a(broad) perspective
Across the Atlantic Ocean is another catastrophic, persistent, and pervasive oil disaster, ongoing for the past fifty years with no end in sight. The oil fields in the Niger Delta, occupying the southern tip of Nigeria, are rich with petroleum reserves, natural gas, and other natural resources. What should be a source of immense economic wealth for Nigeria instead turned into a poisonous cocktail of corruption and violence with disastrous consequences for the environment and human rights. The BP Oil Spill in our country has turned the spotlight on other oil disasters in international waters and foreign countries, and today’s international environmental post focuses on the devastation caused by oil operations in the Niger Delta.
The Niger Delta is one of the most densely populated regions on the African continent, home to 30 million people. The vast majority of this population relies on the Delta and its resources for economic livelihood and cultural identity; its water support the surrounding agricultural sectors. Blankets of mangrove and freshwater swamp forests provide rich breeding grounds for aquatic life and feeding grounds for many endemic birds, reptiles, and mammals. The largest wetland in Africa, the Niger Delta has unique and complex wildlife and ecosystems found nowhere else on the planet.
The region is also blessed with bountiful natural resources that the government and foreign companies have been exploiting since 1956. Nigeria is a primary oil producing state and a member of OPEC. The country gets 95% of its export earnings and 80% of its total revenue from oil. Nigeria is the fifth largest supplier of petroleum and crude oil for the United States.
Full textAcross the full spectrum of outside cognoscenti who are focused on the reality that a small office at the White House has final authority over the agencies charged with preventing catastrophes like the BP oil spill and the Big Branch mine disaster, one threshold assumption is sacrosanct. This tiny Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, now headed by former Harvard Law professor Cass Sunstein, ought to operate in bright sunshine, disclosing fully its communications with the agencies so the public can see its impact on rules and other administrative activities. We have insisted on this point, our loyal opposition at the Center for Regulatory Effectiveness agrees with it, and no less a bipartisan body than the Government Accountability Office has found that such transparency is too often lacking. As a matter of fact, the goal is not at all abstract: the Executive Order authorizing OIRA, 12866 contains specific directives requiring such disclosure. The EO, issued by the Clinton Administration and continued under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, requires those transparency measures in order to deflect the perception that OIRA is a court of last resort for aggrieved industry groups and a killing ground for strong regulation. Indeed, Peter Orszag, director of the Office of Management and Budget and Sunstein’s boss, issued a memorandum in December 2009 assigning OIRA the task of enforcing transparency throughout the government.
So how has transparency fared during OIRA’s Sunstein era? Not so well. OIRA under Sunstein has not only asserted that any agency or department can condemn action by another agency in secret, it is apparently enforcing a policy that outside stakeholders seeking an audience with Sunstein or his political deputy, Mike Fitzpatrick, must not reveal the content of a meeting, at pain of blacklisting from future meetings.
Full textWith characteristic audacity, the Wall Street Journal editorial page today is arguing against the precautionary approach to environmental policy that undergirds our system of environmental laws, even as the oil continues to gush into the Gulf of Mexico. Instead, they want to shift the burden of proof and only allow regulators to restrain corporate greed when the government can first quantify and monetize the environmental harm that will result and demonstrate that it outweighs the money to be made by taking environmental risks. The problem is, of course, that when you require cost-benefit analysis, the environment loses, because most of the values at stake on that side of the equation—human lives, air you can breathe, water you can swim and fish in—just can’t be measured in dollar terms.
The editorial writers of the Wall Street Journal lament that the disaster in the Gulf is causing a resurgence of the precautionary principle in environmental policy, which they claim was long ago “discredited” in favor of cost-benefit analysis. This battle is as old as the environmental movement itself. From the beginning, advocates of environmental protection have argued for a precautionary approach to environmental hazards, while industry has argued for cost-benefit analysis. But the Journal doesn’t quite get its history right. Despite the enormous amount of money they’ve put into this fight, industry hasn’t won—at least not yet.
Far from being “thoroughly discredited,” the precautionary principle is widely accepted throughout the world. It forms the basis for a whole host of international environmental treaties and agreements, including the Rio Declaration, negotiated by the first President Bush. And, as the Journal acknowledges, it undergirds the “architecture” of much of our domestic environmental law.
Full textCPR President Rena Steinzor has an op-ed in this morning's Baltimore Sun on the various regulatory failures at work in the BP oil spill. She writes that important questions need to be answered "about how the federal regulatory system allowed BP and other oil companies to drill in waters so deep without effective fail-safes," and continues:
In truth, this is just the last in a string of profit-driven tragedies that have horrified us recently. Consider the 29 workers smothered in a West Virginia mine shaft; salmonella-laced peanut butter that killed nine and sickened thousands; the recall of 8 million Toyotas after as many as 89 people were killed in sudden acceleration incidents; children's toys slathered with lead paint; drywall venting sulfuric acid into living rooms; and now the worst environmental disaster in our history, which initially killed 11 workers.
The companies that caused these tragedies deserve much of the blame, and where crimes were committed, prosecutions and civil litigation should follow. But it's also vital to understand just why the regulators charged with the job of preventing such disasters have failed so spectacularly.
She goes on to dismantle a couple of right wing arguments against inconveniencing industry -- the Rand Paul line that "accidents happen," and we should just live with them and leave industry alone; and the notion that the spill demonstrates that "big government" regulation doesn't work and that we should rely on corporate self-interest to save us from such disasters.
Full textCPR Member Scholar Dan Farber was on the PBS NewsHour on June 14 discussing the Obama Administration's plan to force BP to establish an escrow fund to compensate victims of its oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. You can see the entire interview with Ray Suarez, on the NewsHour site. Here's a snip of the transcript:
RAY SUAREZ: Daniel Farber, you're familiar with what's in that federal oil protection act. Is there a mechanism in there for the government to say, you must create an escrow fund?
DANIEL FARBER: They're -- certainly, it's true that, at the end of the day, victims can go to court and sue. And BP also has to have a mechanism for processing claims before that. But I don't see anything at least that to my mind requires them to set up this escrow or trust fund. I think it might be a good idea, but I'm not at all sure that it's in the law.
RAY SUAREZ: Well, Daniel Farber, the advantages of having money set aside well before the years of litigation begin, is there something in it for BP, as well as for the claimants, if that can be agreed to?
DANIEL FARBER: No, I -- yes, I think -- I think there is. I think BP is facing a situation where there is enormous distrust about its capability for dealing with this, about its good faith, on the part of a lot of people inside the U.S. government and among the public. I think setting up a fund like this would be very helpful for them, in terms of showing good faith, of assuring people that they are going to take responsibility for what happened. So, I see a lot of reasons for them to do it. Whether they have to do it, though, is something that's less clear.
Full textIt’s fascinating to listen to the media, with lots of encouragement from the right wing, inch its way toward blaming the BP Oil Spill on President Obama. Apparently the President’s job description includes a previously unknown provision about deep-sea plumbing expertise.
Let’s follow the media’s path for a moment here. First we heard media whining that the President was insufficiently engaged in the crisis, on the strength of no evidence whatsoever. Then the press went through a "false equivalency" phase, with a wave of speculation over whether this was, “Obama’s Katrina.” Then we heard howls from FOX commentator Sarah Palin (she of “drill, baby, drill” fame) that he hadn’t cozied up personally to BP CEO Tony Hayward. Now former American Enterprise Institute Fellow and current Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum complains that he’s bending too far in the opposite direction, engaging so visibly in managing the crisis that he’s raising false hopes that the government can indeed apply some sort of fix to the leak, which, of course, makes him look weak to the rest of the world.
President Obama’s in a horrible spot. Neither the oil industry nor the federal government has the technology to fix the leak anytime soon – that much is painfully clear. BP will surely have its chance to explain to Congress and to a judge why it represented repeatedly that it had such technology when it didn't. And the Minerals Management Service will get its chance to explain why it took those assertions at face value. But in the meantime, the sheer enormity of the problem creates a huge appetite for blame-laying. And the President is all too inviting and visible a figure to escape some share of it.
But I feel about this the same way I did about the argument over whether President Clinton’s deregulatory policies or President Bush’s deregulatory policies were responsible for the banking crisis that plunged us into recession. I don’t care so much who the media decides to blame, so long as we correctly identify the policies that are to blame. In this case, one glaring policy failure is that the federal government is inexcusably lax in its regulation of the oil industry. That’s no accident, of course. Industry likes it that way, and its allies on the Hill are similarly contented. Note, for example, that you haven’t heard a chorus of Republicans calling for stronger regulation of the oil industry, even though the political benefits for staking out such a position would be almost limitless for them.
Full textHundreds of offshore extraction platforms dot the world’s oceans, funneling millions of gallons each day of oil, natural gas, and other extracted resources to the surface. While these operations are regulated by the country where they’re located, they have the potential to cause international environmental disasters when located near boundary waters or near large currents. The New York Times looked at the international law implications of the ongoing BP Oil Spill and came to one conclusion: the international law governing oil pollution from offshore platforms is at best thin.
Much of the international law governing oil pollution applies directly to tankers and ships used to transport the oil, which makes sense since these transport vessels constantly cross in and out of territorial waters. But countries are increasingly exploring their offshore resources, leading to the need to create a stronger legal framework for international environmental harms that may be caused by these activities.
Full textCross-posted from IntLawGrrls
Ever since the Deepwater Horizon began gushing oil into the Gulf of Me
xico, BP has been dazzling the American people with a series of colorfully named “solutions:” the dome; top hat, junk shot, top kill. However, as the days turned into week, and the weeks turned into months, one thing has become crystal clear. None of these fanciful solutions had ever been tried in deep water, and BP was making things up as it went along.
It is hard to escape the conclusion that BP was actually engaged in an elaborate theatre designed to divert attention from the fact that the only real hope of stopping the blowout leak is a relief well—a solution that is by no means guaranteed and is still two months away.
BP knew it had no way to stop this leak on April 20, the day Deepwater Horizon exploded. They knew it earlier that day when they elected not to conduct a cement bond log test. They knew it on April 9, 2010, when they claimed in written comments that their deep water drilling activities “would not have an effect, cumulatively or individually, on the environment”. They knew it in Mid-April when they chose the "cheap but risky" method to case the well. They knew it when they successfully lobbied to avoid having to install acoustic triggers as backup blowout prevention system. Worst of all, they knew it when they assured MMS that:
In the event of an unanticipated blowout resulting in an oil spill, it is unlikely to have an impact based on the industry wide standards for using proven equipment and technology for such responses, implementation of BP’s Regional Oil Spill Response Plan which address [sic] available equipment and personnel, techniques for containment and recovery and removal of the oil spill.
Indeed, it is an open secret in the industry that nobody has any idea of how to stop a deepsea leak. Shell Oil admitted as much in a 2000 Environmental Assesment filed with the Mineral and Mining Service. Shell received a permit anyway.
Viewed in light of this backdrop, BP’s parade of fancifully-named solutions looks like a deeply cynical attempt to manipulate public opinion. As long as breathless press coverage focuses on minute-by-minute updates of each new attempt, it diverts attention from the question of why deepwater drilling was allowed at all when there was no way to respond to a disaster. Think about it—there was no Plan B at all.
Full textIn following the oil spill disaster, it can be hard to think beyond the control effort du jour to the bigger picture. I was riveted by the latest of BP’s seven failed efforts to stop the flow of oil, hoping it would succeed and that the underwater tornado of oil devastating the Gulf, the coast, and the people whose livelihoods depend on these natural resources, would be contained, at least. And now that the top kill has failed, we’re all holding our breath for the next containment dome, hoping against all odds that this one will work. Even if we do think a little more broadly beyond the control and response efforts, the most immediate question seems to be how to reform MMS, the agency whose oversight of BP and other oil companies was so compromised and inadequate.
But it’s crucial that we wrench our attention away from the BP webcam, the drama of the efforts to staunch the out-of-control well, and the soap opera of MMS’s ethical failings. We need to step back and consider the larger lessons of this disaster. The tectonic forces that brought us to this point aren’t ever going to make headlines. And if we don’t learn what brought us to this horrible place, you can be sure we’ll be back here again soon. The fundamental lesson we need to learn is this: we don’t need smaller government and less regulation, we need effective government and effective regulation.
Now, in this moment of crisis, we realize how much we need and depend on government to protect us. By “we”, the public, I mean the workers who were killed in the explosion, the fisherman and other workers who depend on the Gulf for their livelihoods, and all of us who are affected by the horrible fouling of the Gulf and the marine creatures who live there. And now, too late, we realize that BP and other private corporations are not going to protect our interests. The echoes of the financial crisis are almost earsplitting.
Full textCross-posted from Triple Crisis.
Despite talk of a moratorium, the Interior Department’s Minerals and Management Service is still granting waivers from environmental review for oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, including wells in very deep water. Until last month, most of us never thought about the risk that one of those huge offshore rigs would explode in flames and then sink, causing oil to gush out uncontrollably and befoul the oceans. The odds seemed low, and still do: Aren’t there lots of drilling rigs in use, year after year? Twenty years ago, your elected representatives thought that you’d be happy to have them adopt a very low cap on industry’s liability for oil spill damages.
Nuclear power was never quite free of fears; it was too clearly a spin-off of nuclear weapons to ignore the risk of a very big bang. Yet as its advocates point out, we have had hundreds of reactor-years of experience, with only a few accidents. (And someday when Nevada’s politicians aren’t looking, maybe we can slip all of our nuclear waste into a cave in the desert.) Again, the risks are so low that you’d be happy to learn about a law limiting industry’s liability for accidents, wouldn’t you?
Environmentalists have long warned that the world could run out of energy and resources, from the “limits to growth” theories of the 1970s to the more recently popular notion of “peak oil.” The response from economists has been that prices for energy and raw materials are still moderate, and declined over the course of the 20th century; if we are running out of something, why doesn’t its price skyrocket?
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