E2 Morning Roundup: Gulf coast lawmakers press Obama on BP fines, report says drilling ban can be lifted safely, Al Gore goes after climate skeptics again, and more

“For three days, engineers worked high-powered pumps on two surface ships to overcome the oil and gas belching out of the well.”

“At one point, technicians said in interviews, a plumbing problem on one of the pump ships forced a delay in the operation. Then a screaming match over the radio between two senior engineers ended in one of them threatening to come over and throw the other overboard.”

“At the Houston command center, officials assembled to monitor the top kill. A BP technician called out pressure readings. Dr. Chu [the secretary of energy], in shirtsleeves, performed his own calculations with paper and pen.”

The whole thing is worth a read.

Federal BP probe reveals uncertainty about rig chain-of-command

Bloomberg reports from the joint Interior Department-Coast Guard hearings in Houston:

“BP Plc executives told U.S. investigators they didn’t know who was in charge of the doomed Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico or who made key decisions before the vessel exploded in April, killing 11 workers and spewing millions of barrels of crude into the sea.”

“Kent Wells, a BP senior vice president who started working on the oil-spill response two days after it began, told a federal panel yesterday he never looked into who might have been at fault because he was focused on controlling the well. Another manager, David Sims, said he failed to read an e-mail about cementing procedures because it was difficult to see on his Blackberry.”

“The testimony from Wells, the highest-ranking BP executive to appear before the joint U.S. Coast Guard-Interior Department panel probing the catastrophe, frustrated Hung Nguyen, co-chairman of the panel, who said no one from BP has accepted responsibility for actions that led to the disaster.”

There’s plenty of other coverage: The Houston Chronicle notes discussion of BP’s decision to use a less-expensive well design, and The Washington Post looks at investigators’ interest in BP’s history of safety lapses.

BP’s Hayward won’t show up at Senate Lockerbie hearing

From The Associated Press:

“Outgoing BP CEO Tony Hayward has refused a request by U.S. senators to testify next month about BP’s role in the release of the man convicted of bombing Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.”

“In a letter this week signed by Hayward and obtained by The Associated Press, Hayward told Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., that he is focused on ensuring a ‘smooth and successful leadership change’ at the company and will be unable to testify. The committee is looking into whether the British-based oil company had sought Abdel Baset al-Megrahi’s release to help get a $900 million exploration agreement with Libya off the ground.”

Climate aid pledges may be old wine in new bottles

A couple of days ago, we noted that the World Resources Institute had raised questions about whether climate aid that rich countries are pledging to the developing world under the limited Copenhagen deal is actually new money.

Now, Reuters has a detailed story raising similar fears that some of the $30 billion pledged to curb emissions and adapt to climate change is just a rebranding of existing plans. Another problem: Nobody’s certain what clears the bar of being “new and additional” funding, the threshold in the Copenhagen deal.

“It’s horribly confusing,” said Gordon Shepherd of the WWF in the Reuters’s piece.

Al Gore wields Antarctic study to bash climate skeptics

The former veep cites a new study on Antarctic ice. “Climate deniers often cite the expanding sea ice in the Southern Ocean as evidence that the climate crisis is not occurring. It turns out the opposite is true,” Gore says on his website, noting a Wired magazine story about a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

From Wired:

“An Antarctic ice paradox that has puzzled climate scientists and fueled skeptics’ arguments appears to have been resolved, with a dire forecast.”

“A new study finds that global warming is responsible for snowfall that’s expanded the range of Southern Ocean sea ice, even as western Antarctic glaciers have disintegrated.”

“That expansion contrasts with the common public perception of a uniformly melting Antarctic. But this fortunate balance between loss and gain likely won’t last. By the end of this century, continued warming will turn extra snow into rain.”

Will coffee addicts demand cap-and-trade?

Global warming may allow a tiny bug to run wild over the world’s climate-sensitive coffee crops, reports Yale Environment 360:

“[T]here is evidence that a warming climate may be linked to one of the major threats facing the coffee industry in Ethiopia and elsewhere: A tiny insect known as the coffee berry borer beetle has been devastating coffee plants around the world, and new research suggests even slight temperature increases promote the spread of the pest.”

U.N. climate panel chief gets clean financial bill of health, apology from U.K. paper

The Guardian has details Thursday:

“The head of the UN’s climate science panel did not abuse his position to enrich himself, according to an independent review of his finances by the accountants KPMG that was published publicly for the first time today.

“Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), had come under pressure to resign following two mistakes in a 2007 IPCC report and false allegations that he had made millions of dollars from advisory roles.”

The piece later notes:

“In December, an article in the Sunday Telegraph had claimed that the UN climate chief was ‘making a fortune from his links with ‘carbon trading’ companies’ and that payments from his work for other organisations ‘must run into millions of dollars’. The article has since been removed from the newspaper’s website.

“Last weekend it issued an apology to Pachauri.”

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