As if taking no action on global warming isn't bad enough, the Bush Administration now wants to trash Virginia's coastline as part of its never-ending quest to enrich its Big Oil buddies. This is not acceptable. According to the Surfrider Foundation, which works to protect our beaches:
Offshore drilling has the capacity to destroy delicate coastal ecosystems in disaster scenarios, and is guaranteed to damage ocean ecosystems under normal operating conditions. Between 1980 and 1999 there were 73 "incidents" causing over 3 million gallons of oil to be spilled. In addition, normal drilling operations generate an average of 180,000 gallons of waste muds containing toxic metals such as mercury and lead, per well, with most being dumped into surrounding waters. Each drilling platform also normally discharges hundreds of thousands of gallons of toxic "produced" water every day containing benzene, arsenic, lead and other pollutants.
Nice, huh? Just what our coastline, wetlands, fisheries and the Chesapeake Bay, need. Speaking of the latter, here's what the Surfrider Foundation has to say:
The Chesapeake Bay is currently under a substantial amount of stress from modern day living. Any additional stress such as those caused by onshore infrastructure could be devastating.
By the way, a year ago Governor Kaine rejected offshore drilling in Virginia after thousands of concerned citizens wrote to him and told him they wanted our beautiful coastline protected. Today, we need to urge Governor Kaine once again to do everything he can to fight this end run by the Bush Administration. According to the Sierra Club, the Federal moratorium against drilling, which has been in place for more than 25 years, "has long spared Virginia from the ravages of offshore drilling and related on shore petroleum processing development." We need to keep it in place for another 25 years...and another, and another. Meanwhile, instead of focusing our entire energy policy on the production side, we need a crash program in energy efficiency, the surest and cheapest way of slashing our oil dependence, our carbon emissions, and our damage to the planet in general.
As usual, the Bush Administration has things completely backwards. I guess we shouldn't be surprised, and it really gets old having to fight them time after time. That's why we need new leadership in Washington in 2008, and that's also why we need a strong, Democratic General Assembly here in Virginia, to protect our state from this kind of rapaciousness and greed.
The web site for the National Council for Science and the Environment gives clues, but it's been taken down and you have to go the the wayback machine and use http://www.ncseonlin... for example
http://web.archive.o...
Dominion Power has holdings in 181 and that is documented in this pdf of here:
http://www.gomr.mms....
There are more references and relationships in one of my old diaries here -
http://www.raisingka...
This is a topic that is not being researched and covered adequately. A little scratching around clearly shows that certain interests are trying to keep this all under the radar as much as possible. I haven't read recent required reports by Dominion Power; I'm sure material of interest is there.
For that matter what's coming to the surface with Todd Graves, Blunt, etc. out in Missouri is not being covered adequately either. These are both situations that could benefit from the "echo chamber" effect imo.