President Chimp Moves To Open Sonoma, Mendocino, Humboldt Coasts To Oil Drilling - Chronicle

[hatrack]

(12-28) 18:51 PST -- The federal government is taking steps that may open California's fabled coast to oil drilling in as few as three years, an action that could place dozens of platforms off the Sonoma, Mendocino and Humboldt coasts, and raises the specter of spills, air pollution and increased ship traffic into San Francisco Bay.

Millions of acres of oil deposits, mapped in the 1980s when then-Interior Secretary James Watt and Energy Secretary Donald Hodel pushed for California exploration, lie a few miles from the forested North Coast and near the mouth of the Russian River, as well as off Malibu, Santa Monica and La Jolla in Southern California.

"These are the targets," said Richard Charter, a lobbyist for the Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund who worked for three decades to win congressional bans on offshore drilling. "You couldn't design a better formula to create adverse impacts on California's coastal-dependent economy." The bans that protected both of the nation's coasts beginning in 1981, from California to the Pacific Northwest to the Atlantic Coast and the Straits of Florida, ended this year when Congress let the moratorium lapse.

President-elect Barack Obama hasn't said whether he would overturn President Bush's lifting last summer of the ban on drilling, as gas prices reached a historic high. Sen. Ken Salazar, D-Col., Obama's pick as interior secretary and head of the nation's ocean-drilling agency, hasn't said what he would do in coastal waters. The Interior Department has moved to open some or all federal waters, which begin 3 miles from shore and are outside state control, for exploration as early as 2010. Rigs could go up in 2012.

EDIT

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/12/28/MN4G14QMVE.DTL

[AndyA]

1. Let's be sure to ruin what little natural areas we have left.

We should be able to put an end to all life on Earth in record time, because accidents never happen offshore, do they? :eyes:

[madrchsod]

2. rigs up in three years?

better start building some new rigs tomorrow....http://www.rigzone.com/data/utilization_trends.asp

[Gregorian]

3. It's a fight to the death up here. We are liberals. Not fools.

It'll never happen.

And people really need to understand math before they start searching for consumable energy sources.

If we doubled the amount of petroleum we believe is in the ground at this moment, it would only last us a very very short period of time due to the fact that the planet is growing, and use is growing.

Folks, no amount of oil will help us now. If you want more info, I can show you a link that describes it in detail.

Basically, if you have a bottle that fills in one hour with a bacteria that doubles every minute, at 59 minutes the bottle is HALF FULL. Everything looks fine. But in the next two minutes you not only fill the rest of the bottle, but another as well. And you need double all of the resources that you have ever consumed. That's a little off, but it's the idea.

[diane in sf]

4. We won't let it happen.

[roguevalley]

5. utterly godless, these.

[femrap]

6. Just how fucking stupid can these men

be??? Willfully ignorant! I'm sick of them. 'Let's take absolutely anything and everything from the Earth and use it...while us white boys make fuckloads of $$$$.' I'm so sick of them.

Salazar is a rancher in Colorado...I don't think he cares much about the coastline. We'll see. He has a horrid voting record....a repugnant lite. His brother was elected at the same time he was...but in the House. I don't trust him. What does being a rancher make you an expert on being Sec'y of Interior??????????

Too bad he isn't a she (like Caroline Kennedy) and fucking everyone would be asking that question. Big deal...he has land where cows fuck...gee whiz...takes a genius to organize that????

I'M SICK OF IT!