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Politics : The Obama - Clinton Disaster -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wayners who wrote (25698)	7/11/2010 9:02:40 PM
From: Hope Praytochange	Respond to of 103300

The administration suffered a setback in its effort to enforce the moratorium on Thursday when the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals declined to suspend a lower court's order lifting the ban. The Fifth Circuit is expected to hear the administration's appeal of the lower court ruling by the end of August. A spokeswoman for Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said he intends to issue a new moratorium order. During a conference call with journalists Friday, the commission's two co-chairmen—former U.S. Sen. Bob Graham and William K. Reilly, head of the Environmental Protection Agency under President George H.W. Bush—cautioned that they aren't going to rush their deliberations on the drilling ban. "It's not going to be the priority of the commission to consider the moratorium," said Mr. Reilly. "The question we have is, is this a one-off event [caused by] a series of bad decisions" or evidence of broader "systemic issues" in the industry, Mr. Reilly said. He said the panel intends to examine the "organizational characteristics" of the companies, the industry and the government regulators involved, and "the culture that may have induced the decisions" that contributed to the accident. Mr. Graham described the hearings the commission is holding in the coming week as an opportunity to hear from "the people most directly affected by this tragedy," including representatives of the oil and fishing industries and state officials. Oil industry officials and lawmakers from oil states are concerned the Reilly-Graham panel has too many environmentalists or figures with records of hostility toward offshore drilling. None of the members of the commission has direct experience with offshore drilling. Mr. Reilly, a former head of the World Wildlife Fund and now chief executive of an investment group that finances water-improvement projects in developing countries, is a longtime member of the board of oil giant ConocoPhillips, which cites his "environmental regulatory background" among the reasons he is "well qualified" for the board. Several other commission members have experience responding to oil spills or studying their long-term effects. With seven members, the spill commission is smaller than the 12-member commission set up in 1979 by then-President Jimmy Carter to investigate the nuclear accident at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania. That panel included figures from academia, the environmental movement and politics. But members also included a labor leader, a journalist and two professors of engineering, one who specialized in nuclear engineering. In addition to Messrs. Reilly and Graham, the spill commission's members include Donald Boesch, a professor of marine science at the University of Maryland; Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council; Terry Garcia, an executive vice president at the National Geographic Society; Cherry Murray, dean of the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences; and Frances Ulmer, chancellor of the University of Alaska Anchorage. Mr. Graham, as a U.S. senator representing Florida from 1987 until 2005, frequently spoke out against drilling for oil off that state's coast—a view common among many Florida politicians. In a May 6 Washington Post blog post, Mr. Boesch, an expert on the environmental effects of offshore energy development, said the effects of drilling on Gulf Coast wetlands "represent an environmental catastrophe." Ms. Beinecke, writing on the Huffington Post website on May 27, blamed the Deepwater Horizon disaster on "America's addiction to oil" and called for broadening the drilling ban to cover wells in less than 500 feet of water. Through a spokesman, Ms. Beinecke declined to comment. Mr. Boesch, a Louisiana native, said in an interview that he is "sensitive to the fact that if we're proposing new procedures and policies, that they do accomplish the objective of protecting the environment but in a way that isn't unnecessarily harmful to the nation's energy supply and the local economies." Messrs. Graham and Reilly have appointed Richard Sears, a former vice president for exploration and deep-water technical evaluation with the U.S. unit of Royal Dutch Shell, as their science and engineering adviser. "The idea that we come at this as novices does not fully appreciate the backgrounds" of the commissioners or their advisers, Mr. Graham said.