CDP: Oceans Clips: August 30, 2022
Pipeline Operator Agrees To Guilty Plea In Calif. Spill. According to Politico, “A pipeline operator and two subsidiaries agreed Friday to plead guilty to negligently discharging oil off the Southern California coast in connection with a pipeline break that covered beaches with blobs of crude. The U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles said in a statement that Houston-based Amplify Energy Corp. and two subsidiaries agreed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor and pay a $7 million fine and nearly $6 million in expenses incurred by government entities, including the Coast Guard. The companies would also install a new leak detection system for pipelines and train employees to identify and respond to potential leaks, the statement said. "Our nation's environmental laws are designed to protect our communities and oceans from hazardous pollutants, including oil," said Scot Adair, special agent in charge of EPA's criminal investigation division in California. "Amplify Energy's agreement to plead guilty today demonstrates that companies that negligently violate those laws will be held responsible for their crimes." The plea agreements still need to be approved by U.S. District Judge David Carter.” [Politico, 8/29/22 (=)]
Judge Issues Permanent Injunction On Biden Ban On New Oil And Gas Leasing On Federal Lands, Waters. According to the Center Square, “A federal judge sided with Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry and 12 other plaintiff states in a Louisiana-led lawsuit, issuing a permanent injunction against the Biden administration’s moratorium on new oil and gas leases on federal lands and water. U.S. District Court Judge Terry Doughty issued the permanent injunction, declaring that the president exceeded his authority when halting oil and gas leasing and drilling permits. “I am pleased the Court recognized that the President stepped outside his authority,” Landry said in a statement. “Biden’s energy policies have crushed American families with higher energy bills for their homes and vehicles.” Doughty ruled that Biden’s executive order issued Jan. 27, 2021, violated the Mineral Leasing Act (MLA) and Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (OCSLA) and was “beyond the authority of the President of the United States. Even the President cannot make significant changes to the OCSLA and/or the MLA that Congress did not delegate.” The order implemented a moratorium on new development of oil and gas fields on federal lands just days after the U.S. Interior Department also imposed restrictions on existing leases. Also under Biden's directive, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and Bureau of Land Management halted long-planned lease sales, which the lawsuit argued violated federal law and the procedural requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act.” [Center Square, 8/29/22 (=)]
Furniture Giant Ikea Buys Stake In Three Offshore Wind Farms. According to Politico, “The owner of furniture giant Ikea is buying a stake in three large Swedish offshore wind farms to offset its carbon footprint. Ingka Investments — the investment arm of the Ingka Group, the company that owns and operates most Ikea retail stores — said the wind farms developed by the Swedish developer OX2 could produce enough energy to power 25 percent of the country’s electricity demand. The move reflects a trend in corporations inking agreements to buy clean energy as climate considerations become a common demand from investors and shareholders. Google, Facebook and Microsoft are among the large U.S. companies greening their balance sheet through clean-power investments.” [Politico, 8/29/22 (=)]
Deep-Sea Riches: Mining A Remote Ecosystem. According to the New York Times, “Millions of years ago, a shark lost a tooth. The tooth fell thousands of feet and settled on the deep ocean floor. Over millennia, minerals in the seawater gradually coated the tooth with layers of metals: cobalt, copper, iron, manganese
and nickel — with traces of lithium and rare-earth elements like yttrium. The metals accumulated slowly, a few millimeters every million years. The result was a potato-size lump known as a polymetallic nodule. Today, billions of tons of these nodules cover wide swaths of the ocean floor, several miles below the surface. One of the largest areas is the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, which covers 1.7 million miles of the Pacific seabed and holds vast fields of nodules.” [New York Times, 8/29/22 (=)]
Nations Fail To Reach Deal On UN Treaty To Protect Sea Life. According to Politico, “Diplomats from around the world have failed to reach agreement on a United Nations treaty designed to protect marine life on the high seas, after a fifth round of talks ended in an impasse. Negotiations at U.N. headquarters in New York were suspended early Saturday following two weeks of talks that environmentalists had hoped would close a gap in international marine protection measures. A proposed treaty would set rules for protecting biodiversity in two-thirds of the world's ocean areas that are outside of national jurisdictions. Less than 1 percent of the high seas is protected without a new treaty, and "pockets of marine protection are not enough" for threatened species, said Maxine Burkett, the United States deputy assistant secretary of State who was involved in negotiations. The global goal is to set aside 30 percent of ocean area as some kind of marine sanctuary.” [Politico, 8/29/22 (=)]
Senators Want NOAA To Lead Illegal Fishing Crackdown. According to Politico, “NOAA would be required to create a blacklist of foreign vessels and their owners under new bipartisan legislation to crack down on illegal international fishing. The Senate bill, introduced by Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska), would also direct the administration to address the issue in any relevant international agreements. S. 4773, the “Fighting Foreign Illegal Seafood Harvest (FISH) Act," would prohibit any blacklisted vessels from entering U.S. ports and waters if they had been found to have engaged in illegal fishing. It would also direct the Coast Guard to increase its at-sea inspections of foreign vessels if they’re suspected of illegal fishing.” [Politico, 8/29/22 (=)]
Greenland Ice Sheet Set To Raise Sea Levels By Nearly A Foot, Study Finds. According to the Washington Post, “Human-driven climate change has set in motion massive ice losses in Greenland that couldn’t be halted even if the world stopped emitting greenhouse gases today, according to a new study published Monday. The findings in Nature Climate Change project that it is now inevitable that 3.3 percent of the Greenland ice sheet will melt — equal to 110 trillion tons of ice, the researchers said. That will trigger nearly a foot of global sea-level rise. The predictions are more dire than other forecasts, though they use different assumptions. While the study did not specify a time frame for the melting and sea-level rise, the authors suggested much of it can play out between now and the year 2100.” [Washington Post, 8/29/22 (=)]
An Investigation Leads To The Bottom Of The Pacific. According to the New York Times, “Our journey began in the Pacific Ocean, off the coast of Mexico, where a New York Times photographer and I met the Maersk Launcher, a giant former offshore oil drilling supply ship that had been repurposed for a very unusual task: collecting potato-size rocks from the ocean floor. When Tamir Kalifa, the photographer, and I arrived in a small fishing boat, the giant ship was just a few miles from the shore preparing for its return to San Diego. The ship had spent the previous six weeks at sea with a crew made up mostly of scientists who were trying to evaluate how lifting these rocks, which are stuffed with metals needed to build batteries for electric vehicles, would affect aquatic life. We had set out to investigate the heated debate over seabed mining, the subject of an article published in The Times on Monday. We wanted to know: Is collecting these rocks, known as polymetallic nodules, which contain nickel, cobalt, copper and manganese, an environmentally friendly solution to the global shortage of these metals, or a threat itself to the delicate seabed, one of the last spots on earth largely untouched by humans? At this point, the mining is just exploratory, but industrial scale mining could begin as soon as 2024.” [New York Times, 8/29/22 (=)]
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