The United States is not ready to clean up an oil spill in the Arctic, the head of the Coast Guard said yesterday.
The warning comes as Congress prepares to open up more drilling in a region quickly being transformed by climate change.
Adm. Paul Zukunft said that the challenges of cleaning up the BP PLC Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010 in the Gulf of Mexico—where the conditions were much more favorable—show the extreme difficulty of Arctic oil spill recovery.
“We saw during Deepwater Horizon, whenever the seas are over 4 feet, our ability to mechanically remove oil was virtually impossible,” he said at a Washington symposium yesterday hosted by the U.S. Arctic Research Commission. “Four-foot seas up there [in the Arctic] would probably be a pretty darned good day, so certainly environmental conditions weigh heavily in addition to just the remoteness.”
The House budget proposal, which is to be marked up today, could begin the process of opening up drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The GOP spending plan, similar to that of the White House, outlines $5 billion that some see as coming from drilling in the refuge, which has long been a target of conservatives in Washington.
Source: Scientific American
