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The Triple Federal Threat to Our Coast

by Richard Johnson, chair of the Green Party of Mendocino County

Despite the election of a Democratic administration and a Democratic majority in Congress, the federal government has targeted the west coast with militarization and industrialization projects on the near-shore ocean.
From Puget Sound on the Canadian border south to the Humboldt/Mendocino line in California, the U.S. Navy has declared that it wants to conduct expanded air and sea warfare training and weapons development activities including bombing, artillery, toxic smoke flares, missiles, and sonar and depth charges on more than 120,000 square nautical miles.

From Shelter Cove to Mendocino, the Minerals Management Service has a Draft Proposed Program, also known as a five-year plan, to sell oil and gas drilling leases; likewise off Santa Barbara and San Diego.
And finally, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is offering pilot project permits to speculators to develop ocean-borne electrical generators that could result in vast arrays of buoys that would preclude fishing or boating in their vicinity. Currently, one such permit is off Eureka, and another was recently granted between Albion and Point Cabrillo, south of Mendocino, to southern California developers connected to the Republican Party.

The simultaneous deployment of these threats to our environment, our economy, our culture, and our dignity has gone unnoticed in the corporate press. In fact, they would redefine our society in ways with which we fundamentally disagree, and display a rank insensitivity to our feelings and our rights.

In response, the Green Party of Mendocino County has launched the Pacific Coast Ocean Sanctuary Petition. (See page 34) Please copy freely.
Aimed at President Obama, the petition asks that he put all three projects into an indefinite study status while the public can be alerted to their cumulative impacts. This effort began in Mendocino County but has reached up and down the coast as the petitions are downloaded and circulated by those who have signed them. We seek contact with ocean-loving activists to involve themselves in this ongoing campaign to get a million signatures to send to Washington. Groups in other areas can use the petition to advance their own ocean-related projects.

This is not an online petition; it depends on citizens carrying paper petitions to meetings, rallies, shopping centers, music concerts, and social gatherings. We now have more than 2000 signatures but need funds to process them and spread the word. To this end we have formed a nonpartisan Ocean Sanctuary Alliance whose members are those who sign the petition.

More information about the Triple Federal Threat to our coast is available at the Independent website at www.mendocinocountry.com. Our mailing address is Ocean Sanctuary Alliance, P.O. Box 533, Talmage, CA 95481. You may email us at independent@mendocinocountry.com, or telephone 707-468-1009.

Questions and Answers about the Triple Threat to the West Coast from Washington, DC

Ģ 1. What are the three threats?
a) The expansion of the U.S. Navys Northwest Training Range Complex from the Canadian border to the Humboldt-Mendocino county line.

b) Minerals Management Services Five-Year Plan with three offshore oil lease sales: one off Mendocino, one off Santa Barbara, and one off Oceanside.

c) Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) wave energy preliminary pilot project permits off Mendocino and Eureka as well as Ventura County.

Ģ 2. What is the extent and time period for each of these?

a) The Northwest Training Range will last as long as the Navys global mission to protect Americans at home and abroad, win wars and defend freedom of the seas. See www.nwtrangecomplexeis.com

b) If not stopped, Lease Sale 236 will take place in 2014 and development could begin any time after that. The operations would take place over decades while extracting the resource which is estimated to supply the nations oil consumption for only 17 weeks. Some impacts would remediate themselves eventually, but not in this century. See www.mms.gov/offshore

c) FERC has asserted jurisdiction over all waters including nearshore areas up to 3 miles out which are in state jurisdiction for OCS (Outer Continental Shelf) activities.

This agency regulates hydropower dams, including the one in Potter Valley. It has adapted the process for licensing dams to licensing hydrokinetic arrays. The final license can last from 30 to 50 years, and then be renewed.
A preliminary permit gives the holder exclusive rights to study the feasibility of development in that area of ocean for 3 years, in order to prepare and file a license application.

In order to encourage rapid development of hydrokinetic technology, FERC has come up with a hydrokinetic pilot project preliminary permit process that can take as little as six months to be completed. Unlike the regular preliminary permit, the hydrokinetic pilot project preliminary permit lasts for five years and allows the deployment and testing of experimental devices and their environmental impacts. Numerous conditions apply. See http://www.ferc.gov/industries/hydropower/indus-act/hydrokinetics.asp
The applicant must apply for a license within two years in the case of a pilot project preliminary permit.

In May, Pacific Gas and Electric announced that it was abandoning its pilot project permit off Fort Bragg, and FERC granted a pilot project permit to GreenWave for the near shore from Albion to Point Cabrillo south of Mendocino. The pilot project permit may be near to shore, but it is intended to lead to arrays in deep water further offshore. The Minerals Management Service has relinquished jurisdiction to FERC for hydrokinetic projects, even in deep ocean.
Ģ 3. What will be the impacts of these projects?

Pelamis Wave Generator

a) The NWTC expansion would convert 122,000 square nautical miles of ocean along 600 miles of coast (the entire Washington, Oregon, Del Norte and Humboldt coastlines in Northern California) from peaceful civilian use to a military weapons systems development and operations training area.
The activities would include simulated strike group-sized sea battles with live artillery and missile fire, undersea submarine training including tracking and depth charges, air warfare operations including bombing and missile launches, and research and development of the unmanned drones now being used in Pakistan.

b) The well-known environmental dangers of offshore oil and gas drilling are both chronic and accidental. See http://www.mendocinocountry.com/independent/2ocean/*portalocean.html
c) The FERC license includes all generating assets up to connection to the grid. Onshore facilities will be built to support the bouy arrays, collect the electricity, and tie it to the grid. This would probably include a shipyard-like facility to construct and repair the bouys, which in some cases are as large as a railroad freight car.
Each bouy is independently anchored to the ocean floor by a set of cables and pulleys designed to keep it oriented and on the surface at all times. Then there are the power cables stretching across the ocean floor to some land-based collection system.

The danger of a single bouy or multiple bouys ripped free from their anchors is unknown.

In addition, the impacts of normal operation on wildlife and sea health are yet to be determined.

But it is clear that wave-energy bouys in arrays of hundreds or thousands will create visual and noise impacts detrimental to citizen and tourist enjoyment of what was once an open and natural ocean environment.
Ģ 4. Where are these decisions vulnerable to modification or reversal?
Ultimately, it is the president and his administration that has the power to halt or mitigate these projects.

a) As Commander in Chief of the armed forces, Obama can order the Navy to conduct years of studies before implementing the expansion of the NWTC or to radically reduce the Op Areas coastal impact.

Unfortunately, Obama is committed to the war in Afghanistan, in which the drones play a major role. The U.S. is committed to a major buildup in its global occupation forces initiated in 2007. Both major parties agree on this.
b) Interior Secretary Salazar announced a six-month delay in the otherwise inexorable march of the Five-Year Plan. Meanwhile, Congress is about to approve an omnibus appropriations bill that for the first time in 28 years does not include the annual moratorium on new OCS leasing activities.
In addition, the extension of the public comment period will mean that the administrations commitment to protection or development will come in September, too late to insert the moratorium in the FY2010 appropriations bill, soon to be debated in Congress.

The motive for withdrawing the moratorium is to give Obama and Salazar maximum flexibility in compromising with the oil industry, opening up more OCS leasing in return for support for renewable energy.

c) Wave energy is being touted by Salazar as an option favored by the new administration, which criticized Bush for a drill-only approach. FERC is determined to permit wave projects and operates independently of the Energy Department, reporting directly to the president. The president appoints its five members, which can include no more than three from the same party, but the next opportunity to replace a Republican with a Democrat may not come until 2010.

Ģ 5. What is the political import of this triple threat?
All these projects originate in Washington, DC, and reflect a desire to industrialize and militarize our coast by agencies that are insensitive to its value in the present state for marine habitat, cultural inspiration, and fishing and tourism economies.

The fact that these projects began in the Bush administration but continue in the Obama administration reflects a contempt for the interests, opinions, and political influence of the citizens of the Northwest if not the entire West Coast.
They also reflect the indifference and impotence of our elected officials at the local, state, and federal levels.

Finally, it reflects the complicity of Obama, the national Democratic party, and the House majority leadership in kowtowing to the oil industry, pandering to nationwide consumer indifference to coastal environmental concerns, and utterly and completely abandoning principle in the rush to election: the holy grail of capitalist politicians.
For years, Democrat activists like Rachel Binah have told us to vote Democratic to save the coast. But it was candidate Obama who last summer signaled his willingness to compromise with industry, as McCain was gaining in the polls by calling for Drill, Baby, Drill to lower gasoline prices, then around $4 a gallon.

Subsequently, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi removed the moratorium from the continuing resolution and backed a decoy drilling bill designed to fool voters into thinking that they recognized the value of OCS leasing to lower fuel prices.

This is how there came to be an oil and gas lease sale off our coast for the first time in 20 years. It is the most significant capitulation in environmental politics in decades.?

RICHARD JOHNSON,
P.O. BOX 533, TALMAGE, CA 95481
(707) 468-1009 phone and
fax; 800-464-0559
www.mendocinocountry.com
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