Who gets the money, then?

Jeff Landry took another step today toward throwing the state's biggest coastal restoration project into the trash.

Gov. Jeff Landry's administration has ordered a 90-day pause on work on Louisiana's biggest-ever coastal project, the controversial Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion, arguing the state cannot afford the more than $3 billion plan and stressing that it must be smaller in scale.

The decision, confirmed by the state's coastal officials, halts nearly all work related to the project, which has been planned and studied for years and broke ground in August 2023 on the west bank of Plaquemines Parish near Ironton. Funds related to the 2010 BP oil spill are intended to pay for it, but state coastal officials say rising costs mean Louisiana will be on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars, if not more.

The story goes on to say that there are contingency funds available through NOAA (which *probably* still exists?) to cover some increases in costs, although not increases in costs that directly result from the Governor sabotaging the project with delays.  There's also the possibility of another $744 million from Chevron if that judgment holds up on appeal. But if Landry isn't interested in spending the BP money on the coastal projects it was intended for, then it's unlikely he will apply that appropriately either.  

Which raises the question, what does the Governor intend to do with this money, if anything? It's also possible he's holding those funds and these projects for hostage pending another go at his tax reforms that just failed at the ballot box.  But who knows. 

What was the fight about?

So many jokes about and head shaking over the incivilitude of legislators punching one another in a bar but almost no attention paid to what they were actually fighting about.

The incident happened at the River Room on Laurel Street.

"He's not happy with me over a bill," said Bishop, who as chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee blocked a bill from Chabert.

Chabert is chairman of the Senate Natural Resources Committee.

Neither man identified the bill in question.

The argument began on the House floor earlier Tuesday before spilling outside of the Capitol later that night.

Titillation aside,  isn't "the bill in question" really the more relevant bit of information in this story.  Lawmakers are mad at each other. Okay, there's the hook.  But you have to tell people what they are mad about. Otherwise, you aren't reporting on politics. You're just doing celebrity gossip.

It took forever for anyone to figure out what this was about.  The Advocate reporters did. (Four of them are credited in that story! This was an all-hands-on-deck situation.) Here's what happened. 

Chabert said the incident stemmed from ongoing arguments on coastal issues between the two and not a specific bill. Bishop is chairman of the  House Natural Resources and Environment Committee; Chabert is chairman of the Senate Natural Resources Committee.

Bishop said the fight was over a bill to alter the make-up of the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority Board. Chabert's bill, Senate Bill 433, would grant voting power to two legislative members on the executive-branch board, which Bishop changed through amendment.

There's more detail on that bill from Mark Schleifstein here. But even that doesn't get to the heart of the matter which is Norby Chabert wants to be able to dip into the Coastal Protection fund in order to pass out patronage projects to affiliates. I don't know what Bishop's angle is exactly. But there's probably money at stake.

Or we could just put money directly into coastal restoration

Louisiana has a multi-billion dollar problem involving its sinking coastline.  You might have heard about this. 

As Brig. Gen Duke DeLuca wrapped up his 32-year career with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in August, he contemplated the key to Louisiana’s massive, 50-year, $50 billion effort to prevent the southeastern portion of the state from being swallowed by the Gulf of Mexico.

DeLuca, an expert on the many threats facing the coast, said: “It will take a moon-shot type of investment in the science.”

Unfortunately, we don't really do "moon-shot" level investing in any science that isn't primarily about blowing things up. (Recall the actual moon shot was, itself, about building rockets and beating the Soviets.)

Instead, when it comes to funding big projects with no obvious military purpose, we take bank-shots. So, instead of just putting money directly into coastal restoration, we see how much we can coax heavy industry to contribute to the cause.   How do we do that?  By selling them licenses to keep on throwing soot into the air in California.

Carbon credits, derived from the additional absorption of greenhouse gases from the air, can be put up for sale in two markets.

The first market is in California, where industrial facilities are required to make up for the amount of greenhouse gas they release by either finding ways to reduce those emissions or by buying carbon credits for reductions elsewhere. The second market is a voluntary market where companies look for ways to reduce their carbon footprint by purchasing carbon credits to offset greenhouse gases they release during the course of business.

The regulatory market usually results in a higher price for the credits, but both could provide a market for Louisiana wetlands building, as imagined over the next 50 years in the state coastal master plan.

See? Everybody wins!  Well, OK, not everybody, really. 

“I don’t see carbon fully funding a coastal restoration project, but I see it could help fund projects,” said Sarah Mack, one of the report’s authors and president and CEO of Tierra Resources. 

You know, it helps a little. But the polluters get to keep on polluting with a slightly clearer conscience. And that's really the point.  If it wasn't we'd just go ahead and force the industries that cause environmental damage to pay for repairs.  But we've already said we don't want to do that.  

Luckily, they put it all on TV

Video from last night's coastal restoration discussion hosted by The Lens is up at.. The Lens.

Coastal conversation

Really bummed I couldn't be there for this.  My daily schedule right now is precisely calibrated such that I am always unavailable for any event either personal or professional. 

Wednesday night at 6 p.m., The Lens will host a panel discussion among state and environmental leaders about how to foot the bill for the coastal restoration effort. Joining us:

• Mark Davis, Tulane Institute on Water Resources Law and Policy
• John Driscoll, Corporate Planning Resources
• Kyle Graham, Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority
• Douglas J. Meffert, Audubon Louisiana/National Audubon Society
• Steve Murchie, Gulf Restoration Network
• Courtney Taylor, Environmental Defense Fund

Fox 8 News’ John Snell will moderate.

Anyway, they say there will be video available at that link so that's good.  I hope they archive it, though since I won't have time to watch live. 

Will attempt to show

Advocate: Coastal Louisiana land loss worth price to fix, study will attempt to show

Let's hope the attempt goes well. It seems very involved.

BURAS — With a 50-year, $50 billion coastal restoration and protection plan to pay for, the state is gearing up with evidence to convince the rest of the country that the price tag is worth it.

The state Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority started a new study in May that will quantify the worth of south Louisiana and just how much the rest of the country has to lose if nothing is done to stem coastal land loss or make coastal communities more secure.

“Try to understand the financial implications of future land loss and flood impacts,” Charles Sutcliffe, policy adviser with the Governor’s Office of Coastal Activities, told Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority members at their Wednesday meeting.

This Coast-wide Economic Impact Evaluation will be done in cooperation with LSU and the RAND Corporation and will include a steering committee made up of representatives from government agencies, businesses and coastal researchers.

For future reference, when your state is faced with an environmental catastrophe on an order of magnitude such that roughly a third of of its total land area (including its most heavily populated communities) is sinking into the ocean, here is what you do.

First you will need to put together a "Master Plan" for coastal restoration.  This will be a long, politically controversial and expensive process.

Next you'll need to do the cost/benefit analysis of implementing the master plan.  This will also involve a lot of people and take several months or years to complete. This is what the phase they're on right now.  Finally, comes the marketing campaign to develop a "brand" that makes the cost/benefit analysis of the Master Plan accessible to people.

Once that's underway you're well on to drowning.

But the important thing is lots and lots of consultants and lobbyists and lawyers get paid in the meantime. Because that's what emergency response is really all about.

Job creators

So to re-cap, the bad news is we're still waiting on the research to tell us how to rebuild the Louisiana coast.

But the good news is, whenever we get around to figuring that out, we could put a lot of people to work on it.

NEW ORLEANS (AP) - A study commissioned by an environmental group says funding the state's multi-billion-dollar, 50-year master plan for coastal protection and restoration would create anywhere from 109,000 to 212,000 permanent jobs while spurring the economy with billions in spending related to the projects.

But then the bad news again is this is a study by Tim Ryan so who knows what those numbers are really worth.

And the worse news is we'll probably just keep building oil pipelines instead.

Landrieu was never going to be a darling of the environmental movement. She represents a state dotted with oil wells and refineries, and sides with the fossil fuel industry more often than not. She also backs the Keystone XL pipeline at a time when opposition to the oil sands project has become the green movement's call to arms.

The Louisiana Democrat also holds considerable sway over energy policy. She's the chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, and if another bipartisan energy bill comes out of Congress under Landrieu's watch, it would be covered in her fingerprints.

Research proceding in geologic time

The longer it takes us to figure this stuff out, the less Louisiana will be left to save if that's even possible anymore.

For decades the solution to the state’s coastal land loss seemed simple: Just punch a few holes in Mississippi River levees and let the mud-rich water spill out over marshes to build new land.

After all, that’s just what the river did for millennia before those mud walls went up after the epic 1927 flood.

But as the first in-depth study of the lower river in 50 years pushes past its mid-way point, the scientists involved have a few words of advice: It isn’t that easy — not even close.

Dug his own Graves

The latest victim of Bobby Jindal and Garret Graves's political purge of coastal and flood protection boards is... Garret Graves.

Gov. Bobby Jindal's coastal chief, Garret Graves, is leaving state government this month.

Graves has been chairman of the state's Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority for six years. Jindal announced Tuesday that Graves' last day will be Feb. 17.

The governor's office didn't give any reason for Graves' resignation, but praised his time leading the state's coastal restoration efforts.

We're pretty close to parade season now and John Barry is already King of Krewe Du Vieux so it's difficult to squeeze Graves in somewhere now.  (In the time it took me to type that, Rob Ryan just joined Argus.)  Graves might do well in Krewe Delusion. Sounds appropriate anyway.

Check local listings

The new season of BP Trial begins this week.

Last season, you will recall, was all about "gross negligence."

This time, the plot revolves around "quantification."

On Monday, U.S. District Judge Carl Barbier will be presented with conflicting testimony over BP's success at "source control," the halting of the flow of oil from the well after the blowout. The parties are expected to present testimony about that issue for a week.

That will be followed by three weeks focused on "quantification" - determining how much oil was released into the Gulf during the spill.

Barbier will then decide, likely next year, how many billion of dollars BP owes in fines.

Spoilers:

Alliances will shift as business partners turn against one another!

Barbier also has limited the number of witnesses and expert reports during the two phases, and urged the parties on each side to consolidate wherever possible.

That has resulted in a temporary alliance for the "source control" portion of the case between the Plaintiffs Steering Committee, made up of attorneys representing private claimants, and two BP contractors - Transocean and Halliburton. The two firms were opponents of the PSC and the government during the first phase of the trial.

Transocean is the owner of the doomed Deepwater Horizon drillship and its employees drilled the well under BP's direction. Halliburton provided the cement and cementing advice to BP.

There will be deceit! 

The aligned parties contend that while BP repeatedly reported to federal officials in April and May 2010 that the oil was flowing at the rate of 5,000 barrels per day or less, the company's own internal experts knew that the flow was much more.

There will be.... murder?  Top Murder!

"After the Macondo blowout, BP repeatedly lied to key decision makers about the flow rate of the well. BP told the Unified Command, the Coast Guard, government scientists, and Congress that the well was flowing at 5,000 barrels per day, when BP's internal estimates showed rates as high as 96,000 barrels per day. These lies and omissions delayed the capping of the well."

Even as the disparate flow estimates were being produced, BP already had on hand a "capping stack," basically a second blowout preventer, that could be placed atop the failed preventer, the aligned parties said. Using it weeks earlier, instead of trying the Top Kill, would have dramatically reduced the amount of spilled oil.

The aligned parties also argued that BP misled federal officials and the public about why the Top Kill method failed, blaming it on the rupture of pressure relief discs in the well. Inspection of the blowout preventer and other well equipment in the aftermath of the accident found no disc failures, though.

Instead, the aligned parties argued BP's deceiving flow estimates led to the failure of Top Kill, because those designing the effort did not factor in the real -- and much higher -- flow rate.

And, of course, the ultimate spoiler: Whatever penalty BP is assessed, it will not be enough money to remedy Louisiana's massive coastal crisis.  
 
But enjoy the show anyway. Binge-watching, live tweeting, etc. begins Monday morning. 

Somewhat surprising quote of the day

Bobby Jindal:  

“BP needs to stop spending hundreds of millions of dollars on their public relations campaign telling us how great they are and start proving it by addressing their Clean Water Act and Natural Resources Damage liabilities now,”

This was at a meeting of the inter-state council charged with spending the Clean Water Act fines the Gulf States will be awarded at the end of the BP trial. There's more to read there but the Governor's language was striking given his stern defense of the oil industry in other legal arenas. 

Still silent

Yesterday I linked to this article from Bob Marshall  where he wondered why some prominent Louisiana environmental groups weren't supporting the SLFPA-E's lawsuit against the oil and gas industry.

Yet three weeks later, the National Wildlife Federation, the Environmental Defense Fund and the Audubon Society remain silent on the lawsuit.

After working separately for a couple years, the three groups joined together in 2008 to create the Restore the Mississippi River Delta coalition, a well-funded drive to gain national support for salvaging the state’s abused, collapsing coast. A large part of that effort has been championing the state’s Coastal Master Plan, developed by the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority. The state authority is headed by Garret Graves, an outspoken critic of the lawsuit.

Restore spokesmen said the coalition’s mission" saving the coast" is the reason for its silence on the lawsuit, not the politics of its working relationship with the CPRA.

When The Lens asked local officials with the three national groups for their organization’s position on the lawsuit, all of them referred to a joint statement that acknowledges damage by the oil and gas industry and recognizes that wetlands loss hinders flood protection" the case made by the flood protection authority. The statement stops short of supporting the suit.

Today a coalition of organizations who do support the lawsuit held a press conference to affirm their position and to take shots at the Governor.

At a New Orleans news conference, environmental groups presented a list of 231 contributions to Jindal state election campaigns between 2003 and 2013 by oil and gas companies and executives that total $1,019,777.

The Jindal administration has criticized a lawsuit filed by the East Bank levee authority against 97 oil, gas and pipeline companies.

Representatives of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice, Global Green, League of Women Voters, Levees.org, Louisiana Bucket Brigade, Sierra Club, and Vietnamese American Young Leaders Association of New Orleans attended the news conference Wednesday.

 I don't see any of Marshall's big three organizations listed among them. 

"That’s all we want: Fix the part they broke"

John Barry explains the SLFPA-E's lawsuit in this Lens op-ed.

Our case is based on the fact that we are forced to maintain and possibly build more elaborate flood protection defenses because of land loss. The industry’s failure to comply with permits — its failure to do what they voluntarily agreed to do and to obey the law in exchange for taking hundreds of billions of dollars out of the state — has destroyed land.

That land loss means there’s no buffer to block storm surge, and that sends more water pounding against our levees. As the saying goes, the levees protect the people, and the land protects the levees.

The land is disappearing so fast that by 2100, if nothing is done New Orleans will be basically an island. The levees will be beach-front property. Much of the rest of the Louisiana coast will simply cease to exist.

Louisiana law also embodies a concept going back to the Romans called “servitude of drain.” This prohibits one party from increasing the natural flow of water from its property onto another’s. The destruction of land is sending more storm surge pounding against our levees.

We believe the oil and gas industry violated the law, and these violations have endangered the people we are responsible to protect.

Our suit does not ask that the industry restore the entire coast. But they must restore the part of the coast they destroyed. They must fix the part of the problem which they created. That’s all we want: Fix the part they broke.

 There's much more.  Read and share with your closest 500 friends. 

By the way, "Servitude of Drain" was probably the best Pantera album.  Pity, Gambit didn't ask Phil Anselmo about it in this interview.

Gret Stet of Texaco

John Barry speaking Monday to the Baton Rouge Press Club:

Barry summed up opposition to the lawsuit against the oil and gas industry with one word: Politics.

“People used to say the flag of Texaco flies over the State Capitol. People have to ask themselves if that’s still true,” he said during a lunchtime gathering.

Barry did not comment on whether the State of Texaco could ever have been "bigger than Texas." But the implication that the state government is wholly owned by oil and gas could not be more appropriate given the lengths the Governor and his allies in the Legislature have gone to to shut down the Flood Protection Authority's lawsuit.  In a Gambit column this week, Clancy Dubos doesn't pull any punches on this point.

No one should be surprised by Jindal’s duplicity. He has never let irony, or truth, or even a fundamental sense of right and wrong stand in the way of his ambition. And right now his ambition tells him to do whatever he can to ingratiate himself to the energy companies that he hopes will help bankroll his future political moves.

In late July, SLFPA-E sued 97 oil, gas and pipeline companies that have carved up Louisiana’s coast for the past eight decades, seeking to make them pay their fair share of the costs of repairing the marshes and protecting southeast Louisiana against the increased risks of flooding. Ever since, Jindal and his wetlands czar Garret Graves have been trying to put the kibosh on the lawsuit.

They tried to intimidate commissioners, who voted unanimously to file the lawsuit, into changing their minds. That didn’t work. Jindal now hopes to replace commissioners whose terms have expired, particularly historian John Barry, who has been outspoken in favor of the litigation. Barry, who wrote Rising Tide, is one of the nation’s leading authorities on flood control policy.

To be certain, the lawsuit is a long shot.  But it's a necessary long shot given the desperate Hail Mary situation South Louisiana finds itself in with regard to the  safety of its residents and the future of its coast.  The Lens' Bob Marshall explained shortly after the suit was filed.

Decades of drilling and dredging by the oil and gas industry have contributed to the dramatic loss of wetlands in southeast Louisiana, which help reduce storm surges pushing against the region’s flood protection levees. About 2,000 square miles of land have disappeared in Louisiana; various studies say the oil and gas industry is responsible for anywhere from 16 to 50 percent of that.

The Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East claims that the loss of wetlands in its jurisdiction means levees and floodwalls must be built higher, resulting in a dramatic increase in their costs for building and maintaining levees and floodwalls.

The agency wants 97 companies named in the lawsuit to repair the damage, and if that’s not possible, to help defray the cost of flood protection now and in the future.

Back in February, Marshall reported on the dramatic costs the SLFPA-E was facing down as it assumed responsibility for maintaining the new and complicated flood control system from the Army Corps of Engineers.

The costs include $14 million for annual operation and maintenance of the system – a figure that does not include future levee raising — as well as $20 million a year for the next 30 years as part of the state’s cost-share for the whole project.

If the flood protection authority can’t find a fix, officials said, the only alternative would be bond issues at rates that could be ruinous to some communities.

“We’ll soon be facing a $600 million question,” the authority’s vice president, John Barry, said with reference to the 30-year cost sharing burden. “Who is going to pay?”

The lawsuit proposes that instead of placing the burden of financing the ever-increasing expense of protection on the public debt of residents, why not seek recompense from the parties responsible for putting them in this position in the first place?  It's a simple and desperate call for justice.

But no one is living under the illusion that's really within reach. 

Last week's legislative hearing demonstrated the oil industry's muscle pretty plainly.

After the meeting, Adley told reporters there wasn’t anything the Legislature could do about the suit until the next session, which begins March 10.

He and Rep. Jones both said, however, that they strongly expect multiple lawmakers to file bills seeking to either limit the authority of the levee boards or block this specific suit.

Meanwhile, Louisiana's Master Plan for coastal restoration is largely dependent upon a favorable result of the current Clean Water Act litigation against BP stemming from the 2010 Macondo disaster.  In May, The Lens hosted a forum dramatically but aptly titled "Last Call For Louisiana's Coast." There Barry said bluntly, "Were it not for the BP spill, we would not have any dollars coming" in time to even get started with the necessary work of saving what's left of the wetlands.

Now even that assertion seems hopeful. Anyone who has been following BP's increasingly defiant stance recently can't expect the state will reap an award anything near sufficient to its needs from those proceedings... certainly not in time to do what desperately needs to be done with it anyway.

Simply put, "Last Call" means it's time to start trying whatever desperate move might be left available before it becomes time to pack up and float away.  And taking 97 oil companies to court is about as desperate a move as one can make.  But even then, Barry has made it clear that the suit is an opportunity for negotiation.

I ask the governor this: Why not solve the problem? Our suit addresses only New Orleans. The entire Louisiana coast needs help. The governor has been good for the coast. I ask the governor to be great for the coast. I ask the governor to negotiate a solution acceptable to everyone. I would support this. I hope the governor and the Legislature would, too.

Of course, any good faith negotiation would have to start with taking the Texaco flag down off the Capitol building and running the Pelican back up in its place.  But even that may be too much to hope for.

It's like a TV timeout

Or maybe one of those stoppages in play so we can get the crazy fans who stormed the field (Robert Adley, Garett Graves, Bobby Jindal)  rounded up.  Whatever it is, we're taking a breather.

The New Orleans levee authority on Thursday passed a resolution to consider placing a 45-day pause on its lawsuit against about 100 oil, gas and pipeline companies. The authority said the pause would let the group work further with the governor’s office and set up “a task force to examine and review all ramifications of the lawsuit.“

The levee authority also passed a resolution reaffirming its resolve to continue with the lawsuit, claiming that oil, gas and pipeline companies are contributing to land loss and erosion. If the levee authority is victorious, companies would be required to repair any wetland damage that increases the risk of hurricane storm surges overtopping local levees.

The "four hour closed door session" with Graves must have been exhausting.  Anybody would want to take a break after that. Still it's good to see they're all resolute in reaffirming their resolve to continue and all.

In my opinion, John Barry has been pretty careful and reasonable in his public statements since the suit was filed.  He also sounds like he knows he's played a strong card.

But Barry and other authority commissioners said they respect Jindal and his office’s work in coastal restoration issues and would prefer to move forward with Jindal’s office if it finds a better way to work with the oil and gas companies.

“If someone can prove that there is a better path, then I would withdraw the lawsuit without a second thought,” Barry said.

Doomed

BP is digging in.

Monday's motion was filed with Barbier, who is overseeing the settlement and other federal lawsuits against BP stemming from the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster. Barbier in mid-July had dismissed a similar BP motion to halt the payments, after saying the company had failed to provide evidence of wrongdoing.
BP has been critical of the business economic claims, and said in a recent Securities and Exchange Commission filing that the company believes its claims liability has grown to $9.6 billion, from an original estimate of $7.8 billion, and could grow higher if the rules aren't changed. The company said that as of the end of the second quarter, it had booked charges of $42.4 billion related to the spill, and had nearly used up all of a $20 billion trust fund set aside to cover claims.

They're already reaching to take money back off the table from the claims process.  There had been hope that the ongoing litigation over Clean Water Act damages represented a last best chance for funding the state's $50 billion coastal restoration plan.

Yeah. Right.

As far as BP is concerned they've pretty much committed all the money they're going to throw at us.  From here on out they'll be clawing back whatever they can. Hope you enjoyed all those seafood commercials.

"Mired in politics"

Stephanie Grace: Levee lawsuit already mired in politics

In theory, the levee authority, the product of a post-Katrina reform drive to replace the parishwide levee boards of yore, is supposed to operate on a separate plane, to sidestep power struggles and focus exclusively on flood protection. Unlike in the old days, some of the new authority’s members are required to have actual expertise in things such as engineering and water management, and all are supposed to be free of political ties and conflicts of interest. The board is also set up to make independent decisions on things like, well, filing lawsuits — or so its members insist.

In practice, it turns out, it’s nearly impossible to stay above the fray. In its brief existence, the authority’s members have gotten into fights over funding and control over land behind homes that back up to its floodwalls.

But there’s never been a blow-up like this.

By filing the stealth suit, the levee authority has picked a major fight with defenders of the industry’s prerogatives and critics of “frivolous lawsuits” that carry the possibility of huge payouts for lawyers — two categories with considerable overlap.

Indeed.  Notice also the "payouts for lawyers" canard is currently being put to use by BP with great effect.

But that's not what we're focusing on right now.  Instead, there's this.

Mark Moseley: Political machinations stain selection for a job that’s meant to be above politics

It’s always assumed that politics factors into the U.S. Attorney selection “process,” but the key decisions are made in private. It’s a farce, and a disservice to the public as well as to potential nominees like Polite. The political nature of the appointment makes everything suspect.

For example, when the Bush administration directed then interim U.S. Attorney Jim Letten to “make urban areas safer,” were we to interpret that as code? Or, when Polite says he intends to focus the office on violent crime — is that his own preference — or Holder’s or Jackson’s?

Here’s my proposal on how to reform the system: U.S. Attorney candidates should come from outside the district and be chosen by lot. I envision each region compiling short lists of peer-approved candidates from each party. When a vacancy opens in another region, a lottery selects a candidate from all the lists to determine which “outsider” candidate fills the vacancy. It’s not a perfect solution. There are drawbacks — lack of familiarity with a new region being the most obvious. And even a random process wouldn’t eliminate all the politics, but it would be a step in the right direction — certainly an improvement over the current charade.

Can't say I'm too excited about Moseley's suggested remedy. I do agree the "process" by which US Attorneys are selected is severely lacking in transparency, though. I'm just not convinced there's much value to ensuring the candidates are always "outsiders." I would have thought the fashion for ass kicking "outsiders" would have gone the way of the Dodo.. or at least the Skyline Crane but some dreams die hard, I guess.

Anyway back to this lawsuit thingy.


Bob Marshall: Flood Authority, suit against oil companies safe from political meddling — for now

Marshall's article is right to laud the post-Katrina reforms for raising the professional standards of the flood protection authority and for granting it a certain degree of insulation from political interference.  But it's foolhardy to presume that politics won't (or even that it shouldn't) come into play in public affairs as is likely to happen eventually. 

When Gov. Jindal and Garret Graves, head of the state’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, loudly condemned the suit and promised to sink it, Louisiana’s tradition of pervasive political meddling might have led many to assume the board would soon be stocked with oil company executives.

The good news for reformers: That kind of political power play looks impossible to achieve this year because of the protections against hanky-panky built into the amendment and legislation that created the flood authority.

The bad news: The Legislature could rescind that protection during its next session.

“The amendment changed the constitution to allow the establishment of regional levee authorities, and laid out certain ways how that could be done, and those things can only be changed by another amendment,” Robert Scott, president of the Public Affairs Research Council, told The Lens.

In the public arena, no matter how smart you are or how important you think the work you're doing is, that work is always going to be subjected to the scrutiny of the public. As long as we're still doing democracy that means it will always be "mired in politics."  Maybe the smart people should try to work on winning the political arguments rather than running and hiding from them.

Past time to do something

I only know the ecological science that read in the papers but this latest flap over whether or not river diversions will actually do more harm than good sounds like the same argument between oystermen and coastal scientists that has been holding up any sort of meaningful action for decades now.

LSU professor James Cowan Jr., a fisheries ecologist, said he was both amused and frustrated by the debate over the Caernarvon diversion “because it certainly wasn’t designed to be a restoration tool. It’s doing what it’s supposed to do (freshening water along the coast to increase the growth of oysters), but it’s not a good model to determine what a sediment diversion will do.”

He said the state's plan to move to sediment diversions is an attempt to “restart an interrupted delta cycle,” mimicking the way the Mississippi River built large segments of the state’s coastline before humans built levees to block spring floods and forced it to stay in its channel, rather than travel down the Atchafalaya delta.

But Cowan also warned that whether or not the diversions are built, the state’s fishers will see significant changes in the location of specific species, including oysters and fish. Even when the Mississippi delta was allowed to run free and contained more freshwater, the types of fish remained similar to today, he said.

Fishers have cited new research that suggests that releasing river water, loaded with chemical fertilizer runoff, into wetlands may only inflict more damage.

The New England study was led by Linda Deegan, an LSU alumna and now a senior scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Mass.* Her team meticulously added concentrated nitrogen and phosphorous to tides flowing into an unpolluted coastal salt marsh. The primary plant in that marsh – Spartina cordgrass – also dominates wetlands targeted for some river diversions south of New Orleans.

In the first few years of the project, the nutrients ignited an explosion of growth in leaves and stems, but by the fifth year the edges of the marsh began “literally falling apart,” said team member John Fleeger, a professor emeritus at Louisiana State University. The pollutants weakened the root structure and speeded decomposition of the organic soil. The combination of stunted, weakened roots and less stable soil led to increased erosion from regular tidal currents.

This argument gets even more complicated. We already understand that fertilizer runoff is a problem.  US agricultural production  is dependent upon highly explosive nitrogen rich chemicals.  These chemicals runoff into the Mississippi River which, in turn, dumps it into the Gulf. The chemical spill off is known to be the cause of a massive hypoxic "Dead Zone" which appears annually off the Louisiana coast.

Interestingly, it's even been suggested that river diversion projects will help reduce the Dead Zone by allowing the marsh to filter nutrients from the water.

Also, Louisiana, through its master plan for coastal restoration and protection, is planning a number of freshwater and sediment diversions that could put some of the river water into the marsh where plants could remove some of the nutrients in the water, he said
.
“We wanted to make sure those diversion projects were part of the solution,” Raynie said.

For the Louisiana, though, it's past time for some solution, even an imperfect one, to move from the argument to the action phase.  We'll never know which side of this debate was correct once the coast has melted away into the ocean.
 

More football condos and seafood commercials

The details of the RESTORE Act disbursements are making it appear less and less restorative every day.

While the allocations to those five pots may be clear enough, much of language describing how and where the money is spent is not, Davis said. At an informational gathering last week of Louisiana groups and government representatives who lobbied successfully for passage of the RESTORE Act, Davis and Garret Graves, head of the state’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, agreed the language left holes “big enough to drive trucks through,” Davis said.

“For example, there is language about funding going to projects in counties or parishes that border the Gulf or have a coastline,” Davis said. “Well, look at New Orleans. It is on an arm of the Gulf — Lake Pontchartrain. Is that a Gulf shoreline? Or does it even border the Gulf?”

And though Louisiana sees Pot-2 money as clearly marked for ecosystem restoration, some of it could be used for other purposes, namely economic projects, Davis warned.

Efforts to divert money from ecosystem repair may also come from within the state, Davis said. Interest groups are likely to push for grants for pet projects and factions in the state Legislature may attempt to “hijack” funding to help solve Louisiana’s budget deficit, he said.

With regard to potential "hijacking" don't rule out the Governor's office there either.

Will BP let us eat cake?

As much fun as it was to watch Ray Nagin walk into federal court, say "Not guilty" 21 times, and then turn around and leave last week, the courtroom action most relevant to Louisiana's future begins Monday.

The long-awaited civil trial against BP and its partners in the ill-fated Macondo oil well is slated to begin Monday in federal court in New Orleans, setting the stage for a three-month proceeding to assign liability potentially worth tens of billions of dollars for the explosion and collapse of the Deepwater Horizon rig in 2010, which killed 11 workers and caused one of the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history.

More importantly for BP and the other companies, the first phase of the complex court case will focus on whether their actions leading up to the accident constitute gross negligence or willful misconduct, which would result in a four-fold increase in the billions of dollars of Clean Water Act penalties expected to be levied.

The size of the Clean Water  Act fine is critical to the future of the Louisiana coast.  Under the terms of the RESTORE Act, this would be the money Louisiana would dedicate to implementing its 50 year coastal rebuilding master plan.  The scope of the dire emergency the state is facing may be even worse than what the authors of that plan anticipated as Bob Marshall explains in this recent Lens piece.

NOAA’s Tim Osborne, an 18-year veteran of Louisiana coastal surveys, and Steve Gill, senior scientist at the agency’s Center for Operational Oceanographic Products and Services, spelled out the grim reality in interviews with The Lens. When new data on the rate of coastal subsidence is married with updated projections of sea-level rise, the southeast corner of Louisiana looks likely to be under at least 4.3 feet of gulf water by the end of the century.

That rate could swamp projects in the state’s current coastal Master Plan, which incorporated worst-case scenarios for relative sea-level rise calculated two years ago— which the new figures now make out-of-date.

So that's not good.  But, in the meantime, it only underscores the importance of what's about to happen this week.  And that's where it gets confusing.  As late as Friday, we were still reading about 11th hour settlement talks.  Interestingly, though, the Restore Act may have rendered such a settlement too complicated to hammer out.

But the statute worsened what were already growing tensions among the states over how they could use any funds from BP, between environmental damage and economic losses. “Up until last year, all the states were rowing together,” said one lawyer who also spoke on the condition of anonymity. 

The split among the Gulf Coast states surfaced again in November when the Justice Department announced the $4.5 billion settlement of criminal charges against BP. At the time, federal and state officials were also seeking to resolve the civil damage claims. 

But those talks failed largely because of disagreements between Louisiana and other states on issues like the size of the settlement that BP was offering, said people briefed on the talks.

The issues coming out of the talks last fall were even more complicated than that, actually.  For a time, it seemed like Governor Jindal and Senator Vitter were in favor of ditching the Restore Act altogether, although their reasons never became clear to me.  I did make some guesses here, though.

Still if this thing does actually go to trial Monday, the key will be pinning the "gross negligence" charge on BP.  A week ago, their lead attorney seemed confident of wriggling out of that one.

Bondy argued that BP acted rapidly and with extraordinary efforts to attempt to plug the well and limit the effects of the oil spill on both the environment and the public.

On the public side, those efforts included the company's decision not to limit its liability under provisions of the Oil Pollution Act of 1990; to create a $20 billion trust fund within weeks of the accident to begin paying for damages; and to appoint Kenneth Feinberg to handle financial claims.

"And we went to pretty extraordinary lengths and efforts to seal the well" and limit the amount of oil reaching the surface, he said. "At one point, we had 48,000 people working on the response," with so many ships and airplanes involved that the fleets were larger than many nations' armed forces.

"I'm not telling you all this to tout our behavior because this was a tragic accident that took 11 lives and created devastating effects on the Gulf Coast," he said. "But when you look at the legal process to determine what the penalty should be for this spill, this is highly relevant and needs to be taken into account."

You might remember BP's series of "extraordinary efforts to plug the well." A series of stunts with colorful names, "Top Kill" "Junk Shot" etc. which many observers surmised were done specifically for the sake of limiting liability while the long process of drilling a relief well could proceed? Well you're about to see that card played from the top of BP's deck. 

Still at issue is exactly how many barrels of oil were released into the water during the spill. The 4.9 million barrels used in most accounts, based on government estimates, includes 820,000 barrels that BP recovered directly. That oil was sold, and the money collected was donated to Gulf Coast charities.

But Bondy said the remaining 4.1 million barrel estimate is at least 20 percent too high. That would drop the range for maximum fines to between $3.3 billion and $14.1 billion.

Federal prosecutors, on the other hand, say their evidence shows that BP officials lied to the Coast Guard and Congressional investigators in claiming soon after the accident that only 5,000 barrels of oil a day were being released from the well, when internal documents indicated the company's own experts believed as many as 100,000 barrels a day were pouring from under the sea floor.

Ah yes, the never-ending flow-rate dispute. Another case of no-surprise here. Thanks to BP's constant obfuscation and misinformation campaign, the estimates varied from as little as 1,000 barrels per day to greater than 62,000. And now we're going to court with tens of thousands of barrels worth of wiggle room.  Mission accomplished, I guess.

Meanwhile, just this weekend, Dambala toured the Wisner Trust land near Port Fourchon and shot some video.  Watch both videos he has posted there but pay special attention to the one where workers are still collecting tarballs along the beach.  According to Dambala's guide, the beach itself is already 75 yards further inland from where it was when oil first started washing up there.