Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour (R) is a Big Oil apologist who raised $2 million in oil money for GOP governors.  That’s probably why he doesn’t draw a big distinction between oil and chocolate.  For him, they are both a treat.

On TP Green, CAP’s Kristen Bartoloni discusses Barbour’s amazing testimony Thursday before the House Oversight Committee on the recovery efforts after last year’s BP oil spill.  Barbour blamed the economic devastation in the Gulf Coast not on BP or the other companies responsible for poisoning the region, but on the media, for  supposedly showing a “chocolate pelican“ over and over again:

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Today, the House Oversight Committee held a hearing on the recovery efforts after the BP oil spill last April, focusing on the Obama administration’s response. Gov. Haley Barbour (R-MS) testified, standing in as an able replacement for an official company spokesman. In his opening statement, Barbour blamed the economic devastation in Mississippi and the Gulf Coast not on BP, Halliburton, or Transocean, the companies responsible for poisoning the region, but on the news media, for showing a “chocolate pelican“:

So people saw on TV the same brown pelican coated with looked like 3 inches of oil, I mean, looked like a chocolate pelican. And they showed it every hour, every day, 24 hours a day for weeks and weeks and weeks. And the news media, particularly 24-hour cable TV, gave citizens the impression the whole Gulf Coast was coated in oil. People deduced from that that it was unsafe, unpleasant, don’t want to go there. They canceled their reservations, they canceled their contracts to buy condominium and not just in Mississippi, but all across the gulf coast.

The President, to his credit, actually it got so bad that the president came to Mississippi, Alabama and Florida and held news conferences on the beach to say, look, the beaches are clean, the water is clear, it’s beautiful down here, come on down here. But that one news day can’t compete with what was being seen every day, every hour for weeks.

This isn’t the first time Barbour tried to downplay the effects of the oil spill and blame the media for loss of tourism. Just last year, Barbour said that “the news coverage is killing our tourist business,” despite the fact that oil was washing onto the shores of his state.

Additionally, at today’s hearing, Barbour once again tried to blame the Obama administration for deliberately driving up the price of oil and gas to spur investments in clean energy. While Barbour places the blame on Obama for higher gas prices, the statistics actually show that domestic oil production has actually risen to its highest level since 2003. Yet, at the same time, gas prices are hovering just below $4 a gallon and oil at $100 a barrel.

Barbour’s inability to blame oil companies for their crimes comes as no surprise. The Huffington Post wrote in March 2011 that Barbour’s past as an energy lobbyist and politician who raked in millions in oil industry campaign contributions “complicate” his comments on energy policy. And a Think Progress report on Haley Barbour’s ties to Big Oil revealed that the RGA raked in $5 million in campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry in 2010 with Barbour at the helm.

Our guest blogger is Kiley Kroh, Associate Director for Ocean Communications at the Center for American Progress.

In yet another alarming glimpse at the long-term effects of the BP disaster, the preliminary findings of two new studies show that the nearly two million gallons of toxic dispersants applied to the more than 200 million gallons of oil that gushed from its exploded rig may have been more damaging to the ecosystem as a whole than the oil alone.

The government approved application of the dispersants in an attempt to prevent oil and tar mats from washing into the marshes along the coast. BP maintained the dispersants would break down the oil and allow more of it to be eaten by bacteria that would consume some of the most harmful products in the oil -– “just like dish soap on grease.” But initial experiments conducted by Wade Jeffrey, a biologist with the University of West Florida’s Center for Environmental Diagnostics and Bioremediation, point to the opposite. After adding BP oil to seawater and combining with Corexit, Jeffrey found that the chemicals did not have their intended effect:

The way we’re doing the experiment, the Corexit does not seem to facilitate the degradation of the oil.

In fact, Jeffrey found that the combination of Corexit and oil was more toxic to phytoplankton in the sample than oil alone and did not prompt the oil-eating bacteria to consume the oil any faster.

A similar study, conducted by Susan Laramore of Florida Atlantic University’s Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute and also released last week, looked at the effects of the oil-Corexit mixture on slightly larger species, including conch, oysters and shrimp. Early results point to the same conclusion – that the oil and dispersant mixture is more toxic than the oil alone. Laramore notes that her study runs directly counter to the assurances BP and others presented to the public when making the case for dispersant use:

These results are backwards of what the oil companies are reporting.

In the immediate aftermath of the spill, BP quickly stockpiled and deployed massive quantities of Corexit with the aim of keeping the oil from fragile marshlands – and out of the public eye. As E&E News uncovered, the chemical is manufactured by “a company that was once part of Exxon Mobil Corp. and whose current leadership includes executives at both BP and Exxon.” According to EPA data, “Corexit ranks far above dispersants made by competitors in toxicity and far below them in effectiveness in handling southern Louisiana crude.”

The oil giant simultaneously worked to convince an uneasy public that the chemicals, previously untested at such depths, would naturally biodegrade. In an official statement last year, BP called the chemical “one of the most well-studied dispersants” and asserted that it would rapidly biodegrade, in many cases in a matter of days. Even when it became clear the company was using the chemicals in “unprecedented volumes” and the EPA demanded BP find a less toxic alternative, the oil giant refused to comply, calling Corexit “the best option for subsea application.”

Both the Jeffrey and Laramore studies, however, clearly debunk BP’s claims that the materials would prove benign. Frustrated by the lack of federal response to their requests for a less-toxic alternative and no longer willing to subject its coasts and citizens to the harmful chemicals, the state of Louisiana has taken matters into its own hands – the senate is moving forward this week with a bill that would effectively ban the use of dispersants in responding to oil spills in Louisiana waters.

Our guest bloggers are Michael Conathan, Director of Oceans Policy, and Richard Caperton, energy policy analyst at the Center for American Progress.

For 87 days in the spring and summer of 2010, an undersea gusher of oil continuously reminded Americans of the toll energy development can take on our oceans.

Approximately 3,500 oil rigs and platforms were operating in U.S. waters at the time of the BP disaster. There were also over 1,000 wind turbines generating clean, renewable electricity off the coastlines of northwestern Europe. But not a single windmill yet turns in the strong, abundant winds that abound off our shores.

Wind power cannot immediately replace the energy we still generate from the oil and gas produced on the outer continental shelf. But America’s unwillingness to clear the way for permitting a proven, commercially scalable, clean source of energy is a major black eye for a nation that purports to be a leader in technological development.

Denmark constructed the first offshore wind facility in in 1991. In the intervening two decades 10 other countries installed offshore wind farms — eight nations in northern Europe, plus Japan and China:

Unfortunately, in the United States, the lack of a clear regulatory structure, inconsistent messages from other ocean stakeholders, congressional budget battles, opposition to specific project siting, and instability in financial markets have all played a role in preventing domestic offshore wind from becoming a reality.

Securing cheap, clean, domestic, energy sources is a universal goal. And yet, as a country, we continue to drop one roadblock after another in front of one of the world’s most proven renewable energy technologies.

More than 40,000 megawatts of offshore wind energy capacity have been permitted around the globe, but the United States accounts for barely 1 percent of that and we have yet to generate our first watt of electricity from this abundant, carbon-free source of power.

The longer we wait to begin developing this technology and creating the infrastructure and knowledge base that go along with it, the further we will fall behind the rest of the world and the harder it will be to bring the economic development and environmental benefits to our own shores.

Read more at the Center for American Progress.

Our guest blogger is Kiley Kroh, Associate Director for Ocean Communications at the Center for American Progress.

One year after the BP oil catastrophe, marine life in the Gulf of Mexico is exhibiting some disturbing trends. Over 150 dead dolphins, including several with oil from the BP spill on their bodies, have washed up along the Gulf Coast this year. Now, scientists are expressing grave concern over the shocking number of fish they’ve discovered in inland waterways and the Gulf of Mexico with skin lesions, fin rot, spots, liver blood clots and other health problems. Richard Snyder, director of the University of West Florida Center for Environmental Diagnostics and Bioremediation, calls the discovery of so many diseased fish “a huge red flag“:

In the years following the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska’s Prince William Sound, the herring fishery collapsed and has not recovered, according to an Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee report. The herring showed similar signs of illness — including skin lesions — that are showing up in Gulf fish

Many of the symptoms scientists see in Gulf fish are consistent with oil exposure. If these recent trends prove to be a result of the BP disaster, then this could very well be a sign of worse things to come. Scientists currently working in the gulf stress that “findings so far demonstrate that studies need to continue far into the future,” again emphasizing the critical need for significant investment in scientific study and the long-term restoration of the Gulf.

The lesson of Prince William Sound’s herring fishery shows that the most devastating effects of the spill could take several years to present themselves. Therefore, Congress, which has failed to pass any sort of post-spill legislation, must use its authority to ensure BP and other responsible parties continue to be held accountable and that funds are directed into research and restoration projects.

At a recent townhall meeting, Rep. James Lankford (R-OK), an oil-funded freshman, dismissed the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico as the equivalent of a “health code violation” at a local restaurant. He criticized the now-ended six-month hiatus on offshore drilling permits as an overblown reaction to the BP spill:

Our reaction to the gulf coast spill would be like closing every restaurant in Shaw-nee because one restaurant had a health code violation.

Lankford’s analogy might be apt if the “health code violation” involved a deadly outbreak of Ebola or mad cow disease that killed 11 eleven people, caused in part by industry contractors that supply every single restaurant, with lax government regulators complicit in an epidemic that took months to overcome, leaving the entire region permanently scarred.

Lankford has already raked in $119,960 in contributions from the oil and gas industry, including $10,000 from Koch Industries.

Our guest blogger is Kiley Kroh, Associate Director for Ocean Communications at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Yesterday, one year and two weeks after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig took the lives of 11 people and perpetuated the worst environmental disaster in US history, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives began voting on a trio of bills designed to repeat the catastrophe:

HR 1230: Reopening risky offshore drilling. The first of the “Oil Above All” bills, HR 1230, passed the House by a vote of 266-149. If enacted into law, the bill would force the Administration to offer lease sales in the Gulf and off Virginia that were canceled in the wake of the BP disaster, after the administration determined safety standards and environmental impact assessments were in serious need of reform.

HR 1229: Accelerating drilling permits. The bill would force the Secretary of Interior to approve or deny all new applications for drilling permits under an existing exploration plan within 30 days (with the possibility of two 15-day extensions). These applications are for dangerous and complicated work and often take oil companies years to compile — the bill would impose rushed, arbitrary permitting deadlines, as well as prevent the enforcement of key public interest and environmental laws. HR 1229 is scheduled for a vote next week.

HR 1231: Opening everywhere to offshore drilling. This legislation would force sweeping new drilling in sensitive areas — namely the entire Atlantic coast, Southern California coast, the Arctic Ocean and Alaska’s Bristol Bay.

All this flies in the face of recommendations of the President’s National Commission on the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling, which stated unequivocally in its report that laws for spill prevention and response need to be improved before drilling is expanded:

The technology, laws and regulations, and practices for containing, responding to, and cleaning up spills lag behind the real risks associated with deepwater drilling into large, high-pressure reservoirs of oil and gas located far offshore and thousands of feet below the ocean’s surface. Government must close the existing gap and industry must support rather than resist that effort.

“To be allowed to drill on the outer continental shelf is a privilege to be earned, not a private right to be exercised,” the commission concluded.

Instead of working to implement this fundamental principle and prevent another blowout, the House leadership is unconscionably choosing to speed up the exact processes that the commission cited as contributing factors to the BP disaster. The commission lays out a set of critical recommendations that have been completely ignored by this Congress. It should be no surprise to anyone that none of them included “speed up permitting” or “open half of the Outer Continental Shelf to drilling.”

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Our guest blogger is Kiley Kroh, Associate Director for Ocean Communications at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

The Department of Justice announced Thursday that oil giant BP has agreed to commit $1 billion toward early restoration projects in the Gulf of Mexico. The $1 billion comes from a $20 billion fund that BP set up last year to pay for natural resource damages and to compensate victims of the spill, and is considered a “first step toward fulfilling BP’s obligation to fund the complete restoration of injured public resources.”

Such a down payment on Natural Resource Damage Assessment (NRDA) liability was a central component of the Center for American Progress recommendations for immediate action on the part of BP and other responsible parties to prove their commitment to the long-term rehabilitation of the Gulf. The agreement will accelerate the restoration process, but, as The Times-Picayune reports, is also “a way for BP to limit its ultimate liability“:

The advance payment plan was first proposed by Louisiana state officials last year as a way to reduce the wetlands damage they expected the spill to cause, and as a way for BP to limit its ultimate liability under the federal Oil Pollution Act, which requires companies responsible for oil spills to be liable for damages caused by spills from the time they occur until all of their effects have been mitigated.

The funds will be divided into projects selected by each of the five affected states and the federal agencies — National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Department of Interior — that make up the Natural Resource Trustees. Possible projects include rebuilding coastal marshes, replenishment of damaged beaches, conservation of sensitive areas for ocean habitat for injured wildlife, and restoration of barrier islands and wetlands.

Determining liability through the NRDA process is a long, bureaucratic procedure that will likely take several years to resolve. Clearly, devastated communities and sensitive environmental areas in the Gulf can’t wait any longer than they already have for remediation to begin — so today’s announcement is certainly a move in the right direction. However, it is just the first step. Full recovery of the Gulf Coast region will require a comprehensive and open scientific assessment of damage caused by the largest oil spill in U.S. history, as well as an enforceable commitment by BP to truly “make this right.”