Federal judge blocks moratorium on deepwater drilling in Gulf

Of course the White House is planning to appeal a federal judge's ruling Tuesday that blocked U.S. President Barack Obama from imposing a six-month freeze on deep-water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. Obama ordered the moratorium after British Petroleum was unable to stop a massive oil leak that followed an explosion aboard an undersea drilling platform off the coast of Louisiana in April. And, of course, companies that supply boats and other equipment to oil exploration companies went to court to try to block Obama's decision. U.S. District Court Judge Martin Feldman granted a preliminary injunction to stop the federal government from enforcing the moratorium, despite the catastrophic and still-growing damage being done to the region's environment and economy. Government officials estimate more than 2 million gallons of oil are flowing unimpeded into the Gulf every day, according to Cable News Network (CNN). The moratorium stopped all companies from drilling in waters deeper than 500 feet and stopped any new permits from being issued until authorities can figure out what went wrong on the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform and how to ensure it doesn't happen again. That sounds like common sense, doesn't it? But common sense has become, like beauty, a matter of personal perspective. How else to explain why Louisiana's Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal and Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu urged the feds not to appeal the ruling. "I'm going to strongly urge the administration not to appeal this ruling, but to try to find a way forward that would achieve the president's goals for safety and responsibility, but at the same time would not jeopardize and threaten a very vibrant and necessary industry for decades," Landrieu told reporters, CNN said. In his ruling, Feldman sided with industry-support companies that contended they would be irreparably harmed by the moratorium, even though the explosion and spill already had done catastrophic harm to the environment and to the 11 workers who were killed. "An invalid agency decision to suspend drilling of wells in depths of over 500 feet simply cannot justify the immeasurable effect on the plaintiffs, the local economy, the Gulf region, and the critical present-day aspect of the availability of domestic energy in this country," the judge wrote. Justice Department attorney Brian Collins had argued on Monday that the moratorium was necessary to allow federal authorities to review the safety of deep-water oil drilling operations. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said the president would file an immediate appeal of the ruling. "The president strongly believes, as the Department of Interior and Department of Justice argued yesterday, that continuing to drill at these depths without knowing what happened does not make any sense," Gibbs said. In a statement Monday, BP said it had already spent $2 billion responding to the spill, including payment of 32,000 individual claims.

Return to sanity means renewed focus on stem cells

U.S. residents got another reminder today of the major change in leadership they voted for last November when the National Institutes of Health announced approval of 13 new human embryonic stem cell lines for federally funded research, and said 96 more were under review. The NIH announcement was highly anticipated by researchers all over the United States, who were barred by former U.S. President George W. Bush from using federal money for research on all but the embryonic stem cell lines available in 2001 because of moral concerns, according to the New York Times. New U.S. President Barack Obama promised during the 2008 campaign to relax the ban in the interests of science and health, since stem cell research holds the promise of curing some of humanity's most-intractable maladies. Obama did so in March, two months after he took office. Concern over gathering stem cells has relaxed since the 2007 discovery that even adult cells could be reprogrammed to the embryonic stage, the Times said. Researchers applauded today's NIH announcement, because it helped to relieve them of the burden of separating their research into two parts -- research acceptable to the government, and eligible for public grants, and research that could only be paid for with private funding. “You can imagine what it meant not to be able to carry a pipette from one room to another,” Ali H. Brivanlou, a researcher at Rockefeller University in New York, told the Times. “They even had to repaint the walls to ensure no contamination by federal funds.” Brivanlou derived two of the 13 newly approved stem cell lines using private funding. The others were prepared by Dr. George Daley of Children’s Hospital Boston, the Times said. Daley told the newspaper that private funding was hard to get and getting harder, and that he was looking forward to being able to use federal grants to fund his research. Since that date, biomedical researchers supported by the N.I.H. have had to raise private money to derive the cells, which are obtained from the fertilized embryos left over from in vitro fertility clinics. NIH director Francis Collins said he thought most researchers would be happy with the decision, even though they still were barred from deriving stem cells themselves. Collins also said induced embryonic cells were not exactly the same as those derived from fertilized human embryos, so researchers still needed to use both kinds.