Inupiat whaling, drilling at stake in recent Alaskan mayor’s race

Independent photojournalists Will Rose and Kajsa Sjölander were on Alaska’s North Slope in November to document traditional whaling by the native Inupiat people and found themselves at the height of a highly charged mayoral election season, with whaling and a gargantuan new Shell oil drilling project at stake.

Check out a fascinating photo gallery of images from their trip, exclusive to the Los Angeles Times.

The two were on hand as Charlotte Brower became the first female mayor for Alaska’s North Borough, a regional municipality that covers the north part of the state, a vast terrain with only eight small communities comprising about 10,000 mostly Inupiat Eskimos. The North Borough mayoralty, including the town of Barrow, has significant influence regarding federal decisions about offshore oil drilling and other resource uses affecting the area.

Royal Dutch Shell has already received some permits to begin drilling in the Chukchi Sea in 2012 but has been dogged by resistance such as a 2007 lawsuit by outgoing mayor Edward Itta that challenged the environmental effects of drilling and any potential spill –- all very real in the wake of the large Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska in 1989 and BP’s Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.

Drilling in Arctic waters is subject to many technical hurdles, but receding ice packs resulting from global warming have made drilling more enticing.

Though Brower is expected to continue to have relatively friendly relations with Shell, ConocoPhillips and other oil companies who are looking to drill off the coast, there were marked differences between her and the second-place finisher, former five-term mayor George Ahmaogak Sr. Notably, Brower made a point of declaring that she was anti-drilling and the borough needs someone to “stand up to the oil companies.” Her husband works with the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission. Ahmaogak, who says he too is against drilling but wants to make sure the community continues to receive millions of dollars in oil revenue, was a former Alaska community affairs manager for Shell. In the North Borough, however, lines of allegiance are quite hard to draw; Ahmaogak’s wife is a former head of the whaling commission. Subsequently, the race was tight, with Brower winning 1,022 votes to Ahmaogak’s 960.

Rose, who is English, and Sjölander, who is Swedish, have spent the last three years documenting the effects of climate change on the polar regions. They call their project 70°, because most of their work has turned out to be along the 70th parallel -– cutting through parts of the Arctic Ocean, Canada, Russia, Greenland, the United States and north Scandinavia.

“The trip to Alaska seemed a logical progression, as Shell have received the preliminary permits to drill in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas in 2012,” wrote Rose and Sjölander in an email to The Times from their home outside Gothenberg, Sweden. “At the same time, the Inupiat hunters are noticing changes in climate, sea ice and increasing numbers of polar bears are coming to shore around Kaktovik.

“Every autumn, polar bears come to Kaktovik in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to feed on the remains of bowhead whales from the traditional Inupiat harvest, but in recent years they have come in much larger numbers. Scientists are using DNA from hair snares to determine which bears show up in Kaktovik, and for how long. This information can help wildlife managers minimize human-bear conflicts, and understand how the animals are faring as climate change reduces the amount of time they can spend on the sea ice hunting their preferred prey, seals.”

The Inupiat hunt bowhead whales and are allowed 80 strikes on the whales during the fall hunt. A strike is an attack on a whale, though an animal sometimes escapes. In 2010 the community took 46 whales, which they split among themselves for food according to traditional distribution formulas.

Environmental concerns and protection of the traditional whaling culture are definitely top of mind in the region. The two journalists found that the small town of Point Hope was particularly active in fighting offshore drilling plans.

“The tribal government of Point Hope, backed by a group of 12 environmental organizations and Earth Justice, have challenged the validity of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement’s conditional approval of Shell’s exploration plan. The decision has now been delayed in the courts again till December. The petition states that the BOEMRE decision violates the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act and the National Environmental Policy Act. Former president of the Point Hope tribal government, Caroline Cannon, has fought the offshore plans for over five years,” write Rose and Sjölander.
 
The pair penned a story about their travels in the region and the politics around the election, which may be part of their upcoming 70° website. In that story, Point Hope city Mayor Steve Oomittuk told them, “The animals make us who we are; they’re our clothing, our shelter, our food, our spirituality, a way of life that has been passed down from generation to generation for thousands of years. Without the animals, we aren’t who we are, we are not the people of Point Hope.”

Rose said he felt that an embezzlement charge swung the election. “I think that Ahmoagak’s wife, Maggie, being charged with embezzling $475,000 from the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission played a part,” he wrote. “She served as the group’s executive director for 17 years until 2007. When she got fired after the financial irregularities were uncovered, George was working for Shell at the same time. The Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission is supposed to protect the interests of the subsistence whaling community.”

The amount of money at stake is enormous. A Shell-commissioned study by consulting company Northern Economics and the University of Alaska Anchorage estimates that new drilling plans could generate $176 billion in federal, state and local tax revenue over a 45-year period from 2012 to 2057. Of that, $3.7 billion would go to the North Slope Borough.

Both Rose and Sjölander hope their futures includes a lot more snowy photos: “Our original idea was to circumnavigate the 70th parallel in 1 – 2 years, by skiing, sled or whatever means necessary. That sadly remains a dream, but we do our best by saving up and hoping to get commissions that allow us to continue with our project.”

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Photo: The Brower family of Barrow, Alaska, welcome community elders for a feast in their home after taking a bowhead whale during the fall subsistence hunt. Recent North Slope Borough elections reflected concerns over new proposed offshore oil drilling that could threaten sea life. Credit: Will Rose and Kajsa Sjolander

Doug Brinkley, Rep. Don Young squabble over Arctic refuge

Famed biographer Doug Brinkley has written exhaustively on the history of Alaskan wilderness, but Alaskan Rep. Don Young was having none of it recently when it came to the issue of drilling for oil at the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

The two men clashed bitterly last Friday as Brinkley, a professor at Rice University and the author most recently of “The Quiet World: Saving Alaska’s Wilderness Kingdom 1979-1960,” testified at a House Natural Resources Committee meeting regarding the effects of drilling in the refuge. Young interrupted Brinkley’s testimony, calling him “Dr. Rice” and saying his testimony was “garbage.”

“Dr. Brinkley. Rice is a university,” Brinkley shot back. “I know you went to Yuba College and you couldn't graduate.”

Young, getting visibly upset, retorted: “I'll call you anything I want to call you when you sit in that chair. You just be quiet.”

"You don't own me," Brinkley said. "I pay your salary.”

Young sat through the testimony of several environmentalists at the panel, and when he got his chance to speak he noted in another YouTube clip featured on his congressional website that the Alaskan acreage they were talking about “is not the pristine area with wolves laying next to caribou, it’ll be a cold day in Saudi Arabia when that happens,” and added: “We’ve heard from environmentalists, and I understand their beliefs, but they don’t know what they’re talking about.”

After the exchange, he said he was “pissed” about Brinkley’s comments.

Brinkley got the last word when he expressed his surprise to “hear a congressman today say there’s nothing in his district. It’s boring. It’s flat. It’s not exciting. I don’t know a representative who doesn’t love their district. Every state in America’s landscape is beautiful if you love it. But some people love money more than their homeland or where they live, and I’m afraid that that’s why this fight has to keep coming up 50 years later, we’re still trying to tell people the Arctic refuge is real. It belongs to the American people.”

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Photo: Musk ox move across an area of coastal plain inside the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge that could be considered for oil exploration in Alaska. Credit: Associated Press/Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Obama proposal would open Arctic and Gulf of Mexico to oil drilling

Arctic waters would be open to new oil and gas development under an Obama administration proposal that keeps the Pacific and Atlantic coasts off limits to new drilling.

The Interior Department’s plan steers a middle course, going too far in the view of environmental groups and not far enough in the eyes of House Republicans.

The proposal, which outlines offshore oil and gas leasing from 2012 to 2017, omits areas on the West and East coasts that the Bush administration planned to open to drilling. But it also calls for three lease sales off the coast of Alaska in environmentally fragile areas that have become a much contested frontier of energy production.

“This five-year program will make available for development more than three-quarters of undiscovered oil and gas resources estimated on the [Outer Continental Shelf], including frontier areas such as the Arctic, where we must proceed cautiously, safely and based on the best science available,” Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said.

Environmentalists condemned the Arctic leasing, warning there is no proven way to clean up oil spills in the remote far north, a place of ice floes, towering waves and winter darkness. “The risk to the fragile Arctic area and Alaska communities is clear,” said Athan Manuel of the Sierra Club. “Spill prevention, containment and response systems are not equipped to work in challenging Arctic conditions.”

GOP House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Doc Hastings, on the other hand, complained the proposal “places some of the most promising energy resources in the world off-limits.”

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Photo: A family of polar bears on the Beaufort Sea, where Shell plans to drill for oil and gas. Credit: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

Mysterious orange goo in Alaskan Arctic identified as tiny eggs

The mysterious orange goo that washed ashore at the northern Alaska village of Kivalina has made headlines around the world, seeming to vaguely portend some new sign of climate disaster or industrial mayhem.

Not so, though. Scientists for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration at Auke Bay in Juneau took samples of the weird orange material that was found floating in the harbor in Kivalina, 625 miles northwest of Anchorage -- and also on beaches, in rainwater and in a river 150 miles away. They concluded it was no man-made nightmare at all.

Rather, it's a large mass of microscopic eggs, researchers concluded, quieting the international alarm.

"We now think these are some sort of small crustacean egg or embryo, with a lipid oil droplet in the middle causing the orange color," said Jeep Rice, a lead scientist at the lab. "So this is natural. It is not chemical pollution; it is not a man-made substance."

Rice said scientists were quickly able to identify a cell structure within the material once they put it under a microscope, meaning they could "identify this as animal."

What kind of animal? Not sure yet, nor can researchers rule out the possibility that the eggs might be toxic -- samples have been sent to a NOAA lab on the East Coast for further testing.

-- Kim Murphy

Photo: The weird orange substance that washed ashore near the northwestern Alaskan village of Kivalina and other areas isn't man-made. Credit: Mida Swan / via Associated Press

Arctic oil spill could prove tough to clean

 

Shell Exploration's plan for exploratory oil and gas drilling in the Beaufort Sea won conditional approval from the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement. One of the big questions now is what happens if there's an oil spill.

Agency officials are expected as early as next week to act on Shell's oil spill response plan, which conservationists say falls short of the mark for responding to an accident in icy waters, often shrouded in darkness, hundreds of miles from the nearest deep-water port.

Earlier this month, Canada looked at the same issue: How hard would it be to clean up an oil spill in the Beaufort Sea, which straddles the border between the two countries. The answer? Really hard.

Even in the "summer" season between July and October, when Arctic drilling normally occurs, true open water without ice occurs only 54% to 88% of the time, even close to shore, according to the report, prepared for the National Energy Board by S.L. Ross Environmental Research Ltd. of Ottawa.

Conditions can be so bad that no ice cleanup measures are even possible about 20% of the time in June, 40% of the time in August and 65% of the time in October, said the report, which measured typical temperatures, wave heights and ice patterns and how they might prevent the use of such responses as in-situ burning, containment  and application of dispersants.

After October, any active response would almost certainly deferred until the following melt season, the report said.

Judge rules polar bears still 'threatened'

A U.S. District Court on Thursday upheld a Bush-era decision that polar bears are a threatened species, despite challenges by the state of Alaska and others seeking to strip the bear of its protection.

Judge Emmet Sullivan ruled that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s decision to protect the bear because of the melting of the Arctic sea ice was well supported and that opponents failed to demonstrate that the listing was irrational.

“Plaintiffs’ challenges amount to nothing more than competing views about policy and science,” Judge Emmet Sullivan wrote.

The polar bear was the first species added to the Endangered Species List solely because of the threat from global warming. 

The status of polar bears became an issue in 2005 after the Center for Biological Diversity, Natural Resources Defense Council and Greenpeace filed a petition arguing that shrinking ice impaired the bears' ability to catch prey and could lead to their extinction. In December 2006, then-Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne declared the bears "threatened," rather than endangered and in imminent danger of extinction. Endangered and threatened species receive the same protections, such as protection of critical habitats, population recovery assistance and prohibition of harm to the species or its habitat. For threatened species, however, the government can reduce protections or allow exemptions.

If the bears were listed as endangered, new power plants could be blocked, as well as other sources of carbon dioxide and other gases that contribute to global warming. It also could make petroleum exploration more difficult.

Van Nuys facility agrees to $100,000 fine

A Van Nuys metal-plating business has agreed to pay a $100,000 fine to settle charges that it mishandled hazardous waste.

Inspectors from the Environmental Protection Agency and Los Angeles County Fire Department found that Crown Chrome Plating, a division of TMW Corp., a supplier of transportation services, had multiple hazardous wastes on site without a permit in April 2009, a violation of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. There were also four other waste-handling violations associated with having the materials in the facility. 

The hazardous material included paint wastes, alkaline and acidic corrosive liquids, and sludges containing heavy metals such as chromium and lead, which the EPA said were not properly stored or handled. Staff also was not trained in proper handling of the materials, EPA said.

“The toxic wastes and sludges at the Crown Chrome facility have the potential to pose a danger to employees, the surrounding community and the environment,” said Jared Blumenfeld, the EPA’s Regional Administrator for the Pacific Southwest. 

Drilling in Arctic waters? Scientists aren't sure if it is safe

 
Escalating oil prices and diminishing supplies around the world are focusing more attention than ever on the vast petroleum reserves under the Arctic seabed, and in the relatively pristine shoreline areas of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska.

The Obama administration is moving to speed up drilling where possible, but the nagging problem with a wholesale move into the Arctic is how much we don't know about the remote, fragile region. How much more drilling can safely be accommodated?

Can polar bears survive the twin threats of shrinking sea ice and greater ship traffic? What about fish stocks and an acidifying ocean? Bowhead whales might be able to migrate around new oil platforms, but will they be stressed out by drilling noise? And what if their food supplies are shrinking as well?

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar in March 2010 ordered up a report on what we don't know, and need to know, about what is happening to the Arctic environment. This week, the answer finally arrived, in the form of a long-awaited new report from the U.S. Geological Survey on what science gaps need to be filled to safely carry on the march into one of the coldest and least-understood places on the planet.

"There is significant potential for oil and gas development in U.S. Arctic waters, but this is a frontier area with harsh weather conditions as well as unique fish and wildlife resources that Alaska’s indigenous people rely on for subsistence," Salazar said in a statement accompanying the report. "To make responsible decisions, we need to understand the environmental and social consequences of development and plan accordingly. This study is helpful in assessing what we know and will help inform determinations about what we need to know to develop our Arctic energy resources in the right places in the right way."

If you were waiting for answers, forget it. The 292-page report doesn't have them, but it does do a   decent job of laying out the questions. And they're big, USGS analysts say.

First, the effects of climate change have to be understood and then taken into account, the report says. Already, the number of days that seismic exploration vehicles can operate on the tundra without causing environmental harm (meaning over a protective layer of ice) has shrunk from 200 to 100 over the past 30 years.

Continued projections of even more accelerated sea ice loss "will ultimately affect nearly every aspect of the Arctic environment," the report says, because plants and animals there are so uniquely adapted to the specific extreme conditions that have been the norm until now.

"Energy activities may exacerbate those changes, unless careful analysis of risks and tradeoffs is conducted," the report warns, though it also recognizes that less extreme weather could reduce the chances of drilling accidents and spills.

Offshore drilling pact will give NOAA scientists more say

The new agency that regulates offshore drilling has signed a kind of peace treaty with the nation's official oceanographers, giving them more input into where and how oil companies explore the federal waters of the outer continental shelf.

The memorandum of understanding between the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (BOEMRE) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), announced Monday, follows recommendations from a presidential commission investigating last year's BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The panel noted that under previous regulation regimes, NOAA's scientists had little more influence on where and how federal leases were auctioned than did the general public.

"A more robust and formal interagency consultation process is needed, with the goal of identifying precise areas that should be excluded from lease sales because of their high ecological importance or sensitivity," the panel concluded.

The former agency that regulated offshore drilling in federal waters, the Minerals Managmenet Service, was disbanded after the BP spill, amid scandals that showed it had become beholden to the industry it was charged with regulating. The service often did not include NOAA's scientific findings in its final leasing decisions.

The accord will require regulators to "explain in writing any decision not to incorporate a comment by NOAA," and allow the agency to respond to those explanations.

“BOEMRE and NOAA have enjoyed a long and productive relationship, but there is room for improvement," said bureau director Michael R. Bromwich. "We can and will broaden and enhance the communication, cooperation and collaboration between our agencies.”

The two agencies will work more closely on environmental assessments of drilling. Past environmental assessments approved by the agency included little detail about spill contingencies and contained inaccurate science, including listing species not found in the Gulf of Mexico.

Monday's move signals that the bureau will make a greater effort to base its regulatory decisions on the best available science, and to develop and deploy "environmentally sound and sustainable offshore renewable energy technologies," including wind farms.

The agencies also agreed to increase collaboration on oil spill exercises and response issues. 

"This is an important step forward," said Marilyn Heiman, director of the arctic program at the Pew Environmental Group. "This is more evidence that BOEMRE’s approach to offshore drilling is changing from being an agency that has been captured by the oil industry to one that truly is interested in regulating the offshore drilling industry."

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Photo: Oil rigs sit idle off the coast of Louisiana last year. Credit: Lee Celano/Reuturs

Gas prices spur move to open offshore drilling in California, Alaska, East Coast [Updated]

With high gas prices once again becoming a high-octane political issue, House Republicans on Tuesday launched a drive to open up more coastal areas to oil drilling, including a stretch off Southern California.

The pro-production legislation comes a day before President Obama is due to speak on energy security and amid heightened political anxiety among both parties over rising fuel prices.

One of three bills would require the Interior Department to offer leases, within the next five years, for drilling in areas off Southern California, the Eastern seaboard and Alaska containing ``the greatest known oil and natural gas reserves.’’

A long-standing ban on new drilling off much of the nation’s coast expired in late 2008 as high gas prices became a hot political issue, though the Pacific Coast is currently protected by Obama’s pledge that there will be no new offshore drilling there.

While the bills stand a good chance of passing the Republican-controlled House, they are likely to face trouble in the Democratic-controlled Senate. The measures come nearly a year after the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, leading the Obama administration to back off plans to open the eastern gulf and portions of the Atlantic Coast to oil and gas exploration.

`` We must unlock our American energy resources to decrease our dependence on foreign energy, to create American jobs, lower gasoline prices and protect our national security,’’ said Rep. Doc Hastings (R-Wash.), chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee.

But Rep. Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, the panel’s top Democrat, said the bills show the ``same pre-spill mentality of speed over safety that was held by BP and others’ ’ leading to the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history.

Republicans have sought to blame the administration for price increases at the pump. But Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.), chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, recently said that ``the idea that our gasoline prices are high today because of some particular action the Obama administration has taken is not supported by the facts,’’ contending that the ``major force driving oil prices is the instability we have seen in the Middle East and North Africa.’’

Other GOP-sponsored bills introduced Tuesday seek to speed permitting for new drilling in the gulf and pave the way for energy exploration off the coast of Virginia, something the state’s Republican governor, Bob McDonnell has supported.

[Updated, 2:40 p.m.: Rep. Lois Capps (D-Santa Barbara) said, ``We learned the hard way how much environmental and economic damage can be caused by a major oil spill, and can’t afford another spill or accident. California is looking forward to a 21st century energy policy, not backwards, and House Republicans should do the same.''

Offshore drilling has long been a hot issue in California where a 1969 spill devastated the coast off Santa Barbara.

The move comes as the Obama Administration released a report showing that a many federal leases for oil and gas exploration are not being used. The report said 70% percent of the tens of millions of offshore acres under lease are inactive, including almost 24 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico, which potentially could hold more than  11 billion barrels of oil and 50 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.]

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Photo: Bills introduced in Congress would put more offshore rigs, such as this one off the Coast of Santa Barbara, in Federal waters off California, the East Coast and Alaska. Credit: Chip Chipman/Bloomberg