Endangered Species Update

July 4, 2010

Rolling Stone Quotes Center, Blows Open Gulf Oil Scandal

This from the Center for Biological Diversity; Read the full story in Rolling Stone.

They didn't put our picture on the cover, but Rolling Stone Magazine featured the Center for Biological Diversity prominently in this month's mammoth exposé on the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Titled "The Spill, The Scandal and the President: The inside story of how Obama failed to crack down on the corruption of the Bush years - and let the world's most dangerous oil company get away with murder," Tim Dickinson's story explains how the deeply corrupt Minerals Management Service was allowed to keep ignoring and violating environmental laws through both the Bush and early Obama years.

A few excerpts:

"[Interior Secretary] Salazar did little to tamp down on the lawlessness at MMS...And instead of putting the brakes on new offshore drilling, Salazar immediately throttled it up to record levels. Even though he had scrapped the Bush plan, Salazar put 53 million offshore acres up for lease in the Gulf in his first year alone - an all-time high. The aggressive leasing came as no surprise, given Salazar's track record. "This guy has a long, long history of promoting offshore oil drilling - that's his thing," says Kierán Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity. "He's got a highly specific soft spot for offshore oil drilling." As a senator, Salazar not only steered passage of the Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act, which opened 8 million acres in the Gulf to drilling, he even criticized President Bush for not forcing oil companies to develop existing leases faster."

"A top-to-bottom restructuring of MMS didn't require anything more than Ken Salazar's will: The agency only exists by order of the Interior secretary…Even though Salazar knew that the environmental risks of offshore drilling had been covered up under Bush, he failed to order new assessments. "They could have said, 'We cannot conclude there won't be significant impacts from drilling until we redo those reviews,' " says Brendan Cummings, senior counsel for the Center for Biological Diversity. "But the oil industry would have cried foul. And what we've seen with Salazar is that when the oil industry squeaks, he retreats."

There was supposed to be a moratorium on new offshore drilling projects, but BP found a way around that: It heaped together a 31-acre pile of gravel in the Beaufort Sea, called it an island base for a drilling rig and declared it would be conducting onshore drilling.

The project, called Liberty, would include a dicey technique of drilling two miles beneath the sea and then up to eight miles horizontally -- all under enormous pressure in a pristine sea that would be devastated by an oil spill. The project already has its state and federal permits, but BP still has to apply for its final permit to drill, which is expected later this year.

"It makes no sense," Rebecca Noblin, the Center's Alaska director (Center For Biological Diversity) told the Times. "BP pushes the envelope in the Gulf and ends up causing a moratorium. And now, in the Arctic they are forging ahead again with untested technology, and as a result they're the only ones left being allowed to drill there."



This month, a federal assessment of Mexican gray wolves' plight gave the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service a needed wake-up call on the animal's endangerment -- and as the Center and our allies ramped up legal pressure and publicity, the Service pledged to act quickly to convene a recovery team that would write a new recovery plan for the Mexican wolf. We've been hearing that promise since the mid-1990s, so we'll be eager to see it actually occur. But if so, an updated recovery plan will likely include recommended changes, like eliminating a rule requiring the capture of wolves who establish home territories outside the present wolf recovery area in southeastern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico. The new recovery plan should also establish -- for the first time --a formal goal, indicating recovery, for the number of wild "lobos" and their distribution in several populations and not just the current recovery area. Currently, the wild population is at a shockingly low 42 individuals. That's a 20-percent decline from 2008, and the lowest count since 2002.

Michael Robinson, carnivore advocate for the Center for Biological Diversity, called the new assessment "a clarion call to action before it's too late for the Mexican wolf, and that moment is approaching perilously fast." The Center has been working to save Mexican wolves since 1990, when our lawsuit initiated the wolf's return into part of its historic Southwest range.

May 17, 2010, Center For Biological Diversity.

(The Center for Biological Diversity is one of our best voices. If you have funds to spare their address is:

Center for Biological Diversity. PO Box 710 Tucson, AZ 85702-0710)

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Meanwhile, wolves in the northeast United States are denied protection. The Endangered Species Act specificlly call for the return of each species to its historic range. The northeast wolf population certainly deserves that. The Fish and Wildlife agency recently denied that wolf segment protection because no breeding pairs have yet been discovered. This is a dangerous excuse. I’ll report later on this.

Remember the Mexican Spotted Owl? It was left in limbo at the close of the big conference made headlines under the Clinton regime. Now, however, a Ninth Circuit Court has called that into question and restored a huge section of the southwest, declaring that it is in need of habitat study, the next step under the ESA.. This is an important decision; good news intervening while we are obsessed with the gulf oil disaster.

Peace/Resist

Martin