Salazar sux, part deux

Via Frank Rich, I am reminded that in addition to taking down Gen. Stanley McChrystal, Rolling Stone also, in the same issue, has a second installment of all that's rotten in the Department of the Interior.

Everything that was wrong, in advance, with Deepwater Horizon in the way of over-aggressive drilling and lack of advance preparations for serious problems, is wrong in spades with proposed new drilling in the Arctic:

The closest Coast Guard station is on Kodiak Island, some 1,000 miles away. The nearest cache of boom to help contain a spill is in Seattle — a distance of 2,000 miles. ... Relief equipment can realistically be brought to the region only by boat — and then only seasonally. The Arctic is encased in ice for more than half the year, and even icebreakers can't assure access in the dark of winter. "If it's this hard to clean this up in the relatively benign conditions of the Gulf of Mexico," Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse cautioned Salazar at a hearing after the BP spill, "good luck trying to implement this sort of a cleanup in the Arctic."

Shell, in fact, has never conducted an offshore-response drill in the Chukchi Sea. Perhaps that's because there's no proven technology for cleaning up oil in icy water, which can render skimming boats useless — much less to cope with a gusher under the ice. In the worst-case scenario, according to marine scientists, a blowout that takes place in the fall, when the seas are freezing over, could flow unabated until relief wells could be drilled the following summer. In the interim, oil could spread under the sea ice, marring the coastlines of Russia and Canada, and possibly reaching as far as Norway and Greenland. "It could realistically be a circumpolar event," says Steiner.

This is the new frontiers of Arctic drilling for which Secretary of the Interior Kenny Boy Salazar is pushing so hard.

Meanwhile, even as the Rolling Stone piece was being penned, and despite the six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, Minerals Management Service was still accepting new deepwater tract bids.

Hey, Obamiacs: As long as The One stays with Kenny Boy, it's a sign he supports his position. Perhaps, as with Wall Street, "New Democrats" would like more campaign money from Old Big Oil?