For those who were unable to attend our Flamenco Fundraiser last Friday, you missed some really fabulous music – as well as some top-notch socializing with supporters of OCR and the Marin AIDS Project. It was such an honor to…
Obama Administration completely fails on Atlantic Seismic Surveys
Despite the thousands of comments advising against opening up the Atlantic Seaboard to offshore oil and gas exploration, today President Obama approved opening up the Eastern Outer Continental Shelf to seismic airgun surveys. As we highlighted in our recent critique…
Perfunctory documents still haunting offshore regulations?
The initial post-disaster review of the contingency plans for the BP-Macondo operations revealed that the plans were a pile of boilerplate used as a proxy for the required papers. This was made clear to the public when the documents included…
Expressing the measure of things
Over the last week I was participating in an International Standards Organization (ISO) meeting hosted by the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research (TNO) with an august assemblage of underwater noise stakeholders working on underwater acoustics standards. While this activity…
Big noises going on out yonder
Dynamically stabilized oil drilling and production platform. With much of the offshore noise attention being focused on seismic airgun surveys, other aspects of the fossil fuel industry’s contribution to ocean noise pollution may be sneaking by our review –…
Save the Whales! Really!
When OCR Program Director Kathi Koontz came on board with our team earlier this year she had one request: that we give her some flexibility to participate in saving whales. While this is part of OCR’s mission, Kathi was referring…
Report from Providence
I spent last week at an Acoustics Society conference in Rhode Island. The field of acoustics is pretty broad so some 1100 professionals from fields as diverse as biomedical imaging and speech and language processing all convened on the 5th…
Geophysical and Geological EIS gateway to Atlantic fossil fuel production
Close to two years ago we reviewed and submitted comments to a Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) five-year survey plan for the offshore uses of the Atlantic Seaboard issued by the Bureau of Offshore Energy Management (BOEM). At the time…
Atlantic G&G PEIS Shortcomings: 2014
Summary of Atlantic Geological and Geophysical Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement Shortcomings: The PEIS should be reevaluated in the context of the most up-to-date NOAA Acoustic Guidelines. These guidelines have just recently been reviewed by the public and stakeholders whose…