ANCHORAGE — A federal appeals court has sided with the federal government in giving the go-ahead to Shell Oil to move forward with drilling in the Alaska Arctic this year.
In the ruling issued late Friday, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected challenges by Alaska Native groups to Shell’s exploration plan in the Beaufort Sea off Alaska’s northern coastline, The Anchorage Daily News reported.
The panel also denied petitions challenging the company’s plan for exploratory drilling in the Chukchi Sea drill off northwest Alaska.
The Native Village of Point Hope and the Inupiat Community of the North Slope said the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management failed to properly consider the risks of drilling in the Arctic in approving Shell’s plans. Several environmental groups, including Greenpeace, Sierra Club and The Wilderness Society, also challenged the federal approval.
The bureau approved Shell’s latest exploration plan for the Beaufort Sea in August subject to 11 conditions, including two that required it to prove its oil spill response capabilities to another federal agency. That agency, the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, in March approved Shell’s oil response plan for the Beaufort Sea.
The challengers said Shell proposal’s for a well-capping stack and containment system in the event of an oil spill was incomplete, and that it had failed to fully inform the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management about its oil spill response plan, the Daily News reported.
They contended that the federal government erred in approving the plan because the plan included a well-capping stack and containment system as part of its proposed response to oil spills, but it did not provide all the information required under federal rules. A capping and containment system has never been used in Alaska or in Arctic drilling conditions.
The challengers said that Shell’s seven-paragraph description was not enough, but the appeals court judges disagreed.
The case marks the third time the federal government has had to defend its approval of Shell’s Beaufort Sea exploration plan in court, the opinion said.
Comments (20)
Add commentThat's...
...exactly what Obama has been saying, Short Cut. You two think alike.
Shell cannot clean oil from
Shell cannot clean oil from water even in the best of conditions and everyone knows it.
http://www.alaskadispatch.com/article/arctic-drilling-shell-must-prove-i...
"In Washington, Shell Oil has been leading an effort in Congress to override Clean Air Act regulations in the Arctic that are meant to protect our health and our environment".
Here is Shell Oils plan to
Here is Shell Oils plan to clean up a spill in the Arctic. They will use:
Mechanical skimmers
Booms
Burning
and Chemical Dispersants which made the oil even harder to clean up in the Gulf and has caused many deformities in the sea life there.
Here is Shells clean up plan for the Arctic, you decide:
http://www-static.shell.com/static/innovation/downloads/arctic/preventin...
Lloyd's of London, the
Lloyd's of London, the world's biggest insurance market, has become the first major business organization to raise its voice about huge potential environmental damage from oil drilling in the Arctic.
http://www.climatecentral.org/news/partner-news/arctic-oil-rush-will-rui...
Published: April 15th, 2012
"The Lloyd's report says the "inadequacies" of both company and government in the event of a disaster were demonstrated after the Macondo blowout. A smaller company than BP, faced with estimated $40 billion clean-up and compensation costs, might have gone bankrupt, leaving the state to foot the bill, it notes".
"The Arctic's vulnerable environment, unpredictable climate and lack of a precedent on which to base cost assessments have led some environmental NGOs to argue that no compensation would be worth the risk of allowing drilling to take place in pristine offshore areas".
The exact makeup of the
The exact makeup of the "dispersants" is kept secret under competitive trade laws, but a worker safety sheet for one product, called Corexit, says it includes 2-butoxyethanol, a compound associated with headaches, vomiting and reproductive problems at high doses.
“There is a chemical toxicity to the dispersant compound that in many ways is worse than oil,” said Richard Charter, a foremost expert on marine biology and oil spills".
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
How is it possible for our government to allow a Company to dump hundreds of thousands of gallons of chemicals into the Gulf of Mexico or in the ARCTIC without our knowing their ingredients or toxicity?
North Slope broken ice
North Slope broken ice response trials conducted by Alaska Dept. Environmental Conservation,
Video results from the oil spill response capacity test in 2000.
Turn up sound
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dL3RGwpBaI
no problems
with the 9th circuit, roughcut? "Activist judges" got your tongue?
Nice one, roughcut
Be sure and pat yourself on the back for it
What is it Rough Cut
that makes wildlife so expendable to you?
Rough Cut is either a troll...
...or else someone for whom self-definition is rooted primarily in the self-perception of power and the ability to control (i.e. I'm a REAL man!). When funneled through his necessary contingencies of being, it means he feels best when he can kill things or alter the world around him in such a way that his ability to influence things is increased. His post a while back about making SE Alaska "wolf-free" means that he values wilderness and wild things fundamentally because they allow him to eliminate them and exert transformational control. If his personal bent made him enjoy financial markets, he'd be perfectly happy on Wall Street making back-door deals and trying to destroy companies to make himself richer.
I think it's likely that we all do this to some degree. His example is just more obvious and a bit more...um... primordial. I am also guessing that, ironically, he'd be one of the loudest to insist that human beings are fundamentally distinct from all other life-forms and not animals (but I have no data to support that assertion).
Top of the food chain?
In that case, may I suggest some severe predator control? Your habits will over-predate, and over-populate. If I recall, you support "predator control" to boost prey numbers...physician, heal thyself...
Predator control
Sounds like a reasonable response. Short Cut, I recommend that you duck for cover every time you hear a helicopter. Or safer yet, just stay under the bridge you inhabit.
@Rough
I thought maybe it was because the dog you teased relentlessly as a child, finally bit you. Now you kill anything that doesn't walk upright, as to not get bit again.
Your reason makes so much more sense.
More toward the storyline, I wonder if we can expect a drop in the pump price now that Shell will be solving our reliance on foreign oil imports. So weird how the price went up again right before the Memorial Day weekend, while the barrel price dropped again.
My thanks to those who served, and especially those that made the ultimate sacrifice, on behalf of our country.
rough might have a point, though...
Here's "the most liberal court in the country" lining up with the Obama administration on arctic drilling, completely undercutting the environmentalist community as well local concerns over BP-esque debacles. That's why his usual cohorts haven't joined him on this thread---They'd end up agreeing with Obama and we can't have that.
Approval of Shell
Corrupt law on demand. I notice that in the Mexican Gulf spill most if not all of the federal judges and the rest of the Judicial branches, were allowed to have investment, professional and personal relationships with the individuals and entities they were ruling on. Conflict of interest and collusion comes to mind with what is going on with American government for sale, our very own Tammany Hall, with everyone feeding at the trough. While Americans are marching and screaming at each other over manipulated wedge issues, stoked with the propaganda from the news media that is owned by corporations and conglomerates.
Everywhere I see corporations and conglomerates are rooting out the worlds diminishing resources and leeching off the people they steal resources and lands from. Parasites who don't care if they kill the people they are leeching off of.
Everyone has a piece of the action that American policy dictates. We spend trillions invading and manipulating weaker countries, to enable these foreign based multi national conglomerates to go in and steal their resources and lands. We set up and prop up the despot dictator regimes that are bribed to keep their people subjugated with intimidation, terror, kidnappings, rape and murder.
I don't see any difference in our international policies of colonialism that results in terror attacks against us by people affected by our policies of colonialism, oe the domestic policies that defund programs into inefficiency so the programs be killed and the money redistributed to the destitute corporations and conglomerates and their bought off politicians and imbedded and burrowed operatives and officials in all three branches of our government and states.
I look at the judicial system here in Alaska and see it is nothing ut colonial, with one that dispenses justice that differentiates between Indigenous and white. Designed to rid the people who remind the thieves and murderers, who run our government as caretakers for the foreign and domestic corporations, that they are nothing but leeches and parasites that leech off their hosts, killing them.
Isn't Shell involved with the dictatorships in Africa that run their countries with terror and murder? How about BP? Exxon? and the others?
The very fact that the 9Th
The very fact that the 9Th circus, & the BO regime support Shell's plan should make all but the most unhinged "watermelons"(green on the out side, red on the inside-dusty) sleep better at night.
Now "drill baby, drill"!
I'm a communist?
Hmmm....well, tell me your definition of "communist" and how I fit it...