I talked last week about last-ditch efforts of the current federal administration to open U.S. coastal waters to oil and natural gas drilling. In Wednesday’s Times-Standard, John Driscoll’s article “Thompson floats no-drill bill” discusses Rep. Mike Thompson’s attempt to protect the California North Coast from this threat.
The most immediate threat generally perceived about offshore drilling is that of oil spills. The T-S article makes a reference to the fuel spills from the vessels Kure (a freighter) and Stuyvesant (a dredge) in 1997 and 1999 which killed thousands of birds in the Humboldt Bay area. I worked on the Kure spill response at the HSU Marine Wildlife Care Center; my husband worked on response to both spills. The scope of these spills is a minuscule fraction of what the spills from an offshore drilling operation look like, and the response time much faster.
Congressman Thompson is trying to protect the waters outside the jurisdiction of the state (i.e., outside the 3-mile limit) off the coast of Mendocino, Humboldt and Del Norte counties from drilling.
Despite this and other efforts, the threat is looming. The Charlottesville, VA, C-Ville recently mentioned that Virginia Governor Tim Kaine asked Minerals Management Service (MMS), the office of the U.S. Department of the Interior in charge of mineral exploration and exploitation, to postpone any plans for drilling until President-elect Barack Obama is sworn in and give a two-month extension to the comment period. The governor was turned down; on Wednesday the Richmond Times-Dispatch announced that the comment period would be extended by a mere 15 days to make up for the holidays.
However, the business community expects the Obama team to restore the moratorium on offshore drilling and even strengthen the ban. But hey, investing in the offshore drilling business is apparently considered a great investment nonetheless.
