News Roundup: Expert Richard Charter says...

Richard Charter, senior policy advisor for Marine Programs at Defenders of Wildlife, has worked on offshore oil drilling issues for over 30 years. Today’s news roundup takes a look at what he’s been saying about the Gulf oil disaster.

In an interview with the Times-Picayune, Richard Charter said,  “I think there are better ways to spend precautionary dollars,” he said, noting that money might be better spent on improving technology to prevent and contain well blowouts rather than on the proposed two relief wells to be drilled in the Gulf of Mexico.

After observing BP’s failure to take precautionary actions that could have prevented the Gulf oil disaster, Richard Charter told Marketplace that without complete reform of how the oil industry is regulated, we’ll see a repeat of this catastrophe some time down the road.

With the rising comparisons between the Exxon Valdez incident and the Gulf oil disaster, Richard Charter points out, in an interview with Uprising Radio, that it is not about any type of comparsions between the two, but rather, it is about the lessons we failed to learn. “The fact is we didn’t learn from Exxon Valdez about dispersants causing human health problems that last for years and years… We didn’t learn that we needed to upgrade our spill containment and clean up equipment… So, we’ve got another lesson here. This is a really hard lesson because some of the things we didn’t learn from the Exxon Valdez are in fact haunting us now.”

In an interview with Gary Null, Richard Charter discussed two main topics, the oil plumes and the economic cost the Gulf oil disaster. Richard discusses three possible causes for the existence of the plume and the uncertainty of economic cost to the American taxpayer, as “[the Gulf oil disaster] is so large it has exceeded federa libability limits.”  At the end of the interview with Gary, Richard made a poignant statement: “the Gulf oil catastrophe could be an extinction event for some species.”

With only guesstimates as to how much oil is in Gulf waters, Richard Charter says, “Knowing the volume of the total daily release of oil allows you to gear every facet of the response, from where and what kind of dispersant you use and how to apply it and where you might want to pre-deploy booms.”