It certainly doesn’t look good. Federal investigators have confirmed that the White House altered a peer-reviewed report last May to expand a six-month drilling moratorium following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The decision sparked complaints from the peer-reviewers themselves, who said they never signed off on such a recommendation.
A detailed accounting of exactly what happened is included in a new report from the Interior Department’s Inspector General. The document has garnered traction in the press (Politico, AP) and has already been used by at least one senator, Louisiana Republican David Vitter, as evidence that the administration of Barack Obama isn’t making good on its promise to base policies on sound science. The conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute is even calling on Obama to fire his chief energy and climate advisor, Carol Browner.
The inspector general does not assert wrongdoing, however, and the administration (which later apologized) makes a plausible case that it was exercising its right to issue policy after consulting the science. A simple reading of the final report offers some evidence for this. After all, one set of recommendations is clearly attributed to the report (“The report recommends…”) and a second set of recommendations – including the moratorium – is clearly attributed to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar (The Secretary recommends…"). The moratorium is described as a temporary pause that would allow for “implementation of the measures proposed in this report”, and the word “moratorium” doesn’t appear in those detailed recommendations.
Regardless, this technical distinction failed to crystallize in the minds of many. The team that conducted the scientific review had agreed with the secretary’s recommendation for a more limited moratorium and a temporary pause on then-current drilling operations, but the final language recommended a moratorium on all drilling operations (later overturned in by the courts). In their letter (posted here), the reviewers made it clear that they did not agree with the final decision and felt that their names were being used to support it.
What is not at all clear – due to poor editing and/or poor communication – is whether the moratorium was actually part of the report and therefore subject to external review. If not, then it’s actually the peer-review team that is stepping on the policymakers’ toes.
Pointing to lessons learned from Exxon Valdez, where fresh oil is still found buried in shallow sediments, Lavoie said that “we need to be thinking long-term in terms of decades” for monitoring of impacts and restoration. Lavoie also emphasized that one of the biggest lessons learned in the wake of the disaster was the need to develop – at the federal level – a way to coordinate with the scientific community and to involve scientists in the response and decision-making process immediately following a disaster. “Communication issues were tremendous,” Lavoie says. “The intention was good. I don’t think the follow through was very good.”
BP’s Macondo oil well in the Gulf of Mexico was finally shut down on 18 September, as a final squirt of cement sealed the source of America’s largest ever oil spill.
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The R/V Cape Hatteras, on a port call after two weeks zig-zagging around the northern Gulf of Mexico on the trail of oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill, seemed quiet when I came aboard Friday afternoon. Some of her eight scientists and technicians (and ten crew members) are enjoying a day off, while others prepare for the next stretch of a 27-day cruise. I watch food and sodas go onto the ship and trash come off, and overhear snatches of cell phone calls home. Chief scientist Tracy Villareal of the University of Texas at Austin contemplates a Google map of the floor of the Gulf.