Greenpeace

In the wake of the unconscionable decision earlier this week by a federal judge in Louisiana to lift the deepwater drilling moratorium, it's good to see Interior Secretary Ken Salazar is talking about taking action. But what we really need is Congressional action to ban offshore drilling.

View more images of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The Obama Administration should renew its efforts to enforce a ban on new drilling activities. This certainly means that Secretary Salazar should reissue the moratorium with further clarification and justification, and President Obama should appeal the court ruling to the 5th circuit as his administration has promised.

At the same time, Congress needs to enact a drilling ban into law — the moratorium should not have been allowed to lapse in the first place and Congress should take immediate action to ensure that no new drilling occurs.

In order to stop fossil fuels tragedies like the BP Deepwater Disaster once and for all, we need to leave behind the dirty energy of the past and move aggressively toward the clean energy of the future. No more fossil fuels and nuclear energy. We must replace them with clean renewable energy and efficiency technology.

Sign our petition calling on Congress to:

• Enact an immediate ban on all new drilling and phase-out all remaining drilling;
• Remove liability limits for energy-related activities in accordance with the principal that the polluter must pay;
• Improve regulation and oversight of energy-related activities to ensure maximum protection of the public health and the environment;
• And end all subsidies for fossil fuels and nuclear energy and invest in clean renewable energy, efficiency technology, and infrastructure development.

A federal judge in Louisiana stood with the oil industry today and issued an injunction lifting the Obama Administration’s 6-month moratorium on new offshore exploration and existing drilling operations in deep water. Despite the fact that as much as 60,000 barrels of oil continue to pour into the Gulf of Mexico every day, the judge called the moratorium “arbitrary and capricious.”

View more images of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

It would appear there was nothing terribly arbitrary about District Court Judge Martin Feldman’s ruling, however. According to Mother Jones, the most recent financial disclosure forms filed by Judge Feldman show that he held several thousand dollars’ worth of Transocean stock as recently as 2008. Transocean, of course, owned the ill-fated Deepwater Horizon rig, which blew up on April 20th, 2010, killing 11 workers and leading to the massive environmental catastrophe in the Gulf. Feldman also owned stock in several other oil companies.

The Obama Admin’s moratorium suspended drilling at 33 existing deepwater wells and barred any new deepwater drilling permits from being granted. Given the rhetoric happily bandied about by Big Oil types claiming that their technology is far too advanced to permit a catastrophe on the order of, oh, say, the BP Deepwater Disaster from ever occurring, the moratorium was at best a middle-of-the-road solution. It’s quite clear that as oil grows scarcer, the solution is not to drill in ever-more remote and difficult-to-reach places but to aggressively transition off of the dirty stuff and on to clean, green renewable energy.

Download the report (PDF)

We recently released a report, Energy [R]evolution: A Sustainable USA Energy Outlook, that shows exactly how we could do that while leaving dirty, dangerous fossil fuels behind.

Judge Feldman’s ruling was issued in response to a suit filed by several oil companies claiming that they were being unfairly impacted due to the BP Deepwater Disaster. The oil industry’s gross negligence led to the current disaster and many more like it in the past, however, and now they’re trying to pretend that the US federal government has somehow created the current crisis with its moratorium. But it was the oil industry that produced generic cut and paste emergency response plans, relied on a dead technical expert to answer calls, and assured the government that walruses that have not existed in the Gulf for millions of years would not be affected by their operations. This is not a circus and these people can not be allowed to act like clowns pointing their finger at the government and pretending they are not the ones who engineered this disaster.

We have to stand up together against the inordinate influence of Big Oil. The oil industry and other dirty fossil fuels industries can’t be allowed to hijack our energy policy any longer. Help call for an energy revolution by joining a Hands Across the Sand event near you this Saturday.

Most Americans recognize the BP Deepwater Disaster as the environmental catastrophe that it is and support all efforts being undertaken to hold BP accountable for the damage the company’s negligence has caused to Gulf Coast ecosystems and the livelihoods of Gulf Coast residents. But not Republican Rep. Joe Barton of Texas.

Proving just how out of touch he is with the American public — and how deeply he is in the pocket of corporate polluters like BP — Rep. Barton this morning decried what he sees as a “tragedy of the first proportion” — not, incredibly, the devastation being wrought in the Gulf, but the fact that a corporation like BP should be held accountable for the malfeasance and violation of public trust that caused that devastation by paying into an escrow account to compensate Americans impacted by the oil spill.

It’s really just mindboggling that any elected representative of the people of the USA should be standing up for little ol’ BP at a time when millions of Americans’ livelihoods are being destroyed. But that is exactly what Rep. Barton did.

See for yourself Rep. Barton’s shameful — and shameless — testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee this morning:



Even a fellow Republican lawmaker is calling on Rep. Barton to step down from his post as the ranking minority member of the Energy and Commerce Committee. Many other Republicans have already attempted to distance themselves from Barton’s statement directed to BP CEO Tony Hayward that he is “ashamed” of President Obama’s efforts to hold BP accountable.

But the term “shakedown” has been getting thrown around by a lot of conservative and pro-corporate politicians lately to describe the $20 billion escrow account BP will be creating to compensate Gulf Coast residents affected by the tragedy. So it’s hard to imagine Barton is alone in feeling that the needs of BP should come before the needs of impacted Americans. Makes you wonder: What other politicians elected to represent us are actually more concerned about looking after their corporate donors even in a time of tragedy?

We the people should not stand for this. Since Barton apparently has more sympathy for a rich and powerful CEO of a foreign company than he does for his fellow Americans — whom he was elected to represent — then he absolutely should step down. And every single politician elected to represent Americans should be calling for him to do so.

If we’ve learned anything from the BP Deepwater Disaster, it’s that we can’t afford not to transition to clean renewable energy and get off of dirty fossil fuels pronto.

The American public knows that: 71% of Americans now support regulating greenhouse gas emissions according to a new poll. And some 72% oppose new offshore drilling according to another. So the fact that the Senate defeated Alaskan Sen. Lisa Murkowski's pro-coal, pro-oil, anti-regulation, anti-envronment bill by such a narrow margin is a bit of a shock.

Let me just say straight out that it's certainly good news that the Senate voted the right way. But it should have been a blowout, not 53 to 47. The Senate is, obviously, well behind the public in terms of being in touch with reality about America’s energy future.

With images like those in this video making headlines on a daily basis, it's beyond me how 47 Senators could still vote on behalf of Big Oil to preserve the status quo:


You can read our full response to the vote on Senator Murkowski’s Dirty Air Act for more. And if you still think that oil spills are just somehow a regrettable side effect of what is otherwise a completely necessary reliance on oil as an energy source, you haven't checked out our Energy [R]evolution report yet, which shows how we can leave fossil fuels behind while transitioning to a sustainable energy economy.

At the end of the day, of course, it’s not what’s on the scoreboard that matters but whether you have another loss or win in the standings. We chalked up another win for the environment yesterday, but you can bet the fossil fuel industry’s other champions are already lining up to finish the task of gutting the Clean Air Act on behalf of big polluters that Murkowski started.

The next attack against the Clean Air Act in the Senate will likely be launched by Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, a coal country Democrat who has the support of other Democratic Senators that actually voted against Murkowski’s Dirty Air Act. So stay tuned, given the deep pockets of our fossil fuels opponents and their allies in Congress, it’s going to take plenty of teamwork to chalk up the next victory for the environment.

The best way to stop oil spills from happening is pretty simple, actually: Leave the oil in the ground where it belongs.

If you think that's not possible, or that it would mean shivering in the dark, or that millions of people would have to go without energy and jobs, you'd probably be forgiven for thinking that. That's the line that Big Oil and King Coal have been feeding us. But it's wrong on all counts.

Read more and download the report (PDF)

We teamed up with more than 30 scientists and engineers from universities, institutes, and the renewable energy industry to create our new report, Energy [R]evolution: A Sustainable USA Energy Outlook. The report lays down a blueprint for how we ensure our emissions peak by 2015, as the Nobel prize-winning IPCC says they must if we’re to avoid runaway global warming, while phasing out nuclear and fossil fuel energy. It shows how we can provide about 96% of our electricity from renewable sources by 2050, and in the process create 1.1 million jobs in the renewables sector alone by 2030.

Why a [r]evolution? Moving from the dirty fossil fuels of the past and onto the clean, green renewable energy sources of the future requires an evolution AND a revolution. (And yes, electronics geeks, that’s the symbol for [r]esistance there as well.)

We need a [r]evolution because business as usual is not going to stop the tens of thousands of barrels of crude oil spilling into our waters, scores of workers losing their lives to accidents in coal mines around the world, or the countless other disasters we are all facing due to our reliance on dirty energy.

Despite all the evidence that we’re paying far too high a price for our dependence on fossil fuels, Alaskan Senator Lisa Murkowski is trying to roll back the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions — a critical tool in making the Energy [R]evolution a reality.

Your Senators can help jumpstart the energy revolution by defeating Murkowski's Dirty Air Act and having the courage to end our dependence on coal and oil. Write to them now.

This post is by Molly Dorozenski, a Greenpeace USA media officer who is on the ground in Louisiana bearing witness to the impacts of the BP Deepwater Disaster and oil spill.

Last Friday, I found myself in Pensacola, Florida getting ready to greet the oil as it hit Florida’s white sand beaches. But just as I arrived, we started hearing reports that the oil had arrived in unprecedented amounts in Barataria Bay, and the barrier islands that served as breeding grounds for the area’s birds.

The very first photographs of oil-covered pelicans had started to hit the newspapers. As BP’s latest attempt to stem the oil flow seemed to be succeeeding, we were seeing the beginning of the worst effects of the oil spill we had seen yet — plainly suffering wildlife that cannot be protected or rescued fast enough.

River Shay walks his dog Smash in the front yard of his Grand Isle, Louisiana house planted with crosses with the names some of the marine life, seafood dishes and recreational activiites that are being lost due oil leaking from the Deepwater Horizon wellhead in the Gulf of Mexico. © Jose-Luis Magana/Greenpeace View more images of the oil spill on Flickr

Grand Isle is a vacation and weekend fishing spot for Louisianans, a long pretty stretch of sand scattered with small motels and cottages with cheerful names and marinas at either end. What would be a place of leisure has been totally transformed — a newly-erected symbolic graveyard for everything this community has lost, courtesy (they say) of BP and the federal government: “Sandcastles,” “Seafood Gumbo,” “Sea Turtles” “Redfish” — dozens of white crosses with different labels. Down at the marina, there are folks who have been coming to Grand Isle for years — they can no longer fish or swim, but they’re coming here anyway. They’re dumbstruck. The beaches of Grand Isle are patroled by BP and closed to the public — you can see the workers from a walkway at Grand Isle State Park where locals and media have lined up to watch oil shoveled endlessly into bags.

A little ways off by boat — not more than a 10-minute boat ride — you can visit Queen Bess Island, home to the endangered Brown Pelican, a bird that has recovered from past population problems related to pesticides. When we visited, the island was surrounded by booms and boats couldn’t get very close, but you could count probably 10-15 pelicans that were partly or fully covered in oil. Many of them would not survive the night. Since we’re not trained to rescue them ourselves, we called in what we had seen to wildlife rescue — we know that teams are going back and forth to the islands, but it’s frustrating to see no rescue teams there. You just feel helpless.

At Grand Terre, a bigger nearby island, the beach was covered in oil.  It was on the sand, and there were thick pools of it along the edge in the water. Dirty sorbent booms had washed up on the shores, totally saturated in oil. Again, we saw no BP workers — where are the 20,000 workers that President Obama says are out here cleaning up this mess? And aren’t we all tired of cleaning up after dirty energy? When will we have an energy policy that protects the things we love from catastrophes like this? This has to be the moment of change, unless we want to see this and feel like this again and again.

The locals here know that it’s going to be a long time, decades, before Grand Isle is the place that they remember. This is the new Gulf Coast. You can’t clean it up much at all, and the little that could be done isn’t being done fast enough. As the oil spreads through the Gulf tainting the waters, the islands, and the wildlife, BP and the President stand up at press conferences and tell us they’re doing all they can. But we’ve seen the truth and it’s not pretty — it’s a failed energy policy, a failed response, and a failure of humanity.