Oil: From the offshore to onshore, From the deep sea to coral reefs

Oil: From the offshore to onshore, From the deep sea to coral reefs

Last Wednesday, Obama in a very surprising move, unveiled plans for large swaths of the ocean off  the East Coast, eastern Gulf of Mexico, and Alaska to be drilled for oil and gas for the first time. Specifically the plan allows areas from Delaware to central Floria, the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas, and swath 125 miles off Florida's coast currently under congressional moratorium, to be opened up to industry.  As a first step, the Obama plan authorizes the Interior Department to start conducting seismic studies to locate potential seafloor deposits.

Why?

Obama stated, "The bottom line is this: Given our energy needs, in order to sustain economic growth and produce jobs and keep our businesses competitive, we are going to need to harness traditional sources of fuel even as we ramp up production of new sources of renewable, homegrown energy."  Obama addressed those who will "strongly disagree" with this decision by saying the announcement is part of a broader strategy to move from an economy run on fossil fuel and foreign oil to one that relies on domestic fuels and clean energy. "The only way this transition will succeed is if it strengthens our economy in the short term and long run," he said. "To fail to recognize this reality would be a mistake."

So is the the appropriate move forward?  Some believe this was Obama's move to gain further support for a later comprehensive climate and energy bill, i.e. a political opposed to an energy move.  And indeed the strange union of liberal Democrat Barbara Block of California, whose state was spared, and Exxon both heralding Obama's policy is so strange my laptop is at risk of bursting into flames as I type this.

But what would appear to be a concession to Republicans has only angered some of them.

Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana, chairman of the House Republican Conference, called the announcement a "smokescreen." "As usual, the devil is in the details," Pence said. "Only in Washington, D.C., can you ban more areas to oil and gas exploration than you open up, delay the date of your new leases, and claim you're going to increase production." House Natural Resources Committee ranking member Doc Hastings (R-Wash.) said the administration "is attempting to pull the wool over our eyes." "President Obama's rhetoric conveys support for increasing American oil and natural gas production, while the reality is he's proposing a plan that will close more areas to drilling than it opens, and the few areas still available won't be open for years," Hastings said.

As can be imagined conservation groups are also angered and not just the ones you might expect, e.g. Greenpeace. Oceana, an organization who in my opinion typically proceeds strategically, thoughtfully, and cautiously, is leading a letter campaign stating

Expanding offshore drilling increases threats to marine habitats and creatures and does nothing to curb harmful carbon emissions; in fact, it increases pollutants in our atmosphere and oceans.  Including offshore drilling in climate change legislation is not only a political compromise – it is compromising the future health of our oceans. Help us reach our goal of 25,000 ocean activists to speak up against offshore drilling.

And, well frankly I can't agree more.

First, I think the move is politically naive.  The behavior of Republicans during healthcare reform is all you need to consider.  This is the group that voted no to everything in healthcare reform, even as parts were borrowed from R-Mitt Romney's state insurance plan for Massachusetts.  This is the group that stated they would continue to vote no on everything the Democrats proposed.  Republicans would vote no on a bill stating they were Republicans if the Democrats proposed it.  Republicans have no interest in bipartisan progression.  Is opening vast swaths of the oceans worth a few Republican votes that Obama doesn't even need?  What if it leads to a loss of Democratic votes.

Second, I think the move is environmentally naive.  It does nothing more than continue our reliance on fossil fuels, perpetuating a cycle of behavior that will ultimately warm, acidify, and pollute our oceans.  At local scales, drilling impacts will greatly threaten the life of the seafloor. And that oil won't only being going into our big SUV's to hold our fat American assess, it will end up on our protected marine habitats.  Or maybe Chineses asses and Australian reefs

A Chinese-registered ship carrying coal that ran aground off the coast of northeast Australia was leaking oil Sunday near the Great Barrier Reef — the world's largest coral reef system. The ship, called Shen Neng 1, was carrying about 65,000 tons of coal to China from the port of Gladstone when it ran aground at about 5:10 p.m. Saturday, according to a Queensland state government statement. The vessel was carrying about 950 tons of oil on board and was leaking into the surrounding waters early Sunday, according to the statement. Maritime Safety Queensland has responded to the scene to assess the spill and plan a clean-up. A light aircraft was expected to spray a chemical solution on the oil.

Third, I am not even sure it makes sense economically.

One reason they haven't is that offshore drilling requires an investment of hundreds of millions of dollars just to find a productive site. Once oil is discovered, offshore rigs used to bring it to the surface cost $1 billion or more. And years would pass before those new rigs could produce their first barrel of oil. Meanwhile, under Obama's proposal, East Coast states and parts of Alaska would expose valuable shoreline and beach property to the possibility of a disastrous oil spill. Tourism benefits coastal states a lot more than skimpy oil royalties would. Why do you think California opted out of this deal right from the start? America also would be wasting time and money that should be spent on developing alternative energy sources, such as wind, solar, cleaner alternative fuels and, yes, nuclear power. While we fiddle, China solidifies its stature as the green energy innovator of the world.

All this leaves me to believe the Republican party and Exxon have kidnapped Obama and put Sarah Palin in an Obama suit.  And as James Werrell writes, "But while "drill, baby, drill" makes a cute catch-phrase, it's still a dumb idea, no matter who proposes it.

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Research helping redraw Hawaii’s tsunamis threat maps | honoluluadvertiser.com | The Honolulu Advertiser - 使用 Google 工具栏发送

Research helping redraw Hawaii's tsunamis threat maps | honoluluadvertiser.com | The Honolulu Advertiser

Hundreds of homes and businesses in areas long believed to be safe from a tsunami could be added to O'ahu's evacuation map in light of new research.

Even as up to 50,000 people statewide evacuated during the Feb. 27 tsunami warning, work was already well under way to upgrade Hawai'i evacuation maps, which are nearly two decades old.

The good news is that the maps created in 1991 are still largely accurate, and inundation zones will mostly remain the same.

However, an examination of the five most dangerous tsunamis that struck the Islands in the last 100 years has found that the threat in some areas may be greater than originally believed.

The result could be expanded evacuation zones in areas including Waialua and Hale'iwa, around Kāne'ohe Bay and along O'ahu's South Shore. Other areas could see evacuation zones shrink.

"I hate broad-brush generalities, but in general I think on the south coast of O'ahu, we're going to need to evacuate more people," said Peter Hirai, deputy director for the city Department of Emergency Management.

Currently, no evacuation is called for around Kāne'ohe Bay.

"We always said if you live around Kāne'ohe Bay, so long as you're more than four feet away from the edge of the water, you're OK," Hirai said. "That's changed."

The new tsunami research, conducted by Kwok Fai Cheung, a University of Hawai'i professor, makes recommendations, but it's up to counties to decide whether to expand or shrink evacuation zones.

O'ahu has already received its updated inundation zones and is considering map changes this month with plans to present them to the community for input once the maps are completed.

Hirai and other officials declined to release specifics about the areas affected because they are still in the process of deciding what changes, if any, to make.

learning from 2004

The project was prompted by the Sumatra-Andaman earthquake of December 2004, which produced a killer tsunami in the Indian Ocean that swept across a dozen countries and killed hundreds of thousands.

The state Legislature in 2005 alloted $2 million a year for two years to state Civil Defense to improve its emergency shelter program, modernize its siren warning system and update the inundation zones, said Ed Teixeira, vice director of state Civil Defense.

The National Tsunami Hazard Mitigation Program has kicked in about $300,000 so far and is expected to continue funding the project with about $200,000 a year.

FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers provided topographical information with a LiDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) survey at a cost of about $700,000 to the state, Teixeira said.

Yoshiki Yamazaki, one of Cheung's graduate students, developed the NEOWAVE model for the project, for which he won an award.

The end product is a computer model that uses the LiDAR survey and data collected after the major tsunamis of 1946, 1952, 1957, 1960 and 1964 to create the new inundation zones. The data includes runup, or how high above sea level a wave gets, and inundation, or how far inland it travels.

Cheung was required to take the Sumatra-Andaman quake of 2004, double it and place it at sites around the Pacific, then run the model to see what it would do to Hawai'i, Teixeira said.

"Our tsunami maps now from the 1991 era still hold up with some exceptions," he said, adding that the Hilo zone may change. "Where Hilo has a very generous evacuation zone (Cheung) is recommending not going so far."

revising the maps

Other areas the city will have to look at are Hale'iwa, Waialua and the area around the Dillingham airfield, which traps water, Teixeira said. Honolulu Harbor near Iwilei, and the area mauka of Kalaniana'ole Highway may need some attention as well, he said.

The original maps of 1991 were prompted by an all-out evacuation in 1986 that caused gridlock on shorelines when the wave struck. Fortunately, it was a small tsunami that caused no damage.

"That was a big screw up by the state and the county," said George Curtis, who created the 1991 maps and is the tsunami adviser for the Big Island. "They sent everybody home and it had nothing to do with whether you were near the shore or not. They closed Ala Moana shopping center, and it's perfectly safe."

Recognizing that good maps would reduce the problem, Curtis lobbied the Legislature for money and developed the maximum expectable inundation from probable tsunami directions, he said. Those maps were designed by county civil defense agencies, he said.

With as little as three hours to evacuate threatened areas, the agencies must decide who will evacuate, keeping in mind the 1986 gridlock, Curtis said.

While Curtis, who is a consultant for the new project, was pleased that the maps created by his old one-dimensional model are still valid, he said this new model is more accurate.

"It's much better modeling and the thing that's much improved about it is their topographic data," Curtis said. "It's a 2-D model, compared to a one dimensional so it's a far better model and that's something to emphasize."

The Associated Press: Chile quake offers tough lessons for US coast

The Associated Press: Chile quake offers tough lessons for US coast

Chile quake offers tough lessons for US coast

By BRAD HAYNES (AP) – 5 days ago

SANTIAGO, Chile — As the Easter earthquake shook Southern California, the state's disaster management chief was thousands of miles away in Chile, examining what experts say is the best case study yet for how a truly catastrophic earthquake could impact the United States.

Chile and the U.S. Pacific coast have more in common than their geology; they share advanced construction codes, bustling coastal cities, modern skyscrapers and veteran emergency services.

These were all put to the test in Chile, which despite its extensive planning lost 432 lives in the 8.8-magnitude earthquake and resulting tsunami — lessons that California, Oregon and Washington have yet to fully learn despite deep experience with lesser quakes.

They include: Coastal flood maps mean nothing without local enforcement. Hospitals need to not only stay upright but also stay open. Stringent building standards require stringent inspections. And tourists need to be taught about the dangers of tsunamis, which caused the greatest loss of life in Chile, wiping out seaside campgrounds on the last weekend of summer vacation.

"People living there know that when the earth shakes, it's like an alarm going off: Get out. But visitors aren't conditioned like that," said Matthew Bettenhausen, the secretary of California's Emergency Management Agency.

Most of Chile's modern buildings emerged with little more than broken plaster, but there were some spectacular failures among recently built structures. Some experts blame code violations that lax inspections failed to catch.

"It's not enough to have a good law — you have to follow it," says Rodolfo Saragoni, the University of Chile's top seismic engineer.

Chileans who lost their homes are asking how building firms got away with cutting corners.

"I've never made walls this thin for this kind of building," said civil engineer Carolina Astorga, showing the AP the damaged foundations of her 19-story apartment building in Santiago.

She moved in a month before the quake. Now the building is sunken, leaning and uninhabitable.

"They save more rebar, more money and it comes out cheaper for the contractor. But here are the consequences."

Code enforcement in California, as in Chile, falls to local governments. Some are sticklers, but others are essentially "paper building departments, where they're pushing paper but not actually rigorously enforcing building codes," said Fred Turner, a structural engineer with the state's Seismic Safety Commission.

"I'm afraid there are a few jurisdictions in California that are probably not much better," Turner added.

Likewise, the tsunami responsible for most of Chile's death toll was perfectly predictable from official flood maps published on the navy's Web site. But the coastal cities devastated by the waves did nothing to incorporate the charts in public planning.

"At the least, it indicates a profound lack of coordination between institutions," said Hugo Romero, a geographer at the University of Chile. At worst, he said, it may reflect commercial interests overwhelming the public interest.

Chile's landscape is similar to built-up stretches of the California coast, where state and federal officials have worked to make flood maps available, but local authorities don't always pay heed.

Some California cities — Long Beach, Crescent City and Santa Barbara among them — now incorporate tsunami risks in their public planning. "Other jurisdictions just haven't gotten around to doing anything yet," Turner said.

"California is catching up," he added, noting that Oregon and Washington have a fraction of the population exposure along the coast, but have done more to prepare for the next tsunami.

In other respects, the Pacific Northwest is at risk.

Scientists say a nearby coastal fault like Chile's will likely slip within a few decades, releasing a similarly devastating mega-quake. A magnitude-9 quake struck the area in 1700.

Washington's building codes were updated to international seismic standards in recent years, but Chile has shown that great standards on paper do nothing when a city is full of older buildings that were grandfathered in.

University of California at Berkeley's Jack Moehle, who led a team of engineers assessing Chile's damage, takes that lesson from two cities near the epicenter: Chillan was almost entirely rebuilt with stronger buildings after a 1939 quake, and survived this one more or less OK. Nearby Talca was full of earlier architecture — and devastated.

"To see Chillan versus Talca, it's like day and night," he said.

California's older cities would suffer more like Talca did if a major quake struck them today, Moehle warns.

Hospitals and other key buildings in parts of California could fare even worse than those in Chile, said structural engineer Bill Holmes, who has been examining Chile's hospitals. Many had 72 hours worth of gas and water on site, which proved invaluable in the catastrophe's aftermath.

California's hospitals are not expected to meet that standard until 2030. And one in 10 won't even be safe from collapse by 2015, according to a report prepared for the California Senate's Health Committee in February.

The rare intensity of Chile's earthquake is also teaching engineers about how international seismic standards might be improved.

Chile's temblor included an unexpected amount of vertical shaking in addition to the usual horizontal movement, according to structural engineer Jay Guin, who runs risk modeling for Applied Insurance Research Worldwide.

Both Chile and the U.S. may need to update building codes accordingly — perhaps applying tougher standards to shakier ground, like the volcanic ash under Concepcion or the landfill under parts of San Francisco.

"It acts like Jell-O. You get that extra violent shaking," said Bettenhausen.

Climate change already killing 150,000 a year in low-income economies: WHO

Climate change already killing 150,000 a year in low-income economies: WHO

Climate change has begun to affect human health, leading to a rise in cases related to stomach ailments and vector-borne diseases like malaria and dengue. This has been indicated in a report in the recent bulletin of the World Health Organisation (WHO).

The apex global health body reckons that about 150,000 deaths occur annually in low-income countries due to the adverse effects of climate change, chiefly malnutrition due to climate change-driven crop failures, stomach diseases and malaria.

The report says that the rise in atmospheric temperature and sea levels, coupled with extreme weather events, notably higher frequency of floods, cause water logging and water contamination, leading to higher incidence of diarrhoeal ailments. The geographical spread of vector-borne diseases such as malaria and dengue is also projected to increase.

Besides, the dynamics of communicable diseases may undergo a change, WHO has cautioned. The poorer countries will be affected relatively more because of their deficient health systems and paucity of resources.

Higher average temperatures as a consequence of global warming could prolong peak periods for vector-communicated diseases. Besides, extreme weather events, including cyclones and floods, can create conditions ideal for the spread of several diseases, including diarrhoea and cholera, the report states. Dengue epidemics are already occurring more frequently and are now reported even from hilly countries like Bhutan and Nepal.

The report notes that most countries in the Southeast Asian region, home to 26 per cent of the world's population and 30 per cent of the world's poor, lack sufficient plans for disease and vector surveillance and control. They also do not have adequate health systems in place to serve as barriers against the adverse effects of climate change on human health.

The UN Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change has already warned that parts of Asia are likely to experience serious adverse effects of climate change because the economies of most countries in this region rely on agriculture and natural resources. People living in vulnerable, yet densely populated, areas are usually disproportionately affected by the consequences, as has been shown by the impact of the devastating floods in Bihar in 2009.

According to the Asian Development Bank, in countries like Indonesia and Thailand, the want of adequate measures to counter the ill-effects of climate change could result in economic losses of 6-7 per cent of their combined gross domestic product by 2100, compared to a loss of some 2.6 per cent of the world's GDP during this period.

Research is underway in India and Nepal on assessing the impact of climate change on vector-borne and water-borne diseases. It will be extended to other countries in the region, subsequently. Its outcome could guide the development of integrated national and regional plans of action for public health interventions to mitigate the impact of climate change on health.

"If all countries of the region make a combined effort to tackle the effects of climate change on health, the resulting evidence base, emerging best practices and lessons learnt will make a valuable contribution to global health," the report says.