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Activists Angry About Oil Auction off Alaska    [

    Polar Bears Vie With Oil for US Government Focus
    By Deborah Zabarenko
    Reuters

    Sunday 06 January 2008

    Washington - The U.S. government will soon decide whether polar bears are in danger because global warming is melting their icy habitat. But last week, the government offered some of that habitat as a place to drill for oil.

    Strangely enough, both those decisions are the province of the Interior Department.

    The department's Fish and Wildlife Service is supposed to announce a decision by Wednesday whether polar bears should be listed as endangered or threatened under the Endangered Species Act. A department spokesman said that deadline would probably pass with no decision.

    Last week, the department's Minerals Management Service announced its plan to offer oil and gas exploration rights in February to 29.7 million acres in the remote Chukchi Sea off the northwest Alaskan coast.

    There are about 16,000 polar bears in the region and environmentalists, especially those who pushed for the polar bear habitat to be protected, were outraged.

    "The polar bear's existence is increasingly threatened by the impact of climate change-induced loss of sea ice," Margaret Williams of the World Wildlife Fund said in a statement. "The chances for the continued survival of this icon of the Arctic will be greatly diminished if its remaining critical habitat is turned into a vast oil and gas field."

    Randall Luthi, director of the Minerals Management Service, called the decision "a good balance" that would allow exploration while still protecting "the resources important to the coastal residents." A spokeswoman questioned whether companies would even want to explore such distant waters.

    Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, a Republican, does not favor listing the big white bear as endangered.

    "I strongly believe that adding them to the list is the wrong move at this time," Palin wrote in Saturday's New York Times. "My decision is based on a comprehensive review by state wildlife officials of scientific information from a broad range of climate, ice and polar bear experts."

    Gone by 2050?

    Palin said the Endangered Species Act is not the right tool to protect polar bears if they were endangered, which she disputed. "Polar bears are more numerous now than they were 40 years ago," she said.

    The future may be another question.

    The U.S. Geological Survey has predicted polar bears could disappear from places where Arctic sea ice is melting most rapidly, along the northern coasts of Alaska and Russia. The same report said two-thirds of the world's polar bears could be gone by 2050 if predictions about melting sea ice hold true.

    Polar bears depend on sea ice as a platform for hunting seals, their main prey. Without enough sea ice, polar bears would be forced onto land, where they are inefficient hunters.

    The first polar bears probably first appeared about 40,000 to 50,000 years ago, and the species has not lived through a period as warm as the one predicted by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for this century.

    The Chukchi Sea is in that patch of the polar bears' habitat, according to Melanie Duchin of Greenpeace, who said allowing exploratory drilling for oil and gas in that area is a double threat to the animals.

    "Oil lease sales in the Chukchi Sea not only threaten polar bears directly through oil spills, industrial noise and other disturbances that come with oil exploration, production and transportation, they also threaten the polar bear by producing more fossil fuels that will exacerbate global warming and melting of polar bears' sea ice habitat," Duchin said by e-mail.

    Conservationists sued the Minerals Management Service last year for approving oil and gas exploration in the Beaufort Sea, another part of the Arctic Ocean. The plaintiffs argued the service rushed the approval without fully analyzing potential environmental impact or a sufficiently public process.

    A stay was granted in that case until final arguments were heard, which happened in December. A ruling is expected in the coming months.

 

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    Activists Angry About Oil Auction off Alaska
    The Associated Press

    Sunday 06 January 2008

Federal agency denies it ignored wildlife impacts in Chukchi Sea.

    Anchorage, Alaska - The federal government will open up nearly 46,000 square miles off Alaska's northwest coast to petroleum leases next month, a decision condemned by environmental groups that contend the industrial activity will harm northern marine mammals.

    The Minerals Management Agency planned the sale in the Chukchi Sea without taking into account changes in the Arctic brought on by global warming and proposed insufficient protections for polar bears, walrus, whales and other species that could be harmed by drilling rigs or spills, according to the groups.

    The lease sale in an area slightly smaller than the state of Pennsylvania was planned without information as basic as the polar bear and walrus populations, said Pamela Miller, Arctic coordinator with Northern Alaska Environmental Center. The lease sale is among the largest acreage offered in the Alaska region.

    "The Minerals Management Service is required to have preleasing baseline data sufficient to determine the post-leasing impacts of the oil and gas activities that will occur," Miller said. "They simply do not have that."

    The MMS announced it would hold a lease sale on Feb. 6 for the ocean floor on the outer continental shelf of the Chukchi Sea, the body of water that begins north of the Bering Strait and stretches between northwest Alaska and the northern coast of the Russian Far East.

    The MMS is a branch of the Interior Department. Its stated mission is to manage ocean energy and mineral resources on the outer continental shelf and federal and Indian mineral revenues to enhance public and trust benefits, promote responsible use, and realize fair value.

    It would be the first federal OCS oil and gas lease sale in the Chukchi Sea since 1991. The agency estimates it contains 15 billion barrels of conventionally recoverable oil and 77 trillion cubic feet of conventionally recoverable natural gas.

    Agency: Wildlife Protected

    MMS director Randall Luthi said the agency took steps to protect wildlife.

    "MMS funds a robust environmental studies program to monitor the effects of industry activity in the OCS, including more than 40 ongoing Arctic-specific studies," said Luthi. "Following up on a workshop attended by over 100 scientists and stakeholders, we are inaugurating a new suite of research for the Chukchi Sea to further monitor marine mammals, other communities, hydrocarbons, and subsistence uses."

    The sale is backed by Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and community and tribal leaders, he said.

    "We believe our decision is a good balance, and will allow companies to explore this intriguing frontier area while still protecting the resources important to the coastal residents," Luthi said.

    Miller and Brendan Cummings of the Center for Biological Diversity said the MMS ignored dangers to animals and birds if an oil spill were to occur.

    "No one yet has figured out how to clean up a spill in broken ice, so they just stick their head in the sand and pretend it won't happen," Cummings said.

    He also said the agency's environmental assessment ignored changes brought by global warming.

    Walrus, Polar Bear Concerns

    The Chukchi Sea, he said, is the nation's most important habitat for Pacific walrus. The lease sale assumes a stable walrus population, ignoring developments of 2007. Unlike seals, walruses cannot swim indefinitely and must "haul out" on ice or land to rest. In late summer, thousands of animals hauled out on the northwest Alaska coast for several months because their usual platform for foraging, sea ice, receded far beyond the relatively shallow continental shelf over waters too deep for walrus to dive for food.

    On the Russian side of the Chukchi Sea, biologists recorded herds gathering on shore instead of the pack ice, including one group of up to 40,000 animals at Point Shmidt, a spot that had not been used by walruses as a haulout for a century. Russian biologists estimate that 3,000 to 4,000 mostly young animals were crushed in stampedes when polar bears, hunters or low-flying aircraft startled walruses and sent them rushing to the safety of the sea.

    "It doesn't address the reality that things are happening rapidly with walrus and we need to be very, very careful in what we do," Cummings said of the lease plan.

    The Chukchi Sea also is home to one of two U.S. polar bear populations. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is days away from deciding whether polar bears should be declared threatened because of global warming and its effect on the animal's primary habitat, sea ice.

    "The chances for the continued survival of this icon of the Arctic will be greatly diminished if its last remaining critical habitat is turned into a vast oil and gas field," said Margaret Williams, managing director of World Wildlife Fund's Kamchatka and Bering Sea Program.

    Polar bears spend most of their lives on sea ice. They use sea ice to hunt their primary prey, ringed seals. In Alaska, females use sea ice to den or to reach denning areas on land.

    Arctic sea ice last summer plummeted to the lowest levels since satellite measurements began in 1979, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado.

    Area Not Near Shore

    The sale area will not include nearshore waters ranging from about 25 to 50 miles from the coast, Luthi said. That nearshore buffer is used by bowhead and beluga whales, other marine mammals, and marine birds migrating north in the spring, Luthi said, as well as subsistence hunters from coastal villages.

    Cummings said the agency used inadequate standards for assessing the effect of sound from exploration seismic and drilling activity. It also failed to take into account recent sightings of endangered fin and humpback whales in the Chukchi Sea, he said.

    "The buffer may put activities out of sight from land but it certainly doesn't shield the land from an oil spill," he said.