show. Those dif­fer­ences, accord­ing to the cor­re­spon­dence, stemmed from the agen­cies’ use of dif­fer­ent sci­en­tif­ic stud­ies as a basis, and from tak­ing dif­fer­ent approach­es to account­ing for the harm that the chem­i­cals can do to the immune sys­tem — an area of research that has bur­geoned in the two years since EPA issued its health advi­so­ry.

    Enck, the for­mer EPA offi­cial, said she sees one trou­bling gap in the emails: They make “no men­tion of the peo­ple who are exposed to PFOA or PFOS, there’s no health con­cern expressed here.”

    ———-

    “White House, EPA head­ed off chem­i­cal pol­lu­tion study” by ANNIE SNIDER; Politi­co; 05/14/2018

    More than three months lat­er, the draft study remains unpub­lished, and the HHS unit says it has no sched­uled date to release it for pub­lic com­ment. Crit­ics say the delay shows the Trump admin­is­tra­tion is plac­ing pol­i­tics ahead of an urgent pub­lic health con­cern — some­thing they had feared would hap­pen after agency lead­ers like Pruitt start­ed plac­ing indus­try advo­cates in charge of issues like chem­i­cal safe­ty.”

    Yep, just when the Health and Human Ser­vices (HHS) Agency for Tox­ic Sub­stances and Dis­ease Reg­istry was prepar­ing to pub­lish its assess­ment of cer­tain tox­ic chem­i­cals that have already con­t­a­m­i­nat­ed water sup­plies near mil­i­tary bases, chem­i­cal plants and oth­er sites, we get this big polit­i­cal inter­ven­tion to block the release of the study. And three months lat­er it remains unpub­lished and has no sched­uled release date.

    And it all appar­ent­ly start­ed with an email on Jan­u­ary 30th by an uniden­ti­fied White House aide decry­ing the “pub­lic, media, and Con­gres­sion­al reac­tion to these num­bers.” That email gets for­ward­ed by James Herz, a polit­i­cal appointee who over­sees envi­ron­men­tal issues at the Office of Man­age­ment of Bud­get (OMB), to the EPA’s top finan­cial offi­cer. Lat­er that day, Nan­cy Beck, deputy assis­tant admin­is­tra­tor for EPA’s Office of Chem­i­cal Safe­ty and Pol­lu­tion Pre­ven­tion, effec­tive­ly puts the brakes on releas­ing the study by sug­gest­ing send­ing the study to OMB’s Office of Infor­ma­tion and Reg­u­la­to­ry Affairs to coor­di­nate an inter­a­gency review:

    ...
    “The pub­lic, media, and Con­gres­sion­al reac­tion to these num­bers is going to be huge,” one uniden­ti­fied White House aide said in an email for­ward­ed on Jan. 30 by James Herz, a polit­i­cal appointee who over­sees envi­ron­men­tal issues at the OMB. The email added: “The impact to EPA and [the Defense Depart­ment] is going to be extreme­ly painful. We (DoD and EPA) can­not seem to get ATSDR to real­ize the poten­tial pub­lic rela­tions night­mare this is going to be.”

    ...

    Herz, the OMB staffer, for­ward­ed the email warn­ing about the study’s “extreme­ly painful” con­se­quences to EPA’s top finan­cial offi­cer on Jan. 30. Lat­er that day, Nan­cy Beck, deputy assis­tant admin­is­tra­tor for EPA’s Office of Chem­i­cal Safe­ty and Pol­lu­tion Pre­ven­tion, sug­gest­ed ele­vat­ing the study to OMB’s Office of Infor­ma­tion and Reg­u­la­to­ry Affairs to coor­di­nate an inter­a­gency review. Beck, who worked as a tox­i­col­o­gist in that office for 10 years, sug­gest­ed it would be a “good neu­tral arbiter” of the dis­pute.
    ...

    And as Nan­cy Beck point­ed out in her email, this exact kind of ‘dis­pute arbi­tra­tion’ (as a means of sup­press­ing research) was done quite a bit under the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion. Envi­ron­men­tal­ists agree, this was a very ‘Bush admin­is­tra­tion’ thing to do:

    ...
    OMB/OIRA played this role quite a bit under the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion, but under Oba­ma they just let each agency do their own thing...,” Beck wrote in one email that was released to UCS.

    Beck, who start­ed at OMB in 2002, worked on a sim­i­lar issue involv­ing per­chlo­rate, an ingre­di­ent in rock­et fuel — linked with thy­roid prob­lems and oth­er ail­ments — that has leached from defense facil­i­ties and man­u­fac­tur­ing sites into the drink­ing water of at least 20 mil­lion Amer­i­cans. Beck stayed on at OMB into the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion, leav­ing the office in Jan­u­ary 2012 and going to work for the Amer­i­can Chem­istry Coun­cil, where she was senior direc­tor for reg­u­la­to­ry sci­ence pol­i­cy until join­ing EPA last year.

    Yogin Kothari, a lob­by­ist with the Union of Con­cerned Sci­en­tists, called Beck­’s Jan­u­ary email “extreme­ly trou­bling because it appears as though the White House is try­ing to inter­fere in a sci­ence-based risk assess­ment.”

    Envi­ron­men­tal­ists say such inter­fer­ence was rou­tine dur­ing the Bush admin­is­tra­tion.

    “It’s why the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion issued a call for sci­en­tif­ic integri­ty poli­cies across the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment,” Kothari said in an email to POLITICO. “Dr. Beck should know first­hand that the Bush admin­is­tra­tion side­lined sci­ence at every turn, giv­en that she spent time at OMB dur­ing that time.”
    ...

    Adding the scan­dalous nature of this research sup­pres­sion is that the chem­i­cals in ques­tion, per­flu­o­roalkyl and poly­flu­o­roalkyl sub­stances, are already know to be dan­ger­ous and chem­i­cal man­u­fac­tur­ers have already had to pay mas­sive fines to pay for their cleanup. But this research indi­cat­ed that these sub­stances are even more dan­ger­ous than pre­vi­ous­ly thought, mean­ing the cleanup efforts will have to be even more thor­ough and there­fore more cost­ly. Addi­tion­al­ly, these sub­stances are found in near­ly every water sup­ply that gets test­ed in the US. So this research would obvi­ous­ly end up cost­ing the chem­i­cal indus­try even more mas­sive amounts of mon­ey to clean up and it’s obvi­ous that these expect­ed costs to the pri­vate sec­tor were a key fac­tor in the desire to sup­press this research:

    ...
    The chem­i­cals at issue in the HHS study have long been used in prod­ucts like Teflon and fire­fight­ing foam, and are con­t­a­m­i­nat­ing water sys­tems around the coun­try. Known as PFOA and PFOS, they have been linked with thy­roid defects, prob­lems in preg­nan­cy and cer­tain can­cers, even at low lev­els of expo­sure.

    The prob­lem has already proven to be enor­mous­ly cost­ly for chem­i­cals man­u­fac­tur­ers. The 3M Co., which used them to make Scotch­guard, paid more than $1.5 bil­lion to set­tle law­suits relat­ed to water con­t­a­m­i­na­tion and per­son­al injury claims.

    But some of the biggest lia­bil­i­ties reside with the Defense Depart­ment, which used foam con­tain­ing the chem­i­cals in exer­cis­es at bases across the coun­try. In a March report to Con­gress, the Defense Depart­ment list­ed 126 facil­i­ties where tests of near­by water sup­plies showed the sub­stances exceed­ed the cur­rent safe­ty guide­lines.

    A gov­ern­ment study con­clud­ing that the chem­i­cals are more dan­ger­ous than pre­vi­ous­ly thought could dra­mat­i­cal­ly increase the cost of cleanups at sites like mil­i­tary bases and chem­i­cal man­u­fac­tur­ing plants, and force neigh­bor­ing com­mu­ni­ties to pour mon­ey into treat­ing their drink­ing water sup­plies.

    The dis­cus­sions about how to address the HHS study involved Pruit­t’s chief of staff and oth­er top aides, includ­ing a chem­i­cal indus­try offi­cial who now over­sees EPA’s chem­i­cal safe­ty office.

    ...

    Pruitt has made address­ing per- and poly­flu­o­roalkyl sub­stances, or PFAS, a pri­or­i­ty for EPA. The unpub­lished HHS study focused on two spe­cif­ic chem­i­cals from this class, PFOA and PFOS.

    States have been plead­ing with EPA for help, and experts say that con­t­a­m­i­na­tion is so wide­spread, the chem­i­cals are found in near­ly every water sup­ply that gets test­ed.

    ...

    The HHS doc­u­ment at issue is called a tox­i­co­log­i­cal pro­file, which describes the dan­gers of a chem­i­cal based on a review of pre­vi­ous sci­en­tif­ic stud­ies. It would car­ry no reg­u­la­to­ry weight itself, but could fac­tor into cleanup require­ments at Super­fund sites.
    ...

    So as we can see, the Trump admin­is­tra­tion is try­ing to ensure the pub­lic does­n’t learn about how almost all water sup­plies in the US are con­t­a­m­i­nat­ed with a chem­i­cal that appears to be much more tox­ic than pre­vi­ous­ly rec­og­nized. All so pri­vate indus­tries can avoid pesky cleanup fines.

    And don’t for­get that this con­scious poi­son­ing of US water sup­plies is hap­pen­ing in the con­text of this glob­al rapid chang­ing in water sup­plies that’s going to make clean water one of the most valu­able resources in the future and a like­ly source of future con­flicts. #Con­t­a­m­i­nateTh­eSwamp #Wak­ing­Night­mare

    Posted by Pterrafractyl | May 16, 2018, 3:26 pm

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