While sea levels are rising, Congress’ ocean IQ is receding.

But there’s not much humor to be found when you look at the likely effect of the election on the oceans. While ocean and coastal conservation has historically been a bipartisan issue, many moderate Republican House and Senate members who were once key advocates for marine protection — such as Rep. Jim Saxon of New Jersey, Rep. Wayne Gilchrest of Maryland, and Sen. John Chafee of Rhode Island — are no longer there. In their place are anti-government zealots who distrust any regulation by land or by sea.

On the other side of the aisle, some normally progressive Democrats like Rep. Barney Frank (Mass.) have strongly opposed plans to stop overfishing. He follows the lead of commercial fishers in his Massachusetts district who don’t use the same science-based approach to their work as fishers in Alaska and elsewhere.

Oddly, there still may be some modicum of hope among even the most conservative of Republicans. Remember George W. Bush’s blue asterisks? While arguably the worst environmental president in history, he also gave us the nation’s first true ocean wilderness parks, starting with northwest Hawaii’s huge Papahanaumokuakea Marine Monument back in 2006. In January 2009, during his final days in office, he added the Line Islands, Rose Atoll, and Mariana Trench in the Pacific. He did this at the urging of his wife Laura and against the wishes of his vice president Dick Cheney.

In the 112th Congress, expect to see President Obama’s newly established Ocean Council come under attack as another wasteful government bureaucracy. In fact, it’s a (sadly unfunded) attempt to coordinate more than two dozen federal departments and agencies to reduce conflict and redundancy at the national level while sustainably managing the uses of our publicly owned seas through regional initiatives.

The attempt to incorporate an ocean conservation trust fund into a Senate oil-spill response bill — if not passed during the 111th Congress’ lame-duck session this winter — will likely die at the hands of those who want to slash government spending even as private-sector spending has stalled out across the nation.

The new Senate may become even more obdurate when it comes to getting a confirmation vote for the Law of the Sea treaty that has been languishing (at this point more like festering) in that august body for years. While almost all ocean stakeholders from the Pentagon to the shipping industry to Greenpeace think the U.S. needs to be an active player in this U.N. convention that determines global actions on ocean issues, a handful of right-wing senators including James Inhofe (R-Okla.), David Vitter (R-La.), and the Tea Party’s Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) claim it’s an attempt to undermine U.S. sovereignty.

Another problem may be how we as a nation address fossil-fuel-fired climate impacts on our public seas — such as acidification, loss of Arctic sea ice, and sea-level rise — when climate-change denial has become an ideological rather than science-based issue for many Republican office holders. More than half of Tea Party supporters believe global warming poses no problem, while 85 percent of the general public thinks it does, according to a recent New York Times/CBS poll. Not coincidentally, many of the key groups backing Tea Party candidates, such as Americans for Prosperity, are also funded by the oil industry.

Expect Capitol Hill debates over ocean policies and politics to get even more heated in the next few years, not unlike the ocean itself.

An oily mess on the Gulf coast.Photo: David Helvarg

Hurricane Alex is the first of a series of 14 named storms predicted for the 2010 hurricane season. The Gulf is warmer than it’s been since before 2005 when unusually warm water super-charged Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and also led to massive coral bleaching and die-offs across the Caribbean. Even as it makes landfall 600 miles from the main oil slicks, the waves and winds generated by Alex have forced skimming operations to be cancelled and threatened to push oil farther onto the shores and into the marshes that include 40 percent of America’s coastal wetlands. 

During this potentially devastating storm season of 2010, the Gulf’s massive fields of oil could be swept ashore, mixed in the water column, or even lifted into the storm clouds to rain out in oily downpours, like some Biblical plague, on the coastal communities of the oil-producing Gulf. 

In 2005, just after Hurricane Katrina, I remember stopping in Biloxi, Miss., by an 8,000-ton, 600-foot-long casino barge that the 25-to-30-foot storm surge had driven half a mile across Beach Drive. Somewhere underneath its barnacle-encrusted black hull was a historic mansion. Another casino barge had gouged a hole halfway up the stately six-story yellow brick yacht club before coming to rest next to it. The beach was covered for miles in plastic buckets, insulation, mattresses, furniture, chunks of drywall, and Styrofoam pellets that the seabirds were eyeing as potential snack food. I felt like an eco-geek being more concerned about the gulls and wetlands than the lost revenue from the casinos that everyone else seemed to be obsessing about. 

On June 28, 2010, tar balls started coming ashore on Biloxi’s cleaned-up white sand beaches just as they had been on the squeaky sugar-white sands of the Florida Panhandle for days and weeks. Far less dramatic than what I’d seen after Katrina, these are the first signs of what promises to be a far more persistent and continuous fouling of beaches for months and possibly years to come. With 95 percent of the oil still offshore, these first small tar balls represent a dire threat to the economic drivers of the Gulf states that are its coastlines, particularly for the state of Florida, where they could be scraping oil off the sand till there’s no sand left. 

Even after the most visible oil is cleaned up by a living wave of work crews and skimmers, much of it remains behind, infiltrating into the backwater wetlands or the sand itself. 

In Grand Isle, La., Greenpeace marine biologist (and Ocean Campaign Director) John Hocevar takes me out on Greenpeace’s 27-foot diesel jet-powered rigid hull inflatable, the Billy Greene, named for a filmmaker who loved the natural world but was cut down by an urban predator. We zip across to Grand Terre Island, which had been hit by oil two days earlier. The water on the crossing is full of pods of dolphin workboats and oily rainbow sheens. Just as New Orleans after Katrina looked like a Woodstock for first responders, the waters around Grand Isle now look like a boat show for oil-spill response vessels.  

The beach on Grand Terre is boomed off and relatively cleaned off, though there’s still some heavy oil left between a rock jetty and the marsh behind it. I stumble and climb on the side of the boulder-pile break wall to where the oil is thick and brown on the rocks and along the marsh grass. The tidal swell between the rocks slowly lifts and lowers the thick sludgy oil, reminding me of a brown diseased lung rising and falling in an open chest. It seems like a living thing and keeps me mesmerized for some minutes till I get a call from a CNN producer asking if I think the Coast Guard has the resources to meet this latest disaster. The media presence is heavy as the humidity on these bayous and hopefully won’t go away once the exploding oil bore is sealed. 

On our way off the beach, there are two dolphins swimming by some yellow blackened oily boom. “Some oil became pebble-like interacting with the sand,” Hocevar tells me. More oil appears as red spots on the surface of the sand, though he says it has also sunk below the surface. I take a stick to dig with and see more copper-like spots appear along the edges of the hole I’ve created. After confirming what he’s said, I throw the sandy stick away and brush my hands against each other, only the sand won’t come off. I try again. When I rub my hands on my jeans, they leave an oily brown stain on the denim and thin brown streaks of oil on my palms. Now multiply that one million times or more and add wind fetch and storm surges.

I seriously doubt that we can “make it better than it was before,” as President Obama promised he would do for the Gulf region in his recent White House speech on the disaster. BP also makes promises in radio ads that play every day around here: “We may not always be perfect but we will make it right.” I love the calculated tone of the ad. Hell, we all know nobody is perfect. I may have killed my grandma and shot my dog, but I’ll make it right. 

Meanwhile, we continue to hope for more luck than we’re likely to get during this hurricane season.

Ten years ago, during a visit to a BP deep-drilling platform in the Gulf of Mexico, I asked the drill boss what would happen if there were a spill a mile or two down. “Guess we’ll find out when it happens,” was his response. Now we know. Every day something between four and 40 COSCO Busan spills are gushing into the Gulf from a mile below the surface.  

The history of offshore drilling is the history of exploring new frontier waters with little expectation, preparation, or planning for the next disaster until it happens. After the deep waters of the Gulf, the next oil-boom frontier will be in the Arctic Ocean unless we make a serious commitment to moving, to quote a discredited oil company, “beyond petroleum.” 

Here’s an account from the time of the COSCO Busan spill, excerpted from my new book, Saved by the Sea: A Love Story with Fish.

—–

The western grebe lies exhausted on a rock in the marina where I now live. Stained black, its red eyes seem to burn at me with anger and reproach. I know that’s anthropomorphic thinking. As humans we understand that we’re killing them, whereas they have no idea what’s killing them. The next day they boom off my neighborhood wetland to keep the oil out, although some has already gotten into the salt marsh where endangered Clapper Rails nest and where I once saw a large salmon heading up our small creek.

A spill of 53,500 gallons isn’t even large compared to dozens of historic disasters like the 8 million gallons released in and around the Gulf of Mexico after Hurricane Katrina or the 11 million gallons from the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989 that devastated the pristine waters and wildlife of Alaska’s Prince William Sound. Shortly after the COSCO Busan spill, the Black Sea and the Korean peninsula are hit by massive oil spills millions of gallons and orders of magnitude larger than this one.

Back home I walk around the marina to Shimada Friendship Park. There’s a couple, early 20s, Amber Kirst and Scott Egan. She’s walking the shoreline, her white pants oil-stained at the ankles, wearing a protective rubber glove and holding a bag full of oiled litter and dead crabs.

“We’ve got a live crab too. He was in a Cheetos bag,” she tells me, climbing up the rocks to the pathway. “We drove down from Lodi to volunteer, but they said they’d get back to us. It’s an hour-and-a-half drive. We needed to do something.”

The Cheetos crab is still alive. She shows me the small critter, with its dark shell. “Should I put it back? Is it too oiled for them to feed on?” She looks at the hundreds of shorebirds hunting in the exposed mud flats and floating just beyond. “It’s all so depressing,” she concludes before climbing back down to pick up more oiled litter.

We build our homes on barrier islands and in flood plains; we move millions of tons of goods and fuel through marine sanctuaries; we continue to burn a product that, used as directed, overheats our planet. Amber and Scott came from Lodi. They needed to do something. We all do.

Under the federal oil spill-response system established in the wake of the Exxon Valdez, a unified command has been set up including the Coast Guard, the state of California, and contractors working for the shipping company Regal Stone, owners of the Cosco Busan (“the responsible party”).  If the “responsible party”‘s $61 million liability insurance ($96 million for oil rigs and tankers) is exceeded in the cleanup, then the Coast Guard will take control.  

Barry McFarland, the hefty lead contractor for Regal Stone, claims that just two and a half hours after the collision, five skimming vessels were on the scene or on their way. But with just over a dozen people in the Bay Area, the contractor then had to bring in more workers from Los Angeles, Texas, and elsewhere over several days, people who were unfamiliar with the Bay and the Northern California coastline’s treacherous tides, currents, inlets, and at-risk beaches and marshes. In a better scenario, the Coast Guard, local fishermen, and volunteers could have responded in the first 24 hours, laying out protective booms and operating a flotilla of skimmer-equipped vessels in key areas before most of the oil got onto birds and beaches, but that’s not the way the system presently works. Unfortunately, the state of cleanup technology is also such that both state and federal officials consider the contractor’s recovery of 20 percent of the spilled oil a huge success.

I visit the Incident Command Center where the spill is being tracked and go out with the Coast Guard to do beach surveys around Sausalito and Richardson Bay, where I used to live. Luckily the damage here isn’t too bad, though we do run into some more oiled birds. Over 20,000 will die in the coming days.

Nine days after the spill, with 1,500 people now involved in the ongoing cleanup, I fly to Bahrain to report on the U.S. Coast Guard in Iraq for my book Rescue Warriors. I join up with 110-foot cutters protecting Iraq’s two big offshore oil terminals in the northern Persian Gulf. Along with chasing off ships that threaten to enter the security zone around the terminals, boarding Iraqi fishing dhows, and patrolling a disputed maritime line between Iraq and Iran, we do security boardings of supertankers before they fill up at the terminals.

One of the tankers, the red and green BW Noto, weighs 286,000 tons, is 1,100 feet long, and, when fully loaded, can carry 2 million barrels of oil. That’s $200 million worth of product at the time of our boarding, a hellacious amount of planet-warming carbon dioxide soon to be pumped into our atmosphere, or, if it were to spill, the equivalent of eight Exxon Valdez oil disasters.

Two weeks later, I return home to find 20 mostly Mexican contract workers in hazmat suits cleaning oil off the rocky shore behind my home. A month later, an oil barge runs into the nearby Richmond Bridge at the north end of the bay, another case of human error. Luckily no oil spills — this time.

——

But once again our luck’s run out. While I respect the roughnecks and roustabouts I’ve met on rigs off California and Louisiana (if not their corporate bosses), and also regret the lost lives and injuries they’ve suffered, I now believe that, like American whalers of the 19th century, it’s time to recognize their role in our maritime history and move on. After all, when it comes to energy production, no lives, livelihoods, coastal cultures, or marine ecosystems have ever been destroyed by a wind spill or a turning tide. 

The War Against the
Greens, by David Helvarg,
Johnson Books, 384 pgs.,
2004 revised edition.

In 1988, the Wise Use movement was founded out of fear that George Bush Sr. was going to live up to his campaign pledge to be “the environmental president.” This cabal of anti-environmental activists, organized by federally subsidized industries dependent on public lands, issued a natal document, the Wise Use Agenda. It called for, among other things: drilling the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, logging Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, opening wilderness to energy development, gutting the Endangered Species Act, and privatizing national parks. Today, the reactionary Wise Use Agenda has become the environmental policy of the administration of George Bush Jr.

One of Wise Use’s major contributions to politics has been its deliberate distortion of language, the adaptation of green-sounding names as industry camouflage: the Environmental Conservation Organization (wetlands developers), Concerned Alaskans for Resources and the Environment (the timber industry), and the Greening Earth Society (coal-fired utilities arguing the benefits of global warming). Today, the administration’s anti-environmental legislation goes by names like “Healthy Forests” and “Clear Skies,” while a combination of industry lobbyists and true believers argue that the same unfettered markets that gave us choking smog and burning rivers in the past have been transformed into the “new environmentalism” of the 21st century. I recently read a government energy report that talked of “the sustainable use of non-renewable resources,” and attended a Boston conference where I met consultants who help developers deal with “environmentally challenged sites.” Translation: wild places containing rare and endangered species or legally protected wetlands.

Musk oxen make merry in the Arctic
Refuge.

Photo: Ken Madsen.

Early in the Bush-Cheney administration, the vice president argued that though conservation might be a “personal virtue,” it is not “a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy” (which, of course, no one had argued that conservation alone was). The White House energy plan did offer a billion dollars to develop renewable power sources, but only if the money came from revenues generated by drilling the Arctic Refuge. That sounded like a gleeful spin on the Wise Use agenda, more red meat for the far right’s political base. By 2004, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham was promoting development of hydrogen fuel-cell technology. The administration plan differed markedly from a plan being promoted by the European Union. While the Europeans envision hydrogen fuel-cell storage systems built on renewable energy sources like wind and solar, the Bush plan calls for the hydrogen to be generated by nuclear and coal-fired power plants. The difference, of course, is whether you see hydrogen fuel cells as part of a necessary transition strategy out of a carbon-based economy or merely as a neat new technology for charging up your SUV.

In the immediate wake of 9/11, the American public appeared ready to make sacrifices and embrace change as they reconsidered their obligations as citizens of a democracy. Instead, the president went on TV and suggested we go shopping. While a few politicians like Sen. John Kerry and media outlets like USA Today argued it was time to move beyond oil and the corrupt terror regimes that produce it, major environmental organizations scrambled to avoid any negative references to the commander in chief. Partly as a result of this timidity, the critical mass needed to mobilize the public failed to materialize. Seeing themselves as hard-headed pragmatists, George Bush, Dick Cheney, and their neo-conservative friends Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Pearle, and Paul Wolfowitz believe we really don’t need to eliminate our dependence on fossil fuels from repressive and unstable regimes like Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. Rather, we need “unilateral” policies to secure and supplement these supplies, even if that means the military occupation of Iraq and industrialization of America’s last wild lands and waters.

In the face of a scientific consensus that human-caused climate change is real and under way and will result in up to a 10 degree Fahrenheit warming and a two- to three-foot sea-level rise by the end of this century, the administration continues to follow the Wise Use path of denial and denigration. They insist that creating incentives to reduce greenhouse pollution (as Europe has done) would severely damage the U.S. economy. You can almost hear the whaling barons of the 19th century arguing that the end of whaling will mark the end of mechanization as industry’s whale-oil lubricated machines grind to a halt. Of course, the introduction of “rock oil” or petroleum actually resulted in the unprecedented growth of the U.S. economy, just as the introduction of renewable-energy technologies is likely to lead to a global expansion of entrepreneurial innovation, competition, and enterprise. Just before the turn of the 21st century, I visited a couple of deep-drilling oil rigs far out in the Gulf of Mexico. It was a loud, thrilling experience watching the platforms’ roughnecks and roustabouts pulling energy from far below the earth and the deep blue sea. It was the kind of heroic but dated scene you might have encountered had you boarded one of the last wooden whaling ships at the turn of the 20th century.

The future of energy production —
or not?

Photo: NREL.

Unfortunately, by favoring their own outmoded petroleum industry, George Bush and Dick Cheney may be undermining America’s competitive position in the world. Today, European energy companies like Shell and BP are investing billions in new energy technologies. Shell believes that solar and other renewables will constitute a third of all new energy production by 2050, while BP’s CEO thinks that year will see 50 percent of global energy demand met by non-carbon renewables. Even if there are short-term costs and dislocations associated with a rapid energy transition, every decade of delay is certain to multiply other economic and human costs. A recent United Nations “CEO Briefing” prepared by Munich Re, a major European reinsurance company, estimates that worldwide insurance losses from severe weather linked to climate change are now running at $150 billion a year and will soon double. Meanwhile, the U.N. World Health Organization estimates that 150,000 people died as the direct result of climate change in 2000.

I’ve seen and reported on dramatic climate impacts already taking place, from the Antarctic Peninsula to the coral reefs of Florida, Fiji, and Australia. As climate change alters and damages unique habitats and the species that depend on them, it becomes ever more important that we conserve and protect what’s left, and that we fully value the economic, social, and spiritual worth of our last wild places. A wetland that’s not filled in for a shopping center or damaged by water diversions can, for example, recharge a local aquifer in times of drought. It can provide habitat for wildlife and recreation, act as a nursery for marine fisheries, filter pollution, and inspire diverse human cultures, ranging from the Cajun of Louisiana to the “Swamp Arabs” of southern Iraq. What Wise Users fail to understand is that saving wilderness, whole and undivided, is really about saving ourselves.

Only a radical reorganization of the way we see ourselves and our role in the natural world can help turn this backlash around. We need to begin a rapid transition from oil and gas to sun, wind, tides, geothermal, and hydrogen energy. We need to revitalize our urban centers and our sense of community while protecting agricultural lands and greenbelts. Even onetime property-rights strongholds like Boise, Idaho, are now recognizing this by voting for growth limits and open-space protections. We need to strengthen the Endangered Species Act to protect our fellow creatures long before they reach a critical state and to ensure we maintain the full diversity and promise of life on our blue-marble planet. We need to establish global standards for the environment, labor, and human rights at least as strong as those for global trade and banking.

Although it’s no guarantee in and of itself, I’ve seen how democratic change can inspire (and be inspired by) ecological movements in places ranging from Poland to Korea and from Bolivia to Mexico and Chile. Ironically, it’s the undermining of democracy in America by a lobbying and election finance system indistinguishable from brown-bag bribery that now poses the greatest environmental threat to our future. We live in a time when too many politicians and business leaders no longer fear being caught in a conflict of interest because they’ve moved beyond a sense of shame.

Point Reyes beckons.

Photo: USGS.

Henry David Thoreau once wrote, “Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads. We need the tonic of wilderness.” As a dedicated diver and bodysurfer, I would add only that heaven is also under our flippers. Whenever the forces of heedless industrial sprawl seem overwhelming, a hike around Point Reyes or a bodysurfing session in the wild waters off Northern California refreshes my spirit. It’s an ice-cold tonic. All I have to do is imagine the noise, traffic, and congestion that aren’t there thanks to the efforts of all those dedicated citizens who came before. Wilderness lands and waters, from New Jersey’s damaged Meadowlands to Alaska’s rugged coastal plains, can revive us and endure with us, but only if we choose to stay engaged in the increasingly politicized struggle necessary to protect them.

Our choice lies either in surrender to the nihilistic backlash that says, “Take what you can get while you can get it,” or in our rededication to a faith that says we can still leave our kids and future generations a good life in a good land. The outcome hangs upon the understanding, heart, and will of the American people. It’s a thin reed of hope, especially in the wake of the 2004 election. Still, it’s worked so far.

A volunteer holds an oil-soaked bird on the Spanish coast.

Photo: Greenpeace Spain.

The U.S. Coast Guard claims that ships like the “Prestige” would probably not even be allowed to operate in American waters — even though the vessel passed a Coast Guard inspection several years ago. Still, rust-bucket ships are just one of many threats the oil business poses to U.S. waterways. Take, for instance, the industry’s likely failure to convert all tankers operating in U.S. waters to double-hulls by 2015, a deadline established under the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, which was passed after the Exxon Valdez disaster.

“People are not knocking down our doors placing orders [for double-hulled tankers],” reports American Shipbuilding Association President Cynthia Brown. “There’s no sense of urgency, and if they don’t order soon, shipyards won’t be able to deliver on time. I think this is an intentional strategy by the oil companies to delay — and when the yards can’t deliver, they’ll ask Congress for relief.”

Another cause for alarm is the practice of drilling and piping oil below sea ice. Oil-spill exercises conducted in the spring and fall of 2000 by the industry, the Coast Guard, the Interior Department’s Mineral Management Service, and the state of Alaska found that existing oil-spill response equipment is inadequate, and that booms (which are used to skim oil off the surface of water) and other gear fail to function effectively in conditions exceeding 10 to 30 percent ice coverage — less than the typical coverage for the area. Nonetheless, energy giant BP and other companies are continuing to develop offshore oil fields, such as “North Star” on Alaska’s North Slope.

Cleaning oil from Prince William Sound after the Exxon-Valdez spill.

Photo: NOAA.

Drilling platforms also operate in winter ice conditions in Alaska’s Cook Inlet, one of the most pristine marine wildlife areas in the United States. The operations have resulted in widespread, documented oil leakage from aging pipelines and onshore refineries. The U.S. EPA, MMS, and state agencies have all denied responsibility for oversight and cleanup of this problem, which continues to grow. Oil carriers entering and leaving Cook Inlet, which has some of the most extreme tidal shifts in North America, also lack the escort vessels, standby oil-spill response equipment, and other safety measures that have been in effect in Prince Williams Sound since the Exxon Valdez spill 14 years ago.

Deep drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, at depths of 1,000 to 10,000 feet, now accounts for more than 50 percent of the region’s oil and gas production — and almost half of all U.S. offshore production. The government provides subsidies (in the form of royalty holidays) for this deep-ocean drilling, but largely ignores the risk of deep-ocean spills. In 1998, the oil industry and MMS began studying the likely effects of a deep-ocean spill; conclusions from their test releases of oil in the North Sea suggest that the oil plume from a deep-water blow-out would surface hours after the disaster and miles away from the site, and would be so widespread at that point as to be uncontainable. In September, Unocal reported that an exploratory well it had drilled in mile-deep waters off of Indonesia had been leaking for more than a month, spreading a sheen of oil across the Makassar Straits.

Continued leakage of 33,000 gallons a day from the Prestige, now lying in 18,000 feet of water off Spain, demonstrates the difficulty of dealing with deep-ocean oil releases. Despite years of multi-billion-dollar profits already extracted from these depths, there are still no established spill protocols or equipment for capping or tapping a deep-water oil release.

A Floating Production, Storage, and Offloading system.

Photo: U.S. Department of Interior.

Oil tankers known as Floating Production, Storage, and Offloading systems are moored to the seafloor and equipped for oil drilling and storage. They have long been banned in U.S. waters as an environmental hazard. In the past, the offshore-production industry argued that drilling and piping oil ashore from fixed platforms was safer than transporting it in tankers. But FPSOs combine the worst risks of both production and transport, which is why many critics consider them unsafe. An FPSO ship would operate in 10,000-foot depths in the Gulf of Mexico and then regularly offload its stored oil to smaller tankers in open waters exposed to some of the worst hurricane conditions in the Western Hemisphere. Nonetheless, MMS has reversed its long-held position banning FPSOs and has indicated a willingness to approve future industry requests to introduce them in the Gulf of Mexico.

No one familiar with Mineral Management Service’s environmental record can be surprised by this latest move. MMS has long been recognized as a tool of the oil and gas industry. Its mandate to increase production and revenue (both for industry and the government through royalty payments) continues to supercede its obligation to prevent oil-spill disasters in U.S. waters. Decisions such as whether or not to permit drilling off the coast of Florida (where the president’s brother is governor) seem to be made on a political rather than a scientific basis. When asked why MMS has never canceled a lease sale based on its own biologists’ oil-spill risk assessments, Bob LaBelle, chief of MMS’s Environmental Division, responded, “It’s hard to make or break something as big as a lease on one issue.”

There are other risks posed to U.S. waters by the oil industry as well, including the security of tanker terminals and coastal refineries, marine hydrocarbon pollution from operational leakages in the Gulf of Mexico, and the impact on sperm whales and deep-ocean ecosystems from acoustic guns used in deep-oil survey work. None of these issues is being adequately addressed. For a long time, there has been insufficient public agency oversight on these matters; now, unfortunately, we also have an administration that seems more concerned with maximizing offshore fossil fuel production than with protecting our nation from an environmental disaster like the Prestige spill.

Which is why I wish the White House, Congress, and the media would stop flacking for the financial sector in the name of patriotism. In peace or in war, the real solution to overcapacity is not maxing out our credit cards. Mindless consumption and consumer debt can only float an economy for so long, even if two-thirds of our gross domestic product comes from the “shop ’till you drop” ethic.

Snowe what.

Admirably demonstrating that ethic, last month, Sens. Patty Murray (D-Wash., flashy democratic scarves) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine, discreet Republican pearls) went so far as to propose a bipartisan 10-day sales-tax moratorium beginning with the day-after-Thanksgiving holiday sales. Their push to jumpstart consumer spending was sidetracked, however, by Snowe’s fellow Republicans, who pushed even harder for a 15-year retroactive corporate tax-break to stimulate lagging sales of mega-yachts and trophy wives.

The basic economic war theory as I understand it is that once those Al Qaeda terrorists in their caves see Americans buying CD burners and SUVs with low- and no interest financing, they’ll realize they can’t beat us, abandon their mosques, and head to the malls. They can get there by following the flag posters in store windows proclaiming, “America: Open for Business.”

Even some environmentalists have begun to confuse the things we make with the values we hold dear. I recently attended a conference where a panelist from the World Resources Institute talked about how the “B4B” (that’s what he called the “Bottom 4 Billion” of the world’s population) lacked Internet access. Obviously they’re also being denied “3Ps”: Personal Computers, Palm Pilots, and Potable Water.

Still with the holiday season fast approaching, I can’t help but feel an increased sense of sobriety across the land, due at least in part to cut-backs at Liquor Barn and other discount eggnog outlets. Hopefully, we’ll be able to counter this recessionary trend towards serious reflection on our duties as American citizens by going out and buying as much stuff as possible. We can start by purchasing Harry Potter tickets and Harry Potter magic action figures to let our enemies know our consumer spirit will not flag. (Thankfully, flag sales are one sector of the economy that’s shown steady growth.)

Personally, even though I don’t have a lot of money this holiday season, I’d still like to do my part by reminding readers that, while not technically “Christian,” I’m available for Christmas stimulus packages in the $100-plus range. Among items I could use are a G-4 Mac computer and a new TV (my old one doesn’t get all 99 channels on my basic cable). One of those hybrid gas-electric cars would be nice, too, and seems environmentally responsible, although to avoid the appearance of journalistic bias, I’d like it to come with a trailered Jetski.

Do what you can and show you care. God bless you, Santa, and America.

Predictable but unreported impacts from this spring’s flooding on the Mississippi River will be an expanded dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, more southern beach closures, and more dying coral in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary.

A pesticide begins its journey to the sea.

Every day, some 32 billion gallons of agricultural, urban, and industrial runoff (including oil, pesticides, and manure) pollutes America’s marine environment. The pollution is suffocating our coastal bays and estuaries, poisoning marine mammals, and feeding outbreaks of stinging jellies and harmful algal blooms that contribute to some 7,000 beach closures a year.

Most of this is attributable to so-called nitrogen-rich nonpoint-source pollution, pollution from agricultural and other sources that follows down our rivers and watersheds and into the sea.

Nitrogen is essential for soil productivity, and can be supplied by animal waste and plant decay. But too much of a good thing can also be a bad thing, as anyone who’s ever had a hangover will attest. According to various studies and recent reports in Science and Scientific American, synthetic, nitrogen-rich fertilizers developed after World War II, along with the burning of fossil fuels, doubled the global nitrogen cycle between 1960 and 1990.

Along with natural nitrogen found in air, soil and lightening, this added input is too much for the land to handle, and so the surplus is washed off into the world’s rivers, estuaries and oceans where it ends up feeding giant algae blooms.

Florida coral: bleach blanket bingo.

Photo: NOAA.

The most productive and diverse parts of America’s seas, such as Florida’s coral reefs, need clean, clear, low-nutrient waters to thrive. Algae, by contrast, loves farm waste and other nutrients, and in their presence, will bloom into a green, light-obscuring soup that sucks oxygen out of the water as it decays, killing off massive numbers of reef fish and suffocating living coral. Nutrient pollution from the Mississippi River, along with nutrient runoff from South Florida’s federally subsidized sugar industry and coastal sprawl, eventually ends up on the reefs, according to scientists working on Aquarius, the world’s last underwater research station, located some seven miles off (and 50 feet below the waters of) Key Largo, Fla.

Every spring, the Gulf of Mexico experiences a seasonal algae bloom that creates a huge dead zone, where there is so little dissolved oxygen in the water that no fish or bottom dwelling life can survive. First studied in the 1970s, this dead zone doubled in size following the great Mississippi flood of 1993. Since then, it’s averaged more than 7,000 square miles, about the size of New Jersey, and is expected to again grow to monstrous proportions following this year’s flood.

The Mississippi watershed.

Image: Barataria-Terrebonne National
Estuary Program.

The Mississippi watershed drains 41 percent of the continental U.S. into the Gulf. The watershed includes 52 percent of U.S. farms that during the 1950s and ’60s became increasingly dependent on synthetic chemicals. These commercial fertilizers and pesticides, promoted by the government, American Farm Bureau Federation, and Agricultural Chemicals Association (since renamed the American Crop Protection Association) boosted production, but undermined the long-term viability of the soil.

Today, as a result, corn farmers in states like Illinois and Iowa are caught up in a cycle of chemical dependence, applying 150 pounds of fertilizer per acre. Corporate feedlots for cattle, hogs, and chickens also generate tremendous amounts of largely unregulated methane, ammonia, and nitrogen. Every spring, rain and snowmelt delivers much of this nutrient-rich brew (along with urban and industrial runoff) into the Mississippi.

In North Carolina, corporate hog farming in flood plains has led to waste lagoons overflowing and poisoning coastal waters. Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, storm drains and oily runoff from freeways, parking lots, homes, and businesses has forced beach closures and caused swimmer infections.

Flow Down in History

If history provides lessons, though, there is hope. The U.S. Clean Water Act could serve as a model for how to clean up our coasts. After its passage in 1972, many politicians realized that the new law wasn’t just about plugging “point-source” industrial pipelines that were polluting America’s waterways. It also provided them a chance to cut ribbons on new sewage plants and be seen as friends of public health and the environment.

Blue Frontier
By David Helvarg
W.H. Freeman & Co.,
320 pages, 2001
Wanna buy it?

As a result, Congress has been willing to allocate more than $40 billion in grants for new sewage systems over the last three decades. While more work still needs to be done, dramatic improvements have taken place. Water quality has been restored and wildlife and recreational opportunities expanded for thousands of the nation’s lakes, rivers, and many coastal communities.

The Clean Water Act has shown us that realistic models of restoration are possible, and it holds out the hope of stemming the flow of nonpoint-source pollution, even as past gains under the act are being reversed by the poisonous nutrient-heavy flushing of our coasts.

Unfortunately the Bush administration has indicated it may put a freeze on new regulations by the U.S. EPA that place limits on nutrient runoff from large factory farms. If the administration were serious about encouraging more local and state input into federal decision-making, it would recognize the short-sightedness of this approach.

Why Did the Chicken Pollute the Bay?

On the Chesapeake Bay, meanwhile, states have moved ahead of the feds in demanding nutrient reduction. As a result, they’re turning chicken waste into cheap energy.

Chesapeake Bay.

Photo: USDA.

In 1997, excess nutrients fed an outbreak of Pfiesteria piscicida in warm rivers feeding the Chesapeake Bay. Pfiesteria is a chameleon-like microbe that spends much of its time buried in the mud as a harmless cyst. It can also disguise itself as a green plant, or, given enough nutrients, turn into a deadly predator that can strip the flesh off fish in three minutes. Exposure to it at this stage can also cause lesions, vomiting, and severe nurological disorders in people. More than a dozen fishermen and biologists exposed to the bay’s outbreak have suffered these effects.

Pfiesteria also cost Chesapeake fishermen $40 million in lost sales. It scared so many area residents that bordering states have joined together to try to reduce runoff by preserving land and regulating nutrient sources.

This has spurred some innovative approaches to d
ealing with the 800,000 tons of chicken manure generated every year on the bay’s eastern shore, where some 600 million birds are raised.

A British firm wants to build a 40-megawatt power plant to burn chicken “litter,” which is a mix of chicken manure, sawdust and wood chips. The ash would sell as fertilizer. Allen Family Farms is planning its own smaller 4-megawatt plant, and even Purdue is turning loose manure into fertilizer pellets for sale.

Local farmers, instead of spreading the waste on their land — where it runs off into the bay — are now signing contracts with the Brits to sell their chicken waste for up to $6 a ton. And the poultry industry, which just two years ago was lobbying against nutrient reduction laws, is now warning of a future chicken-waste shortage. The bay is proving that pollution prevention pays.

The Bush administration should look to Maryland’s eastern shore for inspiration and stop being so, excuse the expression, chickenshit. Maybe then it would see that cleaning up our coastal waters and seas can be a chance for innovation, progress, and, yes, profit.

Real Soviet propaganda.

Take emissions trading. Under this system, I, an evil capitalist, sell you, another evil capitalist, the right to spew tons of air pollution, which I can do because I’ve produced less than the legal limit of allowable sulfur dioxide or other filthy emissions. After you pay me for these surplus dirty air credits, you have the right to give emphysema to the children of my maid, who live downwind from you.

Recently, however, I discovered a far more effective and humane market-based system for reducing pollution — developed in a former Soviet client state, of all places. And, believe me, this is no Polish joke.

The Poles, whose entrepreneurial spirit is driving a booming economy a decade after the fall of Communism, have come up with a pollution cleanup system I call “payments and penalties.”

These American smokestacks are begging for a Polish scrub.

Under this system, every industrial facility in the country pays a small portion of its operating costs for use of the nation’s natural resources. In addition, each facility pays fines if it pollutes above the legal limit. All this money goes into a fund administered by the Ministry of the Environment. This fund in turn makes loans to companies that want to install cleaner, greener technologies. If these technologies meet their environmental goals, and if the company makes its payments on time, it only has to pay 50 percent back on the original loan.

Touring Poland with fellow journalists, I was amazed to see the leapfrogging effect this has had on infamous Soviet-era polluted industrial sites like the Nova Huta Steel Works outside Krakow and the 600-acre Palavay chemical plant.

While much of Nova Huta had to be shut down because of its inefficiency and poisonous impacts, part of it now contains a state-of-the-art cold steel press plant, bought from Italy with one of these environmental loans.

Cold, hard steel.

The Palavay plant used its loans to design and build smokestack scrubbers that it is now selling to Western European factories, and also to convert from chlorine production for paper bleaching (which generates dioxin as a byproduct) to a more environmentally benign hydrogen-peroxide system.

A recent International Monetary Fund report found that Poland’s payment-and-penalty system is one of the most creative anti-pollution initiatives in the world. The Poles, being diplomatic, point out that the U.S. is still the leader in terms of creating new green technologies. It’s just that we haven’t been very creative in developing market incentives to promote them.

Still, the Poles are not about to make fun of us. Well, one of my Polish journalist colleagues did tell me the American joke about the Pole who comes to New York … but, er, maybe that one’s not appropriate for a family e-zine.