Ocean lovers around the world will join hands on beaches and in cities beginning at 12 noon local time Saturday, June 25, for the second annual “Hands Across the Sand” event, a demonstration of opposition to expanding offshore drilling and support for cleaner energy choices.
With the oil industry pushing for a dramatic expansion of offshore drilling in U.S. waters, “Hands Across the Sand” participants will show leaders like President Obama the breadth of opposition to new drilling and support for a clean energy future rooted in energy efficiency and clean, renewable energy solutions, such as wind, solar and geothermal.
“Offshore drilling will never be safe. Expanding offshore oil drilling is not the answer; embracing clean energy is,” said Dave Rauschkolb, a Florida restaurateur who founded Hands Across the Sand. “We’re here to say NO to offshore drilling, and YES to clean energy.”
According to BP ads and the lamestream media, including local newspapers and television news outlets that have taken millions of dollars in advertising money from BP, the Gulf of Mexico is now “clean” only a year after being polluted on a massive scale by the BP oil spill of 2010, the largest and worst mand-made environmental disaster in American industrial history.
The only problem is, it is NOT true. According to this video by Trisha Springstead with Captain Lori Deangelis of Dolphin Queen Cruises, the oil and chemicals are still showing up.
Louisiana charter boat captain Louis Bayhi discusses the severe health problems he’s experienced after serving on clean up crews in the wake of the BP oil spill.
Dr. Wilma Subra, a Louisiana physiological biochemist, founder and president of the Subra Company of New Iberia, was interviewed in the award-winning documentary “Gasland.” She reports on recent blood test results on Gulf Coast residence showing that corexit is making its way into the food supply and humans.
The U.S. House of Representatives passed the second in a series of three fast-track drilling bills Wednesday that impose arbitrarily rushed permitting deadlines and would force the Secretary of the Interior to approve or deny drilling permits within 30 days.
If a final decision is not made within 60 days, the bill requires that the permit automatically be approved, according to the Defenders of Wildlife.
In addition. H.R. 1229, the so-called “Putting the Gulf of Mexico Back to Work” bill, “eliminates important safety and environmental considerations and gives experts far too little time to adequately evaluate the safety and environmental implications of drilling — exactly the type of reckless protocol that contributed to the disastrous BP Deepwater Horizon explosion,” Rodger Schlickeisen, president and CEO of Defenders of Wildlife, said in a press release.
“This bill should more accurately be called, ‘Pandering to Big Oil Interests at the Expense of Coastal Economies and the Environment,’” Schlickeisen said. “By fast-tracking the important review process, the bill puts at risk the very fishermen, restaurant and hotel owners, and coastal communities, wildlife and habitat still reeling from the BP Deepwater Horizon oil disaster.”
Environmental Group Calls it ‘A Case of Oil Disaster Amnesia’
The U.S. House of Representatives passed the first in a series of three bills today that mandates the acceleration of the offshore drilling permitting process and opens up new areas to oil and gas drilling, including offshore along the coasts of California, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Virginia and Florida and in the Arctic Ocean.
Votes on the remaining two bills are expected in the coming days, according to an e-mail from the Defenders of Wildlife.
“Our government appears to be dealing with a widespread case of oil disaster amnesia. Congressman Hastings’ trio of bills blatantly ignores the lessons learned from the BP Deepwater Horizon tragedy, promoting harmful new drilling in key wildlife habitat and weakening critically needed environmental review of drilling projects,” said Rodger Schlickeisen, president and CEO of Defenders of Wildlife.
“The reality that acts of Congress can be bought and paid for by Big Oil is being played out before our eyes: these bills were written with the single-minded purpose of increasing profits for a drilling industry that just last week reported billions of dollars in record profits,” he said. “Our government needs to stop pandering to the oil and gas industry and stand up for the ordinary Americans who elected them to office.”
Boat Captain Sean Kelly, interviewed in Gulf State Park in Gulf Shores, Alabama (see video below)
by Glynn Wilson
GULF STATE PARK, GULF SHORES, Ala., April 24 — When British Petroleum’s Deepwater Horizon exploded on April 20, 2010, killing 11 platform workers and pumping crude into the Gulf of Mexico by the millions of gallons, boat captain Sean Kelly of Seattle, Washington was traveling in Florida. Once the scope of the disaster became known after a few days, he got an opportunity to help by working the spill off the coast of Alabama.
“You want to help protect the shoreline and help the people that live here,” he said. “Whether its sucking oil over here or laying boom over there, you want to do your best to help.”
Little did he know that opportunity would ultimately cause such a major, devastating effect on his life and health. Kelly’s blood even now, a year after his direct exposure, shows higher levels of the petrochemicals associated with BP’s oil and chemical catastrophe than anyone doctors have tested thus far.
Thousands of people on the Gulf Coast are still suffering from the human health effects of the disaster one year after the event, a fact that we have been documenting since last September, when many news organizations would not cover the issue and some commentators were still calling the very idea of the story itself a “conspiracy theory.”
David Underhill of the Mobile Alabama Sierra Club discusses the one year anniversary of BP’s Gulf oil disaster at Fairhope’s Earth Day festival (see video below)
by Glynn Wilson
FAIRHOPE, Ala., April 23 — When the British Petroleum corporation issued a press release this past week announcing that the multinational behemoth would commit $1 billion for Gulf Coast restoration projects, every news organization in the world ran a story about it. But where were the reporters and editors asking the tough questions, such as: Is the $1 billion enough? What is the plan for restoration? What does the company and the government plan to restore?
No amount of money can bring back all the dead wildlife, rotting at the bottom of the sea. The company can be forced by the government to pay for cleaning a large percentage of the oil and chemical dispersants out of the beach sand in many places. But they can’t restore the lost eggs of hundreds of species nesting and spawning in the marshes and bayous of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. Nor can they heal all the sick and dying people along the coast who were exposed to the oil and chemicals in the air and water.
They can pay people, businesses and local governments for lost income for last year, when the largest and worst environmental disaster in U.S. industrial history hit the Gulf of Mexico when BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil well blew up on April 20 and spewed crude from the Macondo well-head for nearly three months. But they can’t bring back all the businesses and people who simply closed up shop and fled the Gulf Coast. And no matter how many millions they spend on advertising to try to sell the American public on coming back to visit the coast and to eat the Gulf seafood, it will never convince anywhere near all the people that all is safe.
“BP has come nowhere close to paying the actual cost of the damage done, and they are not going to come anywhere close to paying the actual cost,” says David Underhill of the Mobile Sierra Club, interviewed on Saturday during the Earth Day festivities in Fairhope overlooking Mobile Bay.
Gulf Coast Pay Czar Kenneth Feinberg came to New Orleans on the anniversary of the BP oil disaster and got a mouthful from some of feel wronged by the process of paying out up to $20 billion in loss claims.
Paul Doomm has been confined to a wheelchair since the end of Summer 2010 after swimming in the Gulf. After all, the government said it was safe. A lot of controversy has surrounded his illness. He wanted to speak directly to Feinberg, but he was not allowed. So he was interviewed by videographer John Wathen.
During the Bush years, we specialized in covering the politicization of the U.S. justice system as much as any news organization. Our archives are about the most comprehensive for anyone researching the prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, and the original case against Richard Scrushy, which Glynn Wilson covered for The New York Times.
