September 14th, 2010

The state of Alaska has filed a petition in federal court to overturn the Obama administration’s moratorium on drilling in federal waters of the Arctic.

The problem: Interior Department officials insist that no such formal moratorium exists.

Filed in U.S. District Court in Anchorage, the petition says the Interior Department “arbitrarily and capriciously imposed” a moratorium on drilling in federal waters off Alaska after the Deepwater Horizon disaster “without considering and weighing the potential effects on Alaska, including economic harm to the State of Alaska and Alaska residents.”

Interior Department officials, however, insist that the drilling moratorium imposed on deepwater Gulf of Mexico operations is separate from a policy decision to take a go-slow approach on new Arctic offshore drilling.

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September 10th, 2010

Continued uneasiness about the safety of offshore oil drilling may lead to delays in Royal Dutch Shell’s plans to proceed with five planned wells in Alaska’s Chukchi and Beaufort Seas.

“We will be making that decision in the several months ahead,” Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said at an Anchorage news conference, citing pending reports on offshore drilling safety and the results of an investigation into the Deepwater Horizon disaster. The review process could thwart Shell’s plans to prepare a drilling program for the brief 2011 open-water season.

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January 25th, 2010

Arizona wildlife authorities should have notified federal officers before setting a trap last year that ensnared a jaguar, leading to the death of the cat, according to an investigative report by the U.S. Inspector General’s office released last week.

Because the jaguar is an endangered species, the local authorities were supposed to notify the federal wildlife overseers and obtain a permit for the capture, investigators found. Their failure to apply for a permit was a violation of the Endangered Species Act.

Arizona Game and Fish Department authorities have maintained that the capture was inadvertant. But the IG’s office found that even that circumstance did not exempt local wardens from needing a permit while conducting operations in known jaguar territory.

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