At a rally last year in Southern California, high school students from Malibu make their commitment known with face paint.

This week, our staff worked up and down the West Coast of North America to wean the United States off of our addiction to fossil fuels.  In Oregon, Rory Cox and Sarah Kagan helped organize a rally in Salem protesting new proposed Liquefied Natural Gas terminals.  Proposals to build new terminals in Coos Bay and along the Columbia River would turn Oregon into an energy colony to feed gas to the California market.

Remember the old slogan “Don’t Californicate Oregon”?  Well, these LNG terminals would do just that.  So Rory and Sarah worked with our partners in Oregon to rally on the capitol steps in Salem, bringing over 200 people together to voice their opposition to these polluting and unnecessary terminals.  Why would Oregon want to derail its renewable energy initiatives just to feed LNG, a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, to California?  Click here to read more about the protest and see photos as well as a video clip!

At the same time, up in Alaska, our nation’s Minerals Management Service was busy leasing off vast areas of the Chukchi Sea in the Arctic to oil and gas companies.  Shell was the high bidder, with ConocoPhillips and Statoil not far behind.  Last week, we filed a lawsuit challenging the sale.  At the lease sale itself, Alaska Program Associate Rachel James and Program Fellow Rebecca Noblin worked with Alaska Natives from the Arctic to make sure that their protests were heard by the media.  Rebecca even donned a polar bear suit to draw attention to the threats to the polar bears from drilling in the “Polar Bear Seas” and from increased greenhouse gas emissions that will result from the massive amount of proposed drilling.  Click here to read a live blog from the event hosted by our friends and colleagues at Alaska Wilderness League and see photos.  And click here to read a great opinion piece by our long-term partner Rick Steiner that describes the insanity of the Chukchi lease sale.

Let’s hope we can take Rick’s words to heart and break our fossil fuel addiction in North America.  We need to do this – to protect our planet from global warming and oil spills as well as to build a new green economy.  That’s what our staff was doing all this week, up and down the West Coast!

Photo by Vladimir Gorbunov.

The government’s decision to delay listing the polar bear as threatened is certainly getting a lot of press – and thankfully, the press is linking the polar bear to the government’s incomprehensible decision to move forward with oil and gas lease sales in the Chukchi Sea.

Check out the following links for some great editorials on the subject:

Regulatory Games and the Polar Bear (The New York Times)

Polar Bears:  Stop Oil, Gas Leases (Seattle Post-Intelligencer)

Protecting Polar Bears (The Los Angeles Times)

The Threatened Polar Bear (The Washington Post)

Meanwhile, Congressman Ed Markey is holding a hearing about the polar bear and the Chukchi Lease Sale in the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming.  The hearing is at 9:30 Eastern Standard Time on Thursday, January 17.  The panel will be broadcast over the internet for those interested:  It can be accessed by going tohttp://globalwarming.house.gov/home and clicking on the box next to the picture of Ed Markey on the left hand side.  The box reads “Next Hearing–Polar Bears on Thin Ice- Thurs. Jan. 17 at 9:30am”

If anyone has trouble with that link they can also try here.

Let’s hope that Minerals Management Service is paying attention and chooses to delay the Chukchi Lease Sales!

Photo by Vladimir Gorbunov.

Welcome back to Pacific Environment’s blog in 2008.  Over the next year, check back to this blog to find interesting tidbits and news related to our work to protect the Pacific Rim environment!

A couple of items caught my eye in the last couple of days.  First of all, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service delayed its decision about whether to list the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act.  Supposedly the delay is to allow the Service to consider new scientific studies.  Yet the studies – which demonstrate sea ice in the Arctic receding even more rapidly than originally thought – only confirm the critical need to act now.

The Fish and Wildlife Service’s delay in making a decision now allows the Minerals Management Service to proceed unhindered with a proposed oil and gas lease sale in the Chukchi Sea in February.  Recent news articles suggest that both Exxon and Shell are interested in the lease sale.  Is it coincidence that the Fish and Wildlife Service’s delay allows the government to move forward with this lease, which will only increase the threats to the polar bears?  I think not. Click here to read a press release from our partners at Center for Biological Diversity or click here for an article that explains the connection between the polar bear delay and the Chukchi lease sale.

We fiddle while the Arctic burns.

Meanwhile, at least South Korea is taking some action.  Click here to learn that South Korea is taking action to ban single-hulled tankers by 2010, following its disastrous oil spill last month.  Wait, you say, weren’t single-hulled tankers banned after the Exxon Valdez?  No, unfortunately not.  The Valdez spill led to an international agreement to phase out single-hulled tankers by 2015.  Now, South Korea is making a commitment to moving up that timeline.  Sometimes it takes an accident like they experienced to force action.  We could learn something from Korea.

This is the time of year when many people think about charitable giving and how to create positive change for the year ahead.  If you like what you have been reading on this blog, I would encourage you to donate to Pacific Environment.

On this blog, you’ve read just a few of the stories about our on-the-ground work around the Pacific Rim and why our staff are so effective at dealing with the huge environmental challenges that our world faces today.  We’ve had a great year, with victories in China, Russia, Alaska, and California.  Your support will help us achieve even more great results around the Pacific Rim in 2008!  Just click here if you would like to support us with a year-end, tax-deductible donation.

Thank you for your support, and thank you for all that you do to make this world a better place!  From all of us here at Pacific Environment, best wishes for the holidays and New Year!

Here’s to a great 2008!

Happy Holidays,

David Gordon

This morning, we woke up to news about another major Pacific Rim oil spill.   This time, it appears as though a barge with a crane struck an oil tanker off the coast of South Korea in the Yellow Sea, spilling over 10,000 tons of oil.  This is the third major oil spill we have seen in a month – in San Francisco Bay, in the Black Sea, and now in the Yellow Sea.

Time will tell how bad the damage will be from this latest spill, though given the amount of oil spilled, and the likelihood that less than 20% of the oil will be recovered, we can expect the impacts to be severe.  Earlier this year, I attended an oil spill workshop in Japan and met colleagues in Korea working to prevent oil spills.  They were particularly worried about the growth in shipping of oil – symbolized by new tankers coming from Sakhalin along the coast of Korea – and the likelihood of accidents.  Up until then, their worst catastrophe had been the Sea Prince spill in 1995.  Today’s spill involves twice as much oil as the Sea Prince.

Here’s an article that details the fact that this was a single-hulled tanker – a dinosaur that long ago should have been retired in favor of double-hulled tankers.  This area in the Yellow Sea is a very busy region for shipping.  Given growth of shipping around the Pacific Rim, I hope this will be a wake-up call for the International Maritime Organization and governments to address the dire need to improve shipping safety.

Meanwhile, here in San Francisco Bay, more details are coming out about the bar pilot’s mishandling of the Cosco Busan, leading to our spill.  It seems clear that the pilot made numerous mistakes that led to the spill, including leaving port in such heavy fog without electronic equipment that either was working properly or that he understood and ordering the ship to full speed in heavy fog when he didn’t understand his location.  A terrible, preventable tragedy.  We need legislative action in Congress to make sure that such accidents around the Pacific Rim are prevented in the future.

Today brought yet another of the myriad of articles reporting record melting of sea ice in the Arctic: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/09/21/MNMISACP7.DTL

The sea ice has melted to record lows below.  Our colleague Kassie Siegel over at Center for Biological Diversity says that it’s melted more this year than was originally projected for 2050.  This news comes just after scientists said that polar bears will largely be extinct by 2050: http://www.pacificenvironment.org/article.php?id=2571

The Arctic, the air conditioner for the earth, is melting.  So far, what’s the response?  Let’s explore for more oil and gas in the Arctic.  Russia is laying claim to a large portion of the Arctic: http://uk.reuters.com/article/scienceNews/idUKL2082113920070920, primarily for oil and gas development.  Or check out this map, which shows proposed and existing oil and gas leases in the Arctic, Bering Sea, and the Sea of Okhotsk, along with Russia’s territorial claims.

Looks like we’re zoning the Arctic for oil and gas.  Ironic, isn’t it?  There are winners and losers in climate change, and the large oil companies will try to be winners.  I think a smarter way to go would be to push for an Arctic treaty to help protect the Arctic as we deal with climate change.