Enviro Groups Ignored Gulf Before BP Disaster

Since the fiery sinking of the Deepwater Horizon rig last spring, environmentalists have scolded federal regulators for neglecting problems with offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. They were right. But environmental groups ignored the Gulf, too. Focused on climate change and watch-dogging drilling in Alaskan waters, environmentalists were wary of upsetting a détente that blocked oil production on both coasts and the eastern Gulf of Mexico. They had ceded the drilling zone off Alabama, Louisiana and Texas as hostile territory. "The Gulf of Mexico was pretty much written off as a sacrifice zone," said Kieran Suckling, head of one of the country's most aggressive environmental litigants, the Center for Biological Diversity. "The focus was put on more pristine areas." That focus can be seen in the number of lawsuits filed by environmentalists and others under the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA. In the eight years that George W. Bush was president, they filed suit against federal agencies more than 1,000 times. By contrast, the Forest Service was sued 388 times under NEPA during the same period, spurring the agency's leaders to complain of "paralysis by analysis" and ask Congress for new exemptions to the law. The 126 NEPA lawsuits filed against the Bureau of Land Management had oil and gas producers complaining that environmentalists were "locking up the land." Environmental groups said they had to go to court to preserve uses of public land other than drilling, logging and mining. Since the spill, the Center for Biological Diversity alone has filed seven environmental lawsuits, and the number of people working on Gulf drilling legal issues there has risen from zero to six. The BP spill has spawned more than 300 civil lawsuits in the four Gulf states(Greenwire, July 7). That kind of legal scrutiny, Suckling said, will inevitably slow down and limit oil production in the Gulf...more