Schedule for New Offshore Oil Leases

As a follow up to the previous post (article in the San Francisco Chronicle on new offshore oil leases in CA), a schedule was recently published in the Federal Register listing the "Draft Proposed Program for 2010-2015 — Lease Sale Schedule" for the entire U.S. coastline. Hopefully the new administration will at least slow down this madness and shift the focus to renewable, non-polluting energy sources.

Sale No. -- Area -- Year
225 Eastern Gulf of Mexico 2010
215 Western Gulf of Mexico 2010
212 Chukchi Sea 2010
216 Central Gulf of Mexico 2011
218 Western Gulf of Mexico 2011
226 Eastern Gulf of Mexico* 2011
227 Central Gulf of Mexico* 2011
214 North Aleutian Basin 2011
219 Cook Inlet 2011
220 Mid-Atlantic 2011
222 Central Gulf of Mexico 2012
221 Chukchi Sea 2012
228 Southern California 2012
229 Western Gulf of Mexico 2012
230 Mid-Atlantic 2012
231 Central Gulf of Mexico 2013
217 Beaufort Sea 2013
232 North Atlantic 2013
233 Western Gulf of Mexico 2013
234 Eastern Gulf of Mexico* 2013
235 Central Gulf of Mexico 2014
236 Northern California 2014
237 Chukchi Sea 2014
238 Western Gulf of Mexico 2014
239 North Aleutian Basin 2014
240 South Atlantic 2014
241 Central Gulf of Mexico 2015
242 Beaufort Sea 2015
243 Southern California 2015
244 Cook Inlet 2015
245 Mid-Atlantic 2015
*Program area for lease sales would expanded

Time to be Very, Very Afraid - and Involved

This graphic was part of an article published in the San Francisco Chronicle on December 29.

"The federal government is taking steps that may open California's fabled coast to oil drilling in as few as three years, an action that could place dozens of platforms off the Sonoma, Mendocino and Humboldt coasts, and raises the specter of spills, air pollution and increased ship traffic into San Francisco Bay.

Millions of acres of oil deposits, mapped in the 1980s when then-Interior Secretary James Watt and Energy Secretary Donald Hodel pushed for California exploration, lie a few miles from the forested North Coast and near the mouth of the Russian River, as well as off Malibu, Santa Monica and La Jolla in Southern California." More

Oil Import Map

When are we going to get serious about cutting off (or at least reducing the size) of those imports? But remember - more offshore oil drilling is (you guessed it) Not the Answer.

See the more detailed, interactive map at http://move.rmi.org/features/oilmap.html

Sherman's Lagoon

Laird Hamilton for Clean Energy

Thanks to our friends at NRDC for this one.

What Were They Thinking?

There's scene in the latest James Bond flick, Quantum of Solace where a female character's nude body is found in a hotel room covered in oil, similar to the famous scene in Goldfinger where a female character's nude body is found covered on gold paint.

I thought of that when I saw this astounding headline:

Florida Tourism Group Endorses Offshore Oil Drilling

Talk about killing the goose that laid the golden egg! I wonder how many tourists they'll get with black, gooey beaches?

More

Big Oil hurt coast, so why doesn’t it pay for repairs?

Below are excerpts from this article about damage to the Louisiana coast from oil drilling activities.

Verdin, a commercial fisherman, says back then, some places here were so thick with trees you could barely see through them. When the oil industry cut canals into the area to get to its drilling sites, he says, things started changing. He says those canals brought the equivalent of poison into the marsh: salt water from the Gulf of Mexico.

"The water flows in and brings all that salt water," Verdin says.

[....]

"Before oil and gas, even after the main river levees, we were holding our own," Professor Oliver Houck says. "Once we started drilling, we started collapsing."

You can see the damage from the air. You see vast, open waterways that began as canals, sliced into the marsh.

"There are 10,000 miles of those canals through the marshes now," Houck says.