Wall Street Journal

By STEPHEN POWER And IAN TALLEY

WASHINGTON—The Obama administration will propose allowing offshore oil and natural-gas exploration and development in a large swath of the eastern Gulf of Mexico, after months of criticism from Republicans who have made expanded offshore drilling a political rallying cry.

In addition, the administration plans to announce new steps to determine how much oil and natural gas is buried off the coasts of Middle and Southern Atlantic states, where oil-reserve estimates are decades out of date.

At the same time, Mr. Obama’s plan wouldn’t allow new oil and gas development off the coasts of Northern Atlantic states or California, whose political leaders have long opposed offshore drilling. The administration will call off a plan drafted by the administration of former President George W. Bush that would have given oil companies access to Alaska’s Bristol Bay, an area teeming with wild sockeye salmon and many commercial fishing interests concerned about the impact of drilling on their livelihoods.

To open up the eastern Gulf, Mr. Obama needs to get Congress’s permission. It will take several months to begin studying how much oil exists off the Atlantic coasts.

The idea of expanding offshore drilling is taking on increased importance in the broader debate over climate and energy legislation. The Obama administration and congressional Democrats are working with Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) to draft legislation aimed at reducing U.S. emissions of heat-trapping gases linked to climate change. With at least several Senate Democrats expected to oppose such legislation, Mr. Obama needs Republican votes to pass it. Mr. Graham has said such a bill would have to include an expansion of offshore drilling.

Expanding drilling was a rallying cry for Republicans during the 2008 presidential campaign. Mr. Obama has said he is open to expanding offshore drilling on certain conditions. But his Interior secretary, Ken Salazar, extended by 180 days the deadline for public comment on a proposal issued under the Bush administration that would allow energy companies to drill for oil and natural gas in half a dozen areas off U.S. shores that had previously been off limits.

Mr. Salazar has spent much of the past year weighing public comments on the proposal, as well as a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that found the Bush administration failed to conduct required environmental analyses of the impact of offshore drilling.

Environmental groups and many Democrats from coastal states have opposed expanded offshore drilling, citing the environmental risks associated with spills.

“We cannot support legislation that will mitigate one risk only to put our coasts at greater peril from another source,” 10 coastal state Democratic senators said in a letter last week to Sen. Graham and Sens. John Kerry (D., Mass.) and Joe Lieberman (I., Conn.), who are collaborating with him.

The area of the Gulf of Mexico that Mr. Obama will propose opening to development covers about 24 million acres and is located about 125 miles off Florida’s western coast, a person familiar with the plan said.

Mr. Obama is unveiling his plan at a delicate time for oil and gas companies. Shut out of resource-rich parts of the world like the Middle East and Russia, many oil majors increasingly view the deep waters off the southern U.S. as a key source of exploration success and production growth. Exploration in the Gulf of Mexico is expensive, compared with other basins, but high production rates and proximity to U.S. markets have made drilling there cost-effective.

The industry is eager for access to the eastern Gulf because it is one of the surer bets for relatively easy, cheap-to-produce oil and gas. A quarter of current U.S. oil production each year—close to half a billion barrels—comes out of the central and western Gulf of Mexico, where drilling is allowed. Much of the roughly 3.5 billion barrels of economically recoverable oil believed to reside in the eastern Gulf is in relatively shallow water that is readily accessible using current drilling technology.

“We’re eagerly awaiting this decision and wondering what the president is going to say,” a spokeswoman for the American Petroleum Institute said.

Write to Stephen Power at stephen.power@wsj.com and Ian Talley at ian.talley@dowjones.com

You say tomato, restaurants say sorry: Fla.’s freezing temps cause tomato shortage

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. (AP) — A frigid Florida winter is taking its toll on your sandwich. The Sunshine State is the main U.S. source for fresh winter tomatoes, and its growers lost some 70 percent of their crop during January’s prolonged cold snap.

Wholesale prices are up nearly five times over last year. That means you can say goodbye to the beefsteaks on that burger and prepare to pay more than usual for the succulent wedges in your salad.

At Costello Sandwich and Sides in Chicago, which uses 10 to 15 cases of tomatoes a week and is now paying $25 a case instead of $15, customers can expect to get a bit less tomato on their sandwiches. The shop hasn’t raised prices or stopped serving tomatoes altogether, but manager Matthew Villareal says he can see the tomatoes are soft when the prep cooks are cutting them.

“The tomato prices definitely have gone up and the quality isn’t so great either,” he said. “We just kind of eat the cost.”

An unusually cold January in Florida destroyed entire fields of tomatoes — along with some green beans, sweet corn and squash. The cold scarred the tomatoes, damaged their vines, and forced many farmers to delay their harvest.

The average wholesale price for a 25-pound box of tomatoes is now $30, up from $6.50 a year ago. Florida’s growers would normally ship about 25 million pounds of tomatoes a week; right now, they’re shipping less than a quarter of that, according to Reggie Brown of the Florida Tomato Grower’s Exchange, a tomato farmer cooperative in Maitland.

Some parts of Florida saw average temperatures so low that this January and February were among the 10 coldest on record, according to the National Weather Service.

“Anecdotally, from talking to some real long timers, as well as people who watch the weather, this has been the most extended cold in maybe 60 years,” said Terry McElroy, spokesman for the Florida Department of Agriculture.

Industry estimates suggest that about two-thirds of the tomato crop in the major southwestern production region was destroyed, according to a Feb. 25 United States Department of Agriculture report.

There’s more bad news, Brown said: Because of the continued cold weather — 38-degree temperatures were predicted Friday in some central Florida growing areas — the current crop of fruit isn’t as far along as everyone had hoped.

“We thought they’d recover by early April, but now it’s mid- April,” he said.

And because high demand has driven up domestic prices, many wholesalers are buying from Mexico instead.

“We’re obviously losing market share to Mexico, and there’s always a price to pay to get the customer to get back into the Florida market,” Brown said.

Florida is the only place where tomatoes are grown on a large scale in the U.S. during winter. California doesn’t grow them until later in the year, and much of that state’s crop is used for processed foods, such as ketchup, sauce and juice. Other states grow tomatoes in greenhouses year- round, but Florida’s winter tomato crop is by far the largest.

At Subway restaurants, the timing of this year’s shortage was fortuitous: It hit right when the sandwich chain switches its tomato purchases from Florida to other regions.

While they so far haven’t been impacted, managers are ordering different varieties of tomatoes to keep supplies steady, a spokesman said Thursday.

McDonald’s Corp., CKE Restaurants Inc., (which owns Hardees, Carl Jr.) and Darden Restaurants (the nation’s biggest casual dining chain, which owns Olive Garden, Red Lobster, Longhorn Steakhouse; Capital Grille; Seasons 52) said it’s business as usual and no shortages are being reported.

Some Wendy’s restaurants posted signs saying tomatoes would only be provided upon request because of limited availability.

But smaller restaurants are feeling the pinch. In Chicago, where a hot dog isn’t a hot dog without chopped tomatoes, you might end up with just a bit less on the bun.

“We’re a little more careful with our tomatoes,” admitted Bill Murphy, owner of Murphy’s Red Hots, which uses 75 to 100 pounds of the fruit a week. “You still owe it to your customers to get them out there and get them on the dogs. You try to get an extra piece out of every tomato if you can. You don’t toss them around like they’re pennies, you toss them around like they’re quarters.”

Associated Press writers Caryn Rousseau and Ashley Heher in Chicago contributed to this report.

Wall Street Journal

‘The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the U.K., I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone. . . . We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind.”

So apparently wrote Phil Jones, director of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) and one of the world’s leading climate scientists, in a 2005 email to “Mike.” Judging by the email thread, this refers to Michael Mann, director of the Pennsylvania State University’s Earth System Science Center. We found this nugget among the more than 3,000 emails and documents released last week after CRU’s servers were hacked and messages among some of the world’s most influential climatologists were published on the Internet.

The “two MMs” are almost certainly Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, two Canadians who have devoted years to seeking the raw data and codes used in climate graphs and models, then fact-checking the published conclusions—a painstaking task that strikes us as a public and scientific service. Mr. Jones did not return requests for comment and the university said it could not confirm that all the emails were authentic, though it acknowledged its servers were hacked.

Yet even a partial review of the emails is highly illuminating. In them, scientists appear to urge each other to present a “unified” view on the theory of man-made climate change while discussing the importance of the “common cause”; to advise each other on how to smooth over data so as not to compromise the favored hypothesis; to discuss ways to keep opposing views out of leading journals; and to give tips on how to “hide the decline” of temperature in certain inconvenient data.

Some of those mentioned in the emails have responded to our requests for comment by saying they must first chat with their lawyers. Others have offered legal threats and personal invective. Still others have said nothing at all. Those who have responded have insisted that the emails reveal nothing more than trivial data discrepancies and procedural debates.

Yet all of these nonresponses manage to underscore what may be the most revealing truth: That these scientists feel the public doesn’t have a right to know the basis for their climate-change predictions, even as their governments prepare staggeringly expensive legislation in response to them.

Consider the following note that appears to have been sent by Mr. Jones to Mr. Mann in May 2008: “Mike, Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise. . . . Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same?” AR4 is shorthand for the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change’s (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report, presented in 2007 as the consensus view on how bad man-made climate change has supposedly become.

In another email that seems to have been sent in September 2007 to Eugene Wahl of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Paleoclimatology Program and to Caspar Ammann of the National Center for Atmospheric Research’s Climate and Global Dynamics Division, Mr. Jones writes: “[T]ry and change the Received date! Don’t give those skeptics something to amuse themselves with.”

When deleting, doctoring or withholding information didn’t work, Mr. Jones suggested an alternative in an August 2008 email to Gavin Schmidt of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, copied to Mr. Mann. “The FOI [Freedom of Information] line we’re all using is this,” he wrote. “IPCC is exempt from any countries FOI—the skeptics have been told this. Even though we . . . possibly hold relevant info the IPCC is not part of our remit (mission statement, aims etc) therefore we don’t have an obligation to pass it on.”

It also seems Mr. Mann and his friends weren’t averse to blacklisting scientists who disputed some of their contentions, or journals that published their work. “I think we have to stop considering ‘Climate Research’ as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal,” goes one email, apparently written by Mr. Mann to several recipients in March 2003. “Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal.”

Mr. Mann’s main beef was that the journal had published several articles challenging aspects of the anthropogenic theory of global warming.

For the record, when we’ve asked Mr. Mann in the past about the charge that he and his colleagues suppress opposing views, he has said he “won’t dignify that question with a response.” Regarding our most recent queries about the hacked emails, he says he “did not manipulate any data in any conceivable way,” but he otherwise refuses to answer specific questions. For the record, too, our purpose isn’t to gainsay the probity of Mr. Mann’s work, much less his right to remain silent.

However, we do now have hundreds of emails that give every appearance of testifying to concerted and coordinated efforts by leading climatologists to fit the data to their conclusions while attempting to silence and discredit their critics. In the department of inconvenient truths, this one surely deserves a closer look by the media, the U.S. Congress and other investigative bodies.