It's actually much less than 48 days and every environmental organization is trying to stop the drilling scheduled off the coast of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The following alert is from Center for Biological Diversity.  Letters from Iowans who heard President Obama promise no offshore drilling when he campaigned in Iowa and worked to get him elected might get him to stop the drilling in the Arctic.  Won't know unless we try to get letters from Iowans. The Wilderness Society has gotten 50,000 letters so far.  Obama  needs to hear from Iowans whom he claims helped him win the election.   Maybe we can prevent another disaster.  From the gulf spill we know the oil company and the government have been irresponsible and the destruction to wetlands and wildlife is sickening.  Phyllis

 

Shell Oil Is 48 Days From Arctic Drilling -- Help Stop Next Disaster

It's not only the one-month anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon explosion -- it's also 48 days till Shell Oil starts its planned oil exploration in the Arctic. This July, Shell plans to begin exploratory oil drilling in the Chukchi Sea off Alaska, which would harm and harass endangered species like polar bears and ice seals -- as well as putting the entire Arctic ecosystem at risk of an oil spill even worse than the Gulf of Mexico disaster. The cold reality is that an Arctic spill could be immeasurably worse than the current one because there's no way to clean up a massive oil spill in the frozen, broken-ice conditions that prevail in the Arctic for much of the year. In fact, the ice-free drilling season is so short in the Arctic -- July to early October -- that leaking oil from an accident there like the one in the Gulf could continue to gush for an entire winter while efforts to drill a relief well had to be postponed.

Yet the Obama administration is allowing Shell's drilling to move forward in little more than a month -- with no proper environmental analysis and with the same technology used by BP in the Gulf. The Center for Biological Diversity and allies sued to stop the drilling, but last week the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed our challenge. Immediately afterward, we issued a formal statement vowing to continue our work to stop Shell's dangerous project: "With 48 days to go before Shell is slated to move forward, we will continue to press our request to the Obama administration to re-evaluate its approval of the Shell drilling plans in light of the Gulf spill, and to suspend drilling that we knew was risky even before the massive failure in the Gulf once again exposed that drilling is indeed a dirty and dangerous business."

Help us stop this ticking time bomb in the Arctic by sending a letter to President Obama today urging him to rescind his decision to allow Shell's drilling this summer. Read more about our case against Shell in the Anchorage Daily News.