Current Savers Blog

Nearly six years ago,  Senator John Kerry and Texas oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens were mortal political enemies.

As a major backer of President George W. Bush’s re-election effort in 2004, Pickens contributed millions to a right-wing ad campaign questioning Kerry’s record as a Vietnam war hero. The ads, which Kerry disputed, put him on the defensive and may have contributed to the Democrat’s failure to win the White House.

On Wednesday, the billionaire and the Massachusetts senator sat side-by-side in the Capitol’s ornate Senate Foreign Relations Committee room, where Kerry presides as its chairman.

Their mission: To spread the word about the legislation Kerry and Senator Joseph Lieberman have written to tackle global warming by reducing U.S. consumption of dirty-burning fossil fuels blamed for climate change.

“If you look at life looking backwards and standing in one place, you’re going to waste your time,” Kerry told a small group of reporters when asked about the new relationship with the man he now calls “Boone.” “Six years ago was six years ago,” Kerry said.

Both Kerry and Pickens talked about the need to reduce America’s reliance on foreign oil, which the Kerry-Lieberman bill aims to do. Pickens talked in patriotic tones about the need to make America energy independent within 10 years. “I don’t care whether you use natural gas, ethanol, the battery.  You can use anything, just so it’s American,” said Pickens, who turns 82 this week.

Patriotism aside, Pickens stands to gain financially from the climate change bill that Kerry hopes to push through the Senate this year.

His BP (as in “Boone Pickens”) Capital Management firm has bet that natural gas prices will rise as the U.S. turns to cleaner-burning fuels. Kerry’s bill attempts to encourage heavy-duty trucks to switch from diesel gasoline to natural gas and it also provides incentives for natural gas cars. While Pickens said he doesn’t care which alternative energy the United States turns to, he eagerly points out that natural gas is “the only (alternative) fuel that will move an 18-wheeler.”

Will Pickens use his powers of persuasion on Republican senators, who so far are boycotting Kerry’s climate initiative?

“Let me think about it ,” Pickens said. “I don’t know for sure how active I’m going to be on that. No question I know most of the Republican senators and all.”

Kerry wasn’t shy, though, knowing he’s got a tough sales job ahead. “I hope he contacts some.”

Climate legislation pending in Congress also would encourage the development of wind energy, which Pickens also is investing in. “We have the best wind in the world,” boasted Pickens.

For more Reuters political news, click here.

Photo Credit: REUTERS/Joshua Roberts (Sen. John Kerry (L) with financier T. Boone Pickens at the U.S. Capitol)

The ongoing struggle in the Gulf of Mexico to contain and remove oil spilling from a ruptured deepwater well is damaging more than the environment, a bi-weekly analysis of companies in the news by ASSET4 data providers shows.

Here is a breakdown of the companies that made headlines Apr. 23 to May 7 for making or losing credibility based on environment-related activity.

Company selections were made by Christopher Greenwald, director of data content at ASSET4, a Thomson Reuters business that provides investment research on the environmental, social and governance performance of major global corporations. These ratings are not recommendations to buy or sell.

Here are the recent hits and misses:

BP PLC

In what has the potential to become one of the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history, BP has faced increasing scrutiny in the media in the past 2 weeks for its poor history of safety and environmental incidents in the recent past. The company had an oil spill in late 2009 at its Prudhoe Bay operations, the location of a devastating spill in 2005, and the company has recently faced a law suit brought by employees over exposure to toxic chemical releases at its Texas City refinery, the site of an explosion in 2006 that killed 12 workers.

Transocean, Halliburton, Cameron

While attention has focused in the media on BP, other companies are implicated in the Deepwater Horizon incident. Those likely to face significant litigation include Transocean, the owner and operator of the rig; Halliburton, which provided cementing to stabilize the walls of the well and Cameron which produced the rig’s blowout preventers.

Freeport-McMoran

Freeport-McMoran is again facing pressure from institutional shareholders to appoint a board member with environmental expertise.  The resolution for the company’s June 9 annual meeting is being led by Holland’s large pension fund ABP.  A similar proposal received 1/3 of the votes of shareholders last year and is being driven by continued environmental controversies surrounding the company’s mining operations in Papua New Guinea.

Royal Dutch Shell

In the wake of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, Royal Dutch Shell has recently faced renewed criticism for its plans to drill in the Arctic Ocean.  Although exploratory drilling has been granted conditional approval by the U.S. Minerals Management service, environmental and Native American groups are challenging the plans in appeals court, arguing that Shell’s planned drilling would pose a significant threat to the natural habitat of the Arctic region.  This news comes as Shell has also recently revealed that it spilled 14,000 tons of oil in Nigerian during 2009, more than double the amount of the previous year, which the company has blamed on increasing attacks by local militant groups.

Wal-Mart

In one of the largest environmental fines in U.S. history, Wal-Mart reached a $27.6 million settlement with the State of California for improperly disposing of hazardous waste at its stores and distribution centers throughout the state.  The settlement includes a $20 million fine, as well as $6 million to develop better training and processes to safely dispose of toxic waste in the future.

Cisco

Cisco topped the ranking of Greenpeace’s annual Cool IT ranking, which measures companies on their commitment and solutions to fight climate change.  Greenpeace commended Cisco’s greater transparency on the environmental impacts of their products, the company’s “Smart Plant” green products initiative, as well as the policy advocacy efforts on the part of the company and specifically its CEO John Chambers for policies addressing climate change.

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Photo shows a British Petroleum (BP) logo at a petrol station in south London April 27, 2010.  REUTERS/Toby Melville

East Africa’s Lake Tanganyika might be getting too hot for sardines.

The little fish have been an economic and nutritional mainstay for some 10 million people in neighboring Burundi, Tanzania, Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo — four of the poorest countries on Earth. They also depend on Lake Tanganyika for drinking water.

But that could change, according to research published in the online version of the journal Nature Geoscience. Using samples of the lakebed that chart a 1,500-year history of the lake’s surface water temperature, the scientists found the current temperature — 78.8 degrees F (26 degrees C) — is the warmest it’s been in a millennium and a half. And that could play havoc with sardines and other fish the local people depend on.

The scientists also found that the lake saw its biggest warm-up in the 20th century.

This unprecedented warm water could interfere with the lake’s unique ecosystem, which relies on nutrients churned up from the bottom of the lake to feed the algae that form the base of the lake’s food web. As Lake Tanganyika heats up, the mixing of waters is lessened and fewer nutrients get to the top level where algae and fish feed. More warming at the surface magnifies the difference between the two lake levels and even more wind is needed to churn the waters enough to get nutrients to the upper layer.

Some researchers believe declining fish stocks in Lake Tanganyika are due mainly to overfishing. However, climate change models show a general warming trend in the region, which would cause even greater warming of Lake Tanganyika’s surface. But in a statement from the U.S. National Science Foundation, which helped fund the research, scientists said that warming of the lake is making the decline in fish stocks worse, even if that is not the cause.

Photo credit: National Science Foundation/Andrew Cohen (Local fishermen troll the waters of Lake Tanganyika, catching sardines, undated photo)

–Dan Howells is deputy campaigns director for Greenpeace USA. Any views expressed here are his own.–

On repeated trips over the last couple of weeks, Greenpeace found the first traces of oil coming ashore at Port Eads, the southernmost tip of Louisiana.

Greenpeace’s mission in the Gulf is to bear witness and record what might be the biggest environmental disaster of our lifetime and to provide independent assessment of the harm that is being done to the ecosystem, and share stories of what we are seeing.

As BP’s PR machine works overtime to spin this “clean up” as successful, statistics from the International Tanker Owners Pollution Federation show 85 to 90 percent of the oil still remains in the environment ruining both habitats and economies.

Greenpeace along with conservation specialist Rick Steiner collected samples of the oil on the beach and documented what they saw with photographs and a couple of Bell jars full of goopy mess.

We found the oil in many forms –a shiny coating slicked onto the reeds, thicker globs caked with sand, and a slight sheen on the marsh waters.

It may not sound like much but unfortunately it might be a sign of more to come. Oil reaching Port Eads shows the oil is coming into the mouth of the Mississippi putting even more species that thrive in Louisiana’s coastal habitats at risk.  Birds like the endangered brown pelican, other animals, and plants are seriously threatened by this onslaught of oil.

We have gone time and again from Venice LA, with reporters from Reuters and NPR in tow, on the Greenpeace boat, the Billy Greene.

Our goal was to collect still more samples of what we were finding, and see if other areas around Port Eads were affected.

We returned to the area where we originally found the oil to find more, and explored other water ways to see booms with oil on them offering further proof that the oil is moving inland.

We piloted the boat in the nearby channels, and found several places where workers in hazmat suits were cleaning up the oil and putting it in large trash bags – first BP, and then the coast guard shooed us away from those areas.  By the numbers of workers there, we’re assuming there’s a lot to clean up—and yet BP wants us to think everything is going just swell.

However, new estimates place the amount of oil at 10 times what was previously thought – as much as 2.1 million gallons of oil per day.

Where is it all going?  It is staying below the surface where it will affect the fish and marine life that make this ecosystem so rich: the dolphins, shark, rays, spawning bluefin, and whales—as well as the oyster beds and shrimp populations that are the backbone of the $2.8 billion fishing industry in Louisiana.

I’ve seen with my own eyes the dirty oil on the booms surrounding Breton Island, home to thousands of birds.  I’ve seen dolphins swimming in waters near where boats dragged booms trying to scoop up oil.

Greenpeace continues to call for an immediate stop to plans for new offshore drilling and a clean energy revolution to break our dependence on dirty and dangerous fuels.

The most urgent step is to stop plans for offshore drilling in Alaska’s pristine Arctic waters.  It is outrageous that even as crude oil continues to spread into the Gulf of Mexico, Shell Oil’s plans to begin exploratory drilling in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas have not been stopped.

And as a court challenge to those Arctic drilling failed, the focus is now squarely on Interior Secretary Ken Salazar who can easily stop it. As difficult as clearly it is to respond to an oil spill in the temperate waters of the Gulf of Mexico, responding to an oil spill in the Arctic would be fraught with problems, and “clean up” is impossible.

This isn’t just about BP developing a better backup plan, or how much boom they can lay down around the vulnerable barrier islands. There will always be spills and blowouts as long as we continue operating like we have in the past.

The only way to prevent dirty energy disasters like the Gulf oil spill is to end our addiction to dirty and dangerous sources of energy like oil.

It’s just not worth the risk.

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Photo shows Greenpeace volunteer Lauren Valle walking along a sandy beach on the east bank of the Mississippi River where it meets the Gulf of Mexico as globs of oil wash up on shore in Louisiana May 17, 2010.    REUTERS/Hans Deryk

An Arizona biologist who illegally snared an extremely rare borderlands jaguar that later died of kidney failure, has been sentenced to five years probation and fined $1,000, authorities said on Friday.

Emil McCain, 31, a jaguar biologist and co-founder of the Borderlands Jaguar Detection Project, pleaded guilty to a “prohibited take” of an endangered species in federal district court in Tucson on Friday, the United States Attorney’s Office said in a news release.

McCain was involved in a project studying jaguars, which roam over a vast area ranging from northern Argentina in the south to the rugged borderlands of Arizona and New Mexico, where they were thought to have vanished until two confirmed sightings in 1996.

Only a handful have been sighted in the United States since then, and very little is known about their habits.

He admitted to placing jaguar scat at snare sites in the Atascosa Mountains near Ruby,  Arizona,  in February last year in an attempt to lure and capture a male jaguar known as “Macho B” that had previously been photographed in the area.  Jaguars are a protected  species, and snaring animals other than mountain lions and bears is prohibited at the sites.

On February 18, 2009, the snare caught the animal, which was subsequently fitted with a tracking collar. After initially doing well, it began to show a decreased level of activity, and the cat was recaptured for medical intervention. Officials subsequently opted to euthanize it after a team of veterinarians found it had severe kidney failure.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Bernardo P. Velasco sentenced McCain to probation with the condition that he is not allowed work with any large cat or large carnivore project or study in the United States during the five-year probationary term. He was also ordered to pay a fine of $1,000.

U.S. Attorney Dennis K. Burke said McCain had breached trust through his actions.

“One of the state officials employed to protect our endangered wildlife instead endangered this same wildlife. The community was rightfully outraged.  Public trust had been broken,” U.S. Attorney Dennis K. Burke said in a statement.

In recent years, concern over the well-being of the U.S. jaguar population has intensified as a program to build some 700 miles (1,120-km)  of security fence along the nearly 2,000-mile (3,200-km) border with Mexico has gathered pace.

Conservationists — among them McCain, who spoke to Reuters about his work in early 2008 — feared that the fencing would prevent the powerful, solitary hunters from roaming up from Mexico.

In January, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced it would designate critical habitat for endangered jaguars in the United States and develop a jaguar recovery plan.

http://www.easterncougarnet.org/Assets/B orderlands.pdf

The U.N. panel of climate scientists came under the microscope on Friday by  experts named by the United Nations to figure out how to restore faith in its work after errors including an exaggeration of the thaw of the Himalayas. 

They’ll have to write clearly, check their findings and avoid overstating their case (sounds like a journalism manual). But how? And are there only isolated slips, or a wider problem? Also, why hasn’t the panel learn more from past controversies?

Rajendra Pachauri (below right), chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, acknowledged at the start of the session in Amsterdam there had been errors in the last major report in 2007 — but said the did not detract from the overall conclusions that warming is under way and that people are very likely to be the cause by burning fossil fuels.

The panel has drawn most criticism for wrongly projecting that glaciers in the Himalayas might all melt by 2035 (that was part of a 3,000 page text but did not make it to a summary for government policy makers). Pachauri said people had got the message from the media that  projections of glacier melt were wrong, for instance, but the panel had not managed to restate its overall message that the ice is in retreat around the world. To show that point, he gave the graph (above left).

A repeated theme was that the Geneva-based Secretariat was “lean” with a budget of just $5-7 million a year and would need to be bolstered to face future challenges to its work, including better communications.

Still, it’s not as if the IPCC is a novice – past controversies include a 1995 conclusion that “the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate”. That was the first, cautious indication that humans were to blame for climate change, raised to a 90 percent certainty in the 2007 report.

“I have never witnessed a more disturbing corruption of the peer-review process,” Frederick Seitz, head of the George C. Marshall Institute, wrote in the Wall Street Journal at the time of the 1995 finding.  And that controversy is still rumbling on — Seitz is among scientists criticised in a new book “Merchants of Doubt” by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, subtitled “How a handful of scientists obscured the truth on issues from tobacco smoke to global warming”.

Sceptics say the panel has exaggerated risks of climate change and failed to include dissenting views and see the Himalayan mistake as symptomatic of a wider problem. Pachauri said that the panel is willing to redouble its efforts and says morale is high — with more scientists than ever wanting to take part in the unpaid extra work.

The review panel, led by economist Harold Shapiro, a former president of Princeton,  will report back on ideas to the United Nations by Aug. 30. He says they welcome ideas.

(Photograph of Rajendra Pachauri by Bob Strong, Reuters. Taken at Copenhagen summit in December 2009)

– Dennis Takahashi-Kelso is executive vice president of Ocean Conservancy and was Alaska Commissioner of Environmental Conservation at the time of the Exxon Valdez spill. Jim Ayers is vice president and senior adviser at Oceana and was executive director of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council. Any views expressed here are their own. –

As we are seeing each day, the Deepwater Horizon oil platform blowout in America’s Gulf coast is a human and environmental tragedy.

The oil platform was drilling an exploratory well for British Petroleum in the Gulf of Mexico when there was a blowout, resulting in the loss of 11 workers’ lives and uncontrolled releases of fuel and crude oil.

The tragic results occurred despite some of the best technology and spill response capabilities in the world, including 32 spill-response vessels and skimming capacity of more than 171,000 barrels per day, among many other advances and planning systems.

In a few short months, Royal Dutch Shell is set to begin exploratory drilling in the Arctic—another rich and fragile region.

The Arctic acts as Earth’s air conditioner, but it is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet due to climate change.

If a spill occurs in the harsh, unpredictable Arctic environment, it could spell disaster for ecosystems and wildlife, as well as the Native peoples of the region, whose way of life depends upon healthy ocean ecosystems.

Little or no capacity exists to handle accidents and oil spills in ice-filled seas. In fact, the U.S. Coast Guard acknowledges that there is no proven technology available today to contain and clean up an oil spill where sea ice is present.

The Minerals Management Service, the federal agency in charge of drilling leases, and Shell have tried to assure the public that there are virtually no risks from exploratory drilling in the Arctic.

In fact, in their environmental assessment necessary to win the right to drill in the Arctic, Shell stated outright that exploratory drilling in the Arctic poses “a statistically insignificant risk of a large, catastrophic oil spill (blow out)”.

Furthermore, Minerals Management Service and Shell did not even include the possibility of a major spill in their risk analyses of exploratory drilling in the Arctic.

The Deepwater Horizon blowout in the Gulf of Mexico should result in a sobering reassessment of the risks of offshore oil and gas development anywhere in the United States, but especially in the Arctic.

The Arctic is one of the least-understood regions of the planet, making it difficult to predict the consequences of increasing industrial activity and the inevitable unintended consequences, such as oil spills.

We simply do not have a thorough understanding of the potential risks, nor do we have the proper capacity and technology to ensure that these operations are safe.

As events in the Gulf clearly demonstrate, the decision to allow Shell to move forward with exploratory drilling is premature and should be reversed. At the very least, Shell should voluntarily suspend exploratory drilling. If Shell is unwilling to do so, Minerals Management Service must halt the plans.

Nearly a generation after the Exxon Valdez spill, our addiction to oil still threatens our coastal communities, marine wildlife, economy, and the ocean—the life support system of our planet.

Let’s heed the lessons of the Gulf of Mexico accident. We need a time out on expansion of oil drilling in the Arctic. A precedent has already been set.

Last August the National Marine Fisheries Service closed U.S. Arctic waters to expansion of commercial fishing above 60 degrees North Latitude because we do not yet know how those actions will impact this ever-changing and important region. The Minerals Management Service should follow this wise course.

And President Obama must demand accountability.

BP should be held responsible for Gulf clean-up and restoration. Any failure of this magnitude demands an Independent Commission to investigate the cause, response and impacts, and to make recommendations on our ability to evaluate and address the risks of offshore drilling.

Until the work of the Commission is complete there must be no new drilling; exploratory efforts in other regions should be put on hold; and there must be no Congressional action to open new areas to drilling.

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Photo shows the coastal plain within the 1002 Area of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in this undated handout photo provided by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Alaska Image Library. REUTERS/HANDOUT/U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

-Kees Willemse is professor of offshore engineering at Delft University. The opinions expressed are his own.-

Last month’s explosion at the Deepwater Horizon rig continues to result in the leakage of an estimated 200,000 gallons (910,000 litres) of oil into the Gulf of Mexico each day.

According to U.S. President Barack Obama, “we are dealing with a massive and potentially unprecedented environmental disaster”.

While the leak is extremely serious, and Obama’s words may ultimately ring true, the leak is (as yet) not one of the top 50 biggest oil spillages from either oil rigs or tankers in historical perspective:

•    Some 7-10,000 tonnes of oil are so far estimated to have leaked into the Gulf of Mexico from Deepwater Horizon.
•    The Exxon Valdez leaked some 36,000 tonnes of crude oil on the shores of Alaska.
•    The largest ever off-shore leakage of oil occurred in 1979 in the Ixtoc-1 spillage when an estimated 476,000 tonnes of oil polluted the Gulf of Mexico (Bay of Campeche).
•    The biggest ever on-shore spillage occurred in the aftermath of the 1991 Iraq War when an estimated 1.4 to 1.5 million tonnes was released in Kuwait by Iraqi military forces.

Most at risk from the Deepwater Horizon spill are the coastlines of Texas, Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana, including the wetlands near New Orleans where millions of migratory birds are currently nesting, and fish spawning.

The oil spill could also be catastrophic for the Gulf Coast’s substantial seafood industry, including oysters and shrimp.

To mitigate the environmental impact, measures will continue to be taken to prevent as much of the oil as possible reaching the shoreline, including setting fires to ‘burn-off’ the oil; soaking up the oil; and placing protective ‘barriers’ around shorelines.

The precise scale of the unfolding disaster remains uncertain owing to the lack of clarity over how long the leak will last.  In the worst-case scenario, as U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has suggested, the leak could continue for several more months.

Uncertainty is also increased by the fact that BP executives are reported to have admitted to members of the U.S. Congress that the amount of oil spilling could intensify — perhaps by several multiples of the current leakage per day — if they cannot cap the flow.

Hopes for a relatively early end to the leakage are resting largely upon the success of the operation to install a five-storey, 100 tonne containment dome.

The device was to be lowered by cranes around 1500 metres to the sea floor and, if possible, positioned over the two areas of leaking pipe.

If successful, the dome would serve as a giant funnel, collecting and piping it for collection on the sea surface. However, this operation has only been applied at a much smaller water depth and the first attempt to employ the device here has not been successful.

Even if successful, the dome will not stem all of the leakage (perhaps 80-90 percent of it) and there remains a risk of explosion when the oil reaches the surface because of the volatile mix of oil, gas and water.  Thus, the operation can only be a ‘holding’ one to buy time until the spillage can be shut off at the two remaining sources of the leak.

While shutting off the leakage at source will be an immensely difficult task, hopes will have been raised last week by the fact that BP successfully shut off the smallest of the three original leakages.  This was done by placing a valve over the ruptured pipe and shutting it off using a remotely controlled submarine.

The best hope of shutting off the two remaining sources of leakage is getting the blow-out preventor working again.  This is the system, which should act as an emergency cut-off to stop oil continually spilling out if a pipe is damaged, and which failed catastrophically last month.

However, the blow-out preventor is proving immensely hard to fix, in large part because of the exceptional depth of the water.  Hopes rest largely upon robot submarines re-starting the system.

In the event that the blow-out preventor cannot be fixed, relief wells have begun to be drilled that could be used to siphon off the oil leaking from the holed pipeline.

This operation will take an estimated two to three months as the drilling is taking place at 1500 metres water depth and a further 5 kilometres into the hard rock.

The relief well can also be drilled such that the shaft of the new well enters into the shaft of the existing, problematic well. A cement prop can then be inserted to stop the flow in the first well. This requires extremely accurate drilling, but that technique has been proven before.

Inevitably, all of this environmental mitigation and emergency replacement activity is proving extremely expensive.  The cost of operations to BP alone is an estimated 6 million dollars a day, and independent estimates have put the final bill at between 3 billion and 12 billion dollars.

However, the effects of this accident cannot be expressed in money terms alone, because of the growing scale of the environmental disaster if the oil spill cannot be contained soon.

Once the crisis is over, industry and government will need to make an urgent in-depth analysis of the cause of the accident to ensure that similar incidents can never happen again.

In supermarket aisles, when a bottle of oil smashes on the floor, a bag of sawdust or kitty litter is hauled out to soak up the mess.

To rescue a favorite silk tie from a dribble of gravy, douse it with corn starch and hope for the best.

How to clean up oil is a reoccurring theme in elevators and Internet chatrooms across the country this week, thanks to the unprecedented, growing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico costing BP $350 million in cleanup costs so far, and threatening environmental disaster.

After a handful of failed attempts to stop the leak, there should still be an abundance of possible technologies that apply here. And now that BP and Transcocean are developing “junk shots” — pipes clogged with synthetic materials including used panty hose– these household remedies may not be so irrelevant after all.

“They are actually going to take a bunch of debris – some shredded up tires, golf balls and things like that — and under very high pressure shoot it into the preventer itself and see if they can clog it up to stop the leak,” U.S. Coast Guard Admiral Thad AllenAllen told CBS News last weekend.

Dog hair clippings from pet stores? Vacuums that filter the oil?  An aquarium skimmer? Is this junk science — or just science?

In Senate subcommittee hearings on Wednesday, BP America president Lamar McKay insisted the “junk shot” containing golf balls was a highly sophisticated technology. “The best minds of the world are working on this 24-7,” he told a congressional panel, including Representative Edward Markey (D), who questioned if BP and rig operator Transocean weren’t  “flailing about with no clue of how to going to get out of this mess,” despite each company being a leader in technology.

So tell us about your Thanksgiving gravy separator, and your mechanic’s favorite way to protect a  garage floor from grease. There’s no time for testing, but who knows where the silver bullet that slays this growing oil slick will originate.

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A man hold a plastic bag with oil from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill south of Freemason Island, Louisiana May 7, 2010. REUTERS/Carlos Barria

With the spotlight shining on the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and on the executives sizzling in the hot seat on Capitol Hill, environmental advocates are looking north.

They’re worried that Shell Oil will start drilling in the Chukchi Sea off Alaska before the U.S. government reports on BP’s Deepwater Horizon drill rig disaster. And the environmental groups are not comforted by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar’s reassurances that no new drilling will take place until the government report is completed by May 28.

“The May 28 report deadline still leaves ample time should the Department of the Interior choose to allow this ill-advised drilling to move forward in extreme Arctic conditions, where spill response faces additional challenges of sea ice, seas of up to 20 feet, darkness and a virtual lack of infrastructure from which to stage a response,” the environmental groups — Alaska Wilderness League, Center for Biological Diversity, Defenders of Wildlife, Earthjustice, Sierra Club and The Wilderness Society — said in a statement.

The Chukchi Sea is home to polar bears, which are already under pressure due to melting summer sea ice in the Arctic. The big white bears are listed as a U.S. threatened species due to the expected continued effects of climate change in the area.

Shell plans to move into the area around July 1, and get to the places where it wants to drill exploratory wells by July 4 if ice permits. They plan to leave for the year by October 31.

An analysis of Shell’s exploration drilling plan by the Pew Environment Group says that provisions for cleanup in the event of a Chukchi Sea oil spill are inadequate and too distant from the prospective drill site. Marilyn Heiman, the former director of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Commission and now with the  Pew group’s U.S. Arctic program, quoted the Shell exploration drilling plan as saying that “a large oil spill, such as a crude oil release from a blowout, is extremely rare and not considered a reasonably foreseeable impact.”  Heiman said the U.S. Minerals Management Service’s environmental assessment also dismissed the probability of this kind of blowout and spill as “insignificant.” A blowout at BP’s well off the Louisiana coast is the source of the oil spill there.

Since the BP spill in the Gulf, the Minerals Management Service has asked Shell for additional safety information by May 18, but that may not be enough to allay the environmental groups’ fears. They want the Obama administration to cancel this summer’s plans for Arctic oil exploration.

Photo credits: REUTERS/Alexander Demianchuk (Twin six-month-old polar bear cubs play in the city zoo in St. Petersburg, Russia, March 25, 2010)

REUTERS/Jason Reed (President and Chairman of BP America Inc. Lamar McKay in front of protesters before a Senate hearing on the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Washington, May 11, 2010)