Tag Archives: Department of the Interior

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Interior Department Rolls Back Desert Protection

From ever-vigilant watchdog group, Public Employees for Environmental Protection (PEER), comes news that the Interior Department plans on opening nearly 50,000 acres of the largest dune ecosystem in the United States to off-road vehicles.

The Algodones Dunes (Photo taken from the International Space Station)

The Algodones Dunes (Photo taken from the International Space Station)

This change displays a frightful ignorance of biology and a complete disregard for wildlife habitat from an agency the public trusts to protect these sensitive areas.

- Karen Schambach, PEER

From their Website:

The Bureau of Land Management released a new recreational plan today for California’s Algodones Dunes that will open up almost 50,000 additional acres of land, including important habitat for rare and vanishing species, to unlimited off-road vehicle use. Currently, ORVs are prohibited from those 49,300 acres.

The plan is the largest conservation rollback in the California desert in more than a decade and conflicts with the BLM’s own goals of ensuring meaningful, enduring conservation of dunes to offset the impacts of large-scale renewable energy projects in the California desert.“This plan pushes the rare plants and animals of the Algodones Dunes closer to extinction, robbing them of a huge part of their safe haven,” said Ileene Anderson with the Center for Biological Diversity. “I’m shocked that the BLM decided to adopt such a destructive, damaging plan — right when it should be carefully protecting these wild creatures and places to make up for vast energy projects that are being developed nearby.”Also known as the Imperial Dunes, Algodones is the largest active sand dune formation in North America, covering about 200,000 acres in the southeastern corner of California’s Imperial County. The dunes create unique habitats for numerous species, from lush woodlands on the east side to shifting blowsands in the middle and stabilized sand flats on the west side.

via PEER - BIG ROLLBACK OF CALIFORNIA DESERT PROTECTION.

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The Real Gulf Behind the Oil Disaster

If you had been tracking the course of the BP-Deepwater Horizon oil gusher, or listening to media coverage about areas that were potentially threatened by the massive amounts of oil floating in the Gulf, you may have thought that experts knew where it’s likely to hit land. In a general sense, at least.

That was never true.

But it seemed correct. Since the April 20th explosion, the oil slick drifted slowly north and east as it grew.

Here’s a New York Times map of the slick three days after the explosion.

From the New York Times

And here it is three days later:

From the New York Times

Even jumping four days more, the trend continues:

From the New York Times

As recently as Saturday, the best data from NOAA and the US Coast Guard appeared to reinforce the notion that, if nothing else, the oil spill was predictable in its heading:

From the New York Times

And then came Sunday:

From the New York Times

The spill seemed to have caught even the Times‘ graphics department flat-footed, as the oil slick moved beyond the boundaries of the map. The gulf between the real world and our expectations of it grew again today:

From the New York Times

This faith in predictability — in our ability to predict — was evident in an October 22, 2007 determination by the Department of the Interior. The DOI issued a “finding of no new significant impact” for the site, allowing drilling to go ahead without a new environmental impact statement (EIS). Why? Because an earlier EIS had determined that drilling at similar sites was safe, and there was no evidence showing that this one was any different. Regulations were directed in one direction (self-monitoring and reporting by oil companies) while in the real world, hundreds of spills, malfunctions and poor safety records drifted silently off the map, creating the real gulf that is our problem.

A sense that the experts know what they’re doing, that companies can self-regulate because market discipline is sufficient, and that the government needs just to get out of the way — all of these are a beautiful dream.

The only problem is that, inevitably, something wakes us up. In this case, it was an explosion on April 20th . The challenge now is to do something to make sure our laws are changed to match reality, before too many grow tired and go back to sleep and the gulf widens again.

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Secretary Salazar: “Time has come for a clean energy future”

With all eco-eyes focused on the action (or, more properly, inaction) on a climate bill, other critical components of a clean energy economy can be overlooked. That was the case on Monday as the dominant news story concerned speculation about whether Republican members of the Senate Committee on Energy and Public Works would show up for Tuesday’s climate bill markup session (they didn’t).

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