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!

Yesterday, I attended a Congressional subcommittee hearing in San Francisco to talk about the Cosco Busan oil spill.  The hearing was led by Representative Elijah Cummings, chair of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Subcommittee on Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation (how’s that for a mouthful!).  Impressively, all of our Bay Area representatives showed – Pelosi, Woolsey, Lee, Miller, Tauscher, Lofgren, Lantos, and McNerney – what a turnout!  And we had Rep. Richardson from the Los Angeles area, who rightly pointed out that maritime safety is a national issue. 

I was impressed with the questioning from our members of Congress.  They were asking the right questions.  How could such a mistake happen?  Why was the response so slow and disorganized?  How do we improve our laws and regulations to make sure that a spill like the ‘Cosco Busan’ never happens again? 

I was not as impressed with the Coast Guard testimony.  While they owned up to the coordination problems, the Coast Guard kept saying that the response was appropriate.  I don’t understand how that can be, when no containment boom was placed around the ‘Cosco Busan’ to prevent oil from escaping out into the Bay?  For those interested, check out this YouTube version of the oil spill distribution, which demonstrates just how the strong tides and currents in San Francisco Bay made the oil churn through the Bay like it was in a washing machine.  Once the oil wasn’t initially contained, it was already too late. 

It seems like a lot of investigations have started.  The Coast Guard is doing its own investigation.  The National Transportation Safety Board is doing an investigation.  Governor Schwarzenegger has asked the Office of Spill Prevention and Response to conduct an investigation.  The US Attorney is doing an investigation.  And yesterday, Speaker Pelosi called for an Inspector General’s investigation.  Soon we will need an investigation to keep track of the investigations!  But unfortunately, none of these investigations are independent.  We need an independent, fresh look at our shipping safety regulations.  The regulations we have in place now are not enough to deal with the volume and size of ships we have moving through places like San Francisco Bay. 

We’re calling for an independent commission that will make recommendations about how to improve our shipping safety laws.  Check out our op-ed and go to this action alert to send a message to our elected leaders.

And let’s hope we can put the safeguards in place to make sure that our waters and wildlife don’t have to suffer from this pollution again in the future! 

Bird covered in oil from a spill on Sakhalin Island

One of our worst nightmares came true yesterday, when a cargo ship spilled 58,000 gallons of bunker fuel into San FranciscoBay.  The ship was traveling out of San FranciscoBay in heavy fog when it hit the BayBridge.

I commute into work on the ferry, so I was on the look-out for oil and oil spill response this morning.  Standing out on the front deck of the ferry, I smelled the oil before I saw it; there’s certainly a strong smell of oil hanging in the air.  I saw ribbons of oil, many with dark globules of floating oil, fromRichardsonBay in Sausalito to the FerryBuilding in San Francisco.  Some areas were harder hit than others – I particularly saw a lot of oil near Alcatraz and Fisherman’s Wharf, two of San Francisco’s biggest tourist attractions.  

According to news reports, beaches to the north of Golden GateBridge on the Pacific have been the worst hit so far – apparently the tide and the currents pushed the oil that direction.

This article starts to talk about some of the effects of the oil spill:  http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/11/08/MND7T870A.DTL  We’re just starting to see a lot of birds come back into the Bay for the winter, including cormorants, grebes, and pelicans, all of which I saw this morning from the ferry. We can only hope and pray that the effects on fisheries and birds are not serious.

To my surprise, I did not see any oil skimmers or other oil spill response equipment working in the Bay this morning.  I did see one Coast Guard helicopter, hopefully looking for oil sheens.  But I was surprised at the lack of oil spill response boats, especially since the weather is pretty good right now and the Bay is calm – as good conditions as you can get for cleaning up spilled oil.

According to this article, officials are “meeting” about how to respond:  http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/11/08/BAD8T8PLU.DTL  On the radio this morning, one official said proudly that 13 agencies were involved in the response.  I have a sinking feeling that it’s going to take a lot of meetings to get everyone on the same page before we see oil spill response vessels out on the Bay!

This is why we talk about the need for good oil spill response plans BEFORE accidents like this happen!  Once they happen, time is of the essence to clean up whatever is possible.  This is why we are so worried about the potential for oil spills in places like SakhalinIsland and Alaska – where the biological resources or so rich, yet we don’t have the cleanup technologies to prevent the damage from a major oil spill when it happens.  And as this oil spill shows, even with some of the best oil spill prevention measures, accidents do happen.  It’s not a question of if, but a question of when.

Of course, once the oil is in the water, it’s pretty much too late.  At best it will be possible to clean up a tiny fraction of the oil spilled, even in the best conditions.  I’m sure we’ll be spending a lot of time figuring out who’s guilty.  From the ferry, I could see the guilty cargo ship, with Hanjin spelled in large letters on the side.  But in this article (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/11/08/BAH3T81G7.DTL), the finger-pointing for responsibility is already starting:  “The ship is owned by a Greek firm that is chartering the vessel to Hanjin Shipping Co. Ltd. of Seoul. Hanjin spokeswoman Sonya Cho said the ship ‘is operated by the Greek owner and his crew’ and that Hanjin ‘has no responsibility in any matter concerning this accident.’”  Hmmmm, sounds like Exxon to me!  Nice way to start avoiding responsibility.