LNG: Blanco takes it down to the wire while Shell's fish impacts explode

Wow, what a week for LNG. The fine folks at Freeport McMoRan are continuing their charm offensive to convince the Governor to ignore her pledge to veto further open-loop LNG terminals in the Gulf. They've lined up every chamber of commerce-type available to swear aligance to their company and the fish-killing technology they'd like to use. They bought a fundamentally flawed, one-week study of marine life at their project site, 16 miles off the mouth of the Mississippi River in the Gulf, and proclaimed the area devoid of sea life. That's about as accurate as calling their efforts in Indonesia 'humanitarian aid.'

The good news is that this week the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries finished their exhaustive analysis of the Freeport EIS and declared their continued opposition to the project's use of open-loop vaporization technology. The Gov has been indicating that she will follow their recommendation, so we're terribly hopeful she'll announce her veto tomorrow. Give her a call and help urge her along: 1-866-366-1121. Or e-mail her here.

This is huge, as it would be the first veto of one of these terminals, and set the precedent that every fish management agency in the Gulf has been hoping for. All we really need is one of these multinational energy corporations to come back to the table with a closed-loop proposal, and everyone else with plans to build an off-shore fish-killing machine will be shown to be the corporate greed-heads we've made them out to be.

Speaking of corporate greed-heads planning to kill fish, Shell has been sponsoring the heck out of the New Orleans Jazz Fest this year - with their logo plastered over every available J Fest ad and surface at the Fairgrounds. We've been outside making our case to Fest-goers and will continue that effort this weekend. We've got flyers, stickers and shirts telling Shell "Thanks for the music - don't kill our fish."

Shoot me an e-mail if you want to help out this weekend. This Saturday (weather permitting) we'll have a plane towing that same message over the Fest for an hour as well!

The biggest Shell news this week came from a peer-review of the industry-funded LNG fish impacts analysis. While the industry-funded science found that there was nothing to worry about, impacts will be negligable yada yada (surprise). The review we contracted for pointed out some significant problems with the industry-funded study(gasp!), as well as isolated a data transcription error in the initial Shell EIS. Correcting that error shows a 220% increase in potential impacts to Gulf red snapper populations! The initial opposition to Shell's terminal stemmed from a red drum impact that was projected to potentially be as high as 5% of Louisiana's annual catch. Well, with this correction we now see that Shell's terminal could also destroy the equivalent of 26% of the entire Gulf's recreational red snapper catch!!! Check out the review here.

We're so sure that Shell will abandon their flawed project once they hear this news we immediately booked a flight to the Hague to attend their annual international shareholder meeting. Seriously though, we're going, and taking RodNReel.com's Mike Lane along as well. We'll see if the Hague cares more about Gulf fish than Houston has.

For our fish and our future,

Aaron


Aaron Viles is the GRN's Campaign Director