Interior under pressure to delay Alaska drilling rights sale

The Interior Department says it has no plans to delay the Feb. 6 lease sale for oil drilling rights in Alaska's Chukchi Sea, despite growing concerns from department scientists, environmentalists and lawmakers that energy development could be devastating to polar bears and other wildlife there.

Interior's Fish and Wildlife Service announced earlier that it would not meet its deadline this month for making a decision on whether to designate polar bears as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. That means the lease sale next month likely would occur before any decision on the bear's' status is made, jeopardizing the government's ability to protect it.

It is widely expected that the polar bear will be listed. The U.S. Geological Survey reported in September 2007 that new research suggests that at the current rate of sea ice melting, more than two-thirds of the world's polar bear population would be lost by the middle of the century, and cautioned that this was a conservative estimate.

At a recent hearing of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, Rep. Jay Inslee, D-Wash., told Randall Luthi, director of the Minerals Management Service, the Interior agency responsible for offshore leasing, that the agency's decision to go ahead with the lease sale was "negligent in the extreme." Also at the hearing, committee chairman Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., introduced legislation that would compel the administration to delay the sale until the polar bear status was resolved.

Contributing to skepticism about Interior's ability to balance wildlife interests with those of energy developers, the environmental watchdog group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility last week released a series of e-mail exchanges among employees at Interior's Minerals Management Service in December 2005, when the agency was in the process of developing the environmental impact statement upon which the lease sale is based.

In one e-mail, a wildlife biologist questioned why MMS was not taking into consideration development plans by Shell Oil to establish a liquid natural gas facility in the south Chukchi Sea and to use icebreakers to facilitate tanker traffic -- plans that were never made public. An MMS official responded that "it would be arbitrary and capricious to change the scenario based on one company's 'hopes,' " and that doing so "violates our established methodology."

In reply, the biologist said: "I do not understand how we can, in good faith, solicit this input and then effectively ignore it in determining the scope of issues we will analyze in the [environmental impact statement]." Government Executive was unable to reach the biologist, who now works at another federal agency, for comment.

Gary Strasburg, a spokesman for MMS, said, John Goll, MMS regional director for Alaska, relied on the advice of experts when deciding the scope of the environmental impact statement. "The individual who gave their opinion was not an expert," Strasburg said of the biologists' recommendation in the exchange.

Jeff Ruch, executive director of PEER, said MMS is withholding the majority of documents upon which its environmental assessments were based. He especially disputed Luthi's contention that MMS "wouldn't be proceeding with this sale if we weren't comfortable that we had enough knowledge, enough data to say that we can adequately see that the polar bear is protected."

On Monday, the group released another internal e-mail from a different MMS scientist complaining in January 2007 that Shell had "completely ignored polar bear concerns" despite repeated requests over many weeks from MMS to provide information about the company's protection and mitigation plans. "Now we are in an extreme time crunch and under intense pressure to get this [environmental assessment] done, regardless. Yet we were hamstrung before we even began," the scientist wrote. Government Executive was unable to reach the scientist, who has since left MMS, according to Ruch.

Federal scientists in Alaska "are being asked to sign off on environmental evaluations they believe are dishonest" in deference to energy company interests, Ruch said.

Scientists actually know very little about the polar bear population in the Chukchi Sea, which flows between Russia's Siberian coast and the northwest coast of Alaska, other than the fact that decreasing sea ice is harming the population. According to Deborah Williams, president of Anchorage-based Alaska Conservation Solutions and a former attorney for Interior in Alaska, the nation's two polar bear populations, one shared with Canada in the Southern Beaufort Sea and the other shared with Russia in the Chukchi-Bering Sea, are both vulnerable.

Accurate data on the Chukchi polar bear population is nonexistent," Williams said at last week's hearing: "How many polar bears are there in the Chukchi Sea? We don't know. What is their condition? We don't really know. Have any comprehensive surveys or distribution studies been completed in the last 10 years on this population? No. Do we have the factual basis to impose greater risks on this population from oil and gas development in a substantial portion of their range? Absolutely not."

Government scientists and line managers "are doing their best," she said, but they lack adequate funding and resources to conduct the kind of environmental assessments necessary to make informed decisions.

MMS estimates there are 15 billion barrels of oil and 76 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in the Chukchi Sea region slated for the lease sale.