BP reneges on deal to rebuild oyster beds, repair wetlands, Louisiana officials say

[Modbert]

BP reneges on deal to rebuild oyster beds, repair wetlands, Louisiana officials say | NOLA.com

BP has reneged on promises made in November to negotiate early payments to Louisiana to help rebuild oyster beds, repair damaged wetlands and build a fish hatchery to allow the state to respond immediately to the collapse of commercial fisheries in the wake of the BP Gulf oil spill, state officials said Monday.

Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority chairman Garret Graves and Department of Wildlife & Fisheries director Robert Barham said the state will instead scramble to find millions of dollars to begin the work itself, then bill BP for the costs.

"BP has clearly changed their approach," Barham said. "All we've asked is for them to do what they said they would do in their commercials, be here for the long haul and make it right."

 

[strollingbones]

que surprise!

 

[waltky]

Granny says, "Dat's right - wildlife returns with wetlands too...

Study: Restoring Wetlands Could Help Fix Climate Change
February 01, 2017 When it comes to climate change, there are all kinds of ideas about how to address the problem.

One that has been on the front burner lately is the 'engineering' approach. The idea is: humans can 'fix' the problem through technology, rather than by punishing people and industries that pump carbon into the atmosphere. Supporting clean energy technologies, and making them as cheap and plentiful as fossil fuels, is one way to engineer our way out of the problem. But according to a new report, protecting and rebuilding some of our coastal wetlands may be another way to get some carbon out of the atmosphere.

Wetlands as carbon sinks

The new study was done by researchers from the University of Maryland, with support from NOAA, and appears in the Journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. The goal was to find the world's best 'blue carbon' storage sites. Blue carbon is what scientists call the carbon dioxide captured and held in the world's oceans and coastal systems. VOA spoke with lead author Ariana Sutton-Grier, an ecosystem ecologist at the University of Maryland, about the research. She says one of the main points is that the natural world has already figured out some effective ways to deal with excess carbon. "Coastal wetlands are some of the most productive ecosystems on the planet," she points out, "and they store a lot of carbon below ground."

Salt marshes capture and store carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.​

How much? "The researchers estimated that mangrove forests in the U.S. capture and store as much as 34 metric tons of carbon annually," the team said in a press release. "Which is roughly equivalent to the carbon emitted by 24 million passenger cars in a year." And that's just the U.S. How about the world? Including the United States, they estimate "coastal wetlands may capture and store more than 200 metric tons of carbon per year globally."

Illustration of how coastal wetlands serve as reservoirs for carbon.​

That's a lot of carbon, but Grier admits, not nearly enough to solve the problem. "This would definitely not be a "silver bullet" that would "fix" climate change;" she says. "There is no silver bullet. Human emissions are much larger than natural sinks, but with a problem this big, we need to find multiple solutions to reduce and combat emissions..." To give you an idea how big, some of the best estimates suggest humans are pumping about 36 billion metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere every year. To help reverse that trend means protecting, and perhaps beginning to restore the coastlines that have been degraded by human activity and rising sea levels.

Protecting, and rebuilding

 

[theHawk]

"promises made in November to negotiate early payments"

So failing to "negotiate early payments" is equivalent to them not doing the repair work?

Why would BP need to pay early?

The article also states they will just do the clean up and then "bill BP for the costs." So what is the problem?