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Murkowski endorses NOAA relocation Alaska senator says Obama’s proposal to move agency from Commerce Department to Interior ‘makes sense on a number of levels’ Wesley Loy For Petroleum News
Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski says she sees “real merit” in the Obama administration’s proposal to move the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration from the Commerce Department into the Interior Department.
Murkowski, a Republican, explained her view on the matter in a recent op-ed column published in Alaska media outlets.
The Obama administration on Jan. 13 proposed the NOAA move as one prong of a reorganization plan meant to make the government more efficient and helpful to business with less duplication.
Formed in 1970, NOAA is an agency of considerable importance to the offshore oil and gas industry. NOAA conducts extensive scientific research, and is home to subagencies such as the National Marine Fisheries Service, the National Weather Service and the National Ocean Service.
‘Fish out of water’ “There are many issues on which I disagree with President Obama,” Murkowski began her op-ed column. “When someone is right on something, however, it is important to give credit where it’s due.”
The senator said that after reviewing Obama’s plan for NOAA, she had concluded it “makes sense on a number of levels.”
“From a basic structural perspective, NOAA is increasingly out of place at Commerce — like a fish out of water,” she wrote. “Its stated mission is to provide the scientific data necessary to protect lives and property, as well as to conserve and help manage our nation’s fisheries, oceans and coastlines. Now consider the two departments it could be located in. Commerce is primarily focused on the promotion of economic growth and international trade, dealing with patents and other commercial issues. Interior, meanwhile, manages natural resources, public lands, and fish and wildlife. Based on that alone, it’s easy to see why Interior is a more natural fit.”
She noted the story of how NOAA was placed where it is today: Because President Nixon “was upset with one of Alaska’s great statesmen, Wally Hickel, who was serving as Interior Secretary at the time.”
Murkowski said both NOAA and Interior focus on the same types of work, such as offshore mapping and managing marine mammals, fish stocks and habitat.
Arctic exploration EIS cited One unified agency would be better than “two in conflict,” Murkowski said.
“For example, NOAA and Interior regularly conduct separate environmental reviews of the same projects, adding time to the approval process and crossing purposes,” Murkowski wrote. “Case in point is NOAA’s Draft Environmental Impact Statement for Arctic oil and gas development, which contemplates a needlessly restrictive and unrealistic program and is at odds with Interior’s own assessment. Instead of coordination, the current arrangement routinely leads to conflict and confusion — and an uncertain path forward for those who wish to invest in our state.”
NOAA Fisheries Service is the lead federal agency preparing the EIS, which lays out policy alternatives for issuance of permits and authorizations for seismic surveys and exploratory drilling over a five-year period through 2017. Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which handles offshore leasing, is helping write the EIS as a “cooperating agency.”
The draft EIS considers how industrial noise, vessel traffic and pollution might affect whales and other marine mammals.
The alternatives concern industry, placing annual limits on the number of seismic surveys and allowing only one or two exploratory drilling programs per year in each of the Beaufort and Chukchi seas.
The bipartisan Alaska congressional delegation, in a joint press release, said it had met April 18 with NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco to raise concerns “that the final EIS could create a set of further timing and spatial restrictions beyond those already listed in the leases held by oil companies.”
Sen. Rockefeller ‘appalled’ Obama can’t move NOAA by himself. He has asked Congress to “reinstate the authority that past presidents have had to streamline and reform the Executive Branch.”
A May 2 press release from Murkowski’s office cites a “growing movement” in Washington, D.C., regarding the NOAA proposal.
Murkowski noted that both Commerce Secretary John Bryson and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar have indicated support for the move.
But consolidating NOAA within Interior certainly has opposition.
“I’m appalled by that thought,” Sen. Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat and chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, said in a March 7 hearing on NOAA’s budget. “I’m appalled by it. And I want to serve notice that I will do everything I can to make sure that it does not happen. And that’s not because of territorial concerns, jurisdictional concerns. It simply doesn’t make any sense.”
Rockefeller said NOAA is an excellent organization now, with an excellent leader, and “I just want to make sure that NOAA’s day-to-day performance stays on track.”
Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, has said relocating NOAA within Interior “is not merely some technical, bureaucratic shift.”
She wrote in a January blog post: “Housing NOAA within a department whose focus on the oceans is almost entirely extractive (permitting offshore oil drilling and exploration, for example) could erode the capability and mute the voices of the government’s chief oceans experts.”
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