I came back to Mississippi to my family’s farm in 2000. We’re about 30 miles north of Biloxi, and just when I was getting used to living away from the big city, along came Katrina. It was a big setback for this area, which has always been poor anyway. The coming of the casinos to the Mississippi Gulf Coast made a big economic change, but the isolated, uneducated redneck culture persists. Our land had been relatively uninteresting to developers; much of it remains in its natural state—natural, that is, post the massive harvest of the longleaf pine at the turn of the last century. People were not ready for the rape that is now upon us, not only by the developers, but now by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).
The governor of Mississippi is a good ole boy Republican, once head of the Republican National Committee, named Haley Barbour. Until I saw a Sierra Club film, I hadn’t realized that Haley Barbour was at Cheney’s infamous "Energy Task Force" meeting. The film, completed only weeks before Katrina, connects the Energy Task Force to Barbour’s attempt to open up the inner Mississippi Gulf Coast at the barrier islands to oil and gas drilling.
As reported by the Mississippi Press, initial hearings on another Barbour project that very likely can be traced directly to the Energy Task Force were held just weeks after hurricane Katrina. The part of the state that would be most affected by this project was otherwise engaged, looking for water, gas, food and shelter, and trying to get out from under massive fallen trees.
Now the DOE is ready to start work on this outrageous $3.5 billion project. The Richton Salt Dome project intends to pump 50 million gallons of water per day out of the Pascagoula & Leaf Rivers. The Pascagoula River basin is the only undammed water system in the lower 48, and a vital lifeline to migrating birds, as the first stop after their flight across the Gulf of Mexico in the spring and the last stop before they head for Central and South America in the fall. There is food in those big swamps, and lots of clear, clean water.
O.K., the DOE has no use for migrating birds (or the International Migratory Bird Treaty). The water will be pumped (using lots and lots of fossil fuel) into a land formation called the Richton Salt Domes. Instead of mining the salt and selling it to the people up north who say they need it for de-icing roads, the salt will be mixed with perfectly clean, potable water, and pumped through the salt domes. Then the highly salted water ("brine," they call it) will be pumped into the Gulf of Mexico (using lots more fossil fuel for that pump job), where the excess salt in the water will do in marine life, including the endangered Gulf Sturgeon.
And what do we U.S. citizens get for our $3.5 billion? We will have 160 million gallons of unrefined oil, supposedly enough to run the U.S. for two weeks. Here's what has to be built just to deliver the crude to the Chevron refinery. You can almost hear the simple slide presentation, but behind it lie a lot of dead birds and fish. And note that half the oil goes to a Naval Station, not to civilians or businesses.
What about the environmental consequences? Well, the DOE has studied them carefully.
Click on Chapter 3, Section 3.6, "Water Resources." Richton surface water analysis begins on p. 3-130. There are four pages of tables describing the impact on creeks and streams—generally the same phrase "Impaired use for aquatic life support." Originally, I thought "N/A" in the tables must mean "not affected." Nope: "not available." They didn’t bother. For most of the surface water in the vicinity of Richton, the impact of the salt domes project is "impaired" or "not available."
It is hard for me to believe that the impairment extends so far upstream...even to Black Creek, a U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service designated "Wild & Scenic River." I guess the concluding sentence is the one that hurts the most: "It is unlikely that a drawdown event would coincide with drought conditions in the Leaf River" (p. 3-139). I guess the DOE hasn’t seen this USGS map. All the rivers and streams in South Mississippi have streamflows well below normal, according to the USGS. Perhaps they missed the drought in the Southeast, missed Atlanta and Florida and Alabama fighting over water last summer.
Don’t even start reading the "Surface Water Common Impacts," p. 3-99. It’s too painful.
After two weeks, then what? No water, no fish, no birds, and, presumably, the emergency oil supply is gone. Why not just spend the $3.5 billion this project will cost on solar panels for American homes? At least they would last longer than two weeks—and a little fan, a little light, a little communication devices like TV or radio or internet, all that means a lot in an emergency. We know, we lived through Katrina. But will we live through Cheney?
Wyoming residents know what their native son did to them, in the name of OIL. With the opening of Wyoming’s public lands to oil and gas exploration, Wyoming folks have lost access to huge tracts of public lands. Halliburton trucks run the highways, towns have boomed, the big skies have gotten cloudy with continual plumes. And the people have been locked out of what was once some of the most beautiful public land in the world.
At a time when no one seriously questions that burning fossil fuels is changing our climate far more rapidly than we can control, our government can’t seem to get off the teat.
Haley Barbour was thrilled to have his hero’s DOE bring its no-bid petrodollars to Mississippi—he must have been lobbying for it, and along the way acquired some nice campaign contributions as a result, according to Richard Munson's From Edison to Enron, Praeger Books, 2005, pp. 158-159:
Barbour quickly lobbied the President to reverse his campaign pledge to regulate emissions of carbon dioxide, the key culprit of global climate change. Two weeks before the vice president’s energy task force was to release its final recommendations, the two lobbyists (Barbour and Marc Raciot) met privately with Cheney–the EPA administrator...was deliberately not invited. Just days before the report’s unveiling, the Southern Company and other utilities contributed an additional $100,000 to the Republican Party. Reversing decades-old rules, the administration responded by declaring that utilities need not install pollution controls when they expand or upgrade their plants.
After being surprised by, and uninformed of, this reversal, Christine Todd Whitman resigned as EPA Administrator. And, although the project will doubtless enrich a few Barbour buddies, Richton is a poor choice for a unit of the national strategic petroleum reserve system expansion, according to Gal Luft, in a Washington Post op ed about a year ago.
So what of the patriotic goal of providing oil in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve? There are 4 existing sites. The one in Freeport, Texas is the largest. These have a total of 700mm barrels capacity. They now have 671mm barrels in storage and can only add 100,000 per day. The Richton Salt Dome reserve would add to the project so that the reserved unrefined oil would last the USA about 2 months if we had to rely on it and if the public got it. But the public does not get this oil. The U.S. government gets the oil, as payment for royalties of producers on federal owned land. Does VP Dick Cheney’s recent trip to the middle east include assuring oil producing nations we will be buying lots of oil with which to fill up our strategic reserves?
When the Mississippi public became fully apprised of the Richton plans, our senators (both Republicans) and our Congressman, the exemplary Gene Taylor, insisted that there be public hearings about the project. So the DOE condescendingly scheduled three "open meetings". The DOE does not seriously believe that there will be any changes to its plan, and certainly no possibility that it won’t happen.
If you care about stopping Dick Cheney’s and Haley Barbour’s backward-looking energy policy; if you care about migrating birds, the water supply in the U.S., slowing the use of fossil fuel, or just stopping this infernal machine of a war government, please ask your Congressmen and Senators to rethink their approval in 2005 of the expansion of theStrategic Petroleum Reserve Program.
First we ship in the oil from. . . somewhere, then we blast out a hole by diverting a river and sending brine to the Gulf, and then we put the oil back in the ground. Then we build 100 miles of pipeline to a refinery and reserve the oil for. . . the military? It’s stupid, dirty, and dangerous to the water we need and the air we breathe. Get thee behind me, Satan.