>>Oil versus the coast: the state's silence
BYLINE: By ADAM NOSSITER, Associated Press Writer
DATELINE: NEW ORLEANS
BODY:
Gov. Kathleen Blanco was excited enough to deliver the news in person, on the floors of the state House and Senate last month: the U.S. Senate had just voted to dole out $541 million for coastal restoration.
That money is courtesy of U.S. taxpayers. "An outrage," Senate Budget Committee Chairman Judd Gregg, R-N.H., called it; Louisiana politicians of all stripes, on the other hand, were jubilant and self-congratulatory. A deep-pockets sugar daddy was beginning to assume the $16 billion bill for Louisiana's loss of wetlands.
The politicians haven't been similary voluble about recent science news suggesting the tab might reasonably go someplace besides to our fellow citizens. An exhaustive new study by government scientists points the finger, convincingly, at oil and gas companies.
The scientists picked five areas at the bottom of Louisiana's ragged boot and demonstrated what has been bruited about for years: sucking oil and gas out of the marsh has caused it to disappear. "Rapid subsidence and associated wetland loss were largely induced by extraction of hydrocarbons and associated formation water," wrote Robert Morton and others from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). "Formation water" is jargon for the stuff that comes up with the oil.
Their corollary, about which Louisiana politicians have been equally silent: as oil and gas production in the marsh has dropped sharply since its 1970 peak, so has the rate of wetlands loss. Today, that loss would be low, according to a telling graph in the USGS report.
Advertising these incovenient facts wouldn't serve the atmosphere of crisis with which local pols have surrounded the problem. This has undoubtedly aided their quest for federal money, if not the public's understanding. And it would clash with the unwritten catechism in Louisiana before and after Huey Long: never get crosswise with big oil.
Indeed, for all the anguished pleas, gnashings of teeth, and supplications to the federal government to save Louisiana from sinking, never once has the state confronted what is likely to be the real culprit in wetlands-loss, most of which occurred in the 1960s and 1970s, according to Morton. (Other scientists posit long-term, continuing geological shifts as the most important cause for Louisiana's wetland loss; Morton and co. are dismissive, though some neutral observers aren't so sure).
A handful of private lawyers have taken on oil and gas. But not the state.
"The state has been the most silent, reluctant partner in this game," said Oliver Houck of the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic. "I think the trade-off is all but explicit," Houck said. "They want to get huge amounts of federal money. They feel that if they alienate the oil industry, they might miss their chance," he added.
"They've got 15 to 16 billion dollars hanging fire, and if the oil and gas industry puts in one negative word, that funding would be in jeopardy," said Houck. "Here, the state has never once sued oil and gas."
To be sure, in an atmosphere where the merest hint that more should be expected out of big oil is regarded as anathema, the idea of enlisting state lawyers is probably far-fetched.
Nobody testified last spring against a Louisiana legislator's perenially-proposed oil processing tax, the proposal's death was so certain. Just talking about such a tax was dead wrong and has probably frightened oil away from Louisiana, according to Republican state senator Max Malone - ignoring the fact that other areas beside the Louisiana marsh, like Texas, Oklahoma, Wyoming, and New Mexico, are geologically far more appealing to the drillers.
So it's up to the lawyers. But they too are operating in a hostile environment. The Louisiana Supreme Court, in a January opinion, said it was terribly sorry about what had happened to the coast. But it wasn't about to hold Castex Energy responsible for ruining land owned by the Terrebonne Parish School Board, having built canals and "altered the hydrology of the marsh."
The state, with all its expertise, was far better placed than any court to take up such a complicated matter. This was quite a switch from a decision two years before - as one of Houck's Tulane graduate students, Noah Perch-Ahern, points out in a recent paper - where the Louisiana Supremes were unwilling to "leave only understaffed and underfunded state agencies to oppose the oil companies," in their words.
The court need not have worried. That challenge is one that hasn't yet been taken up.
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EDITOR'S NOTE: Adam Nossiter is a reporter for The Associated Press in New Orleans.
LOAD-DATE: July 18, 2005 |
