The British government is seeking to make it easier for oil drillers to work in fragile areas by trying to adjust proposed E.U. regulations.

In leaked documents, the United Kingdom insisted on removing a regulatory clause that would have made it harder to drill in vulnerable regions. The government took particular issue with accounting for the "response gap" -- the time between when an oil spill happens and when it can safely start to be cleaned up. In the volatile and remote Arctic, such a gap could last weeks or even months depending on weather conditions and other factors. The U.K. government argued that "oil spills may be effectively dispersed by wind and wave action and this is in itself one form of effective response."

Environmentalists were outraged by the United Kingdom's perceived attitude toward drilling in the Arctic, noting that the government has publicly maintained to members of Parliament that it is interested in "robust environmental protection" for any oil operations in the Arctic.

"The British government has been caught talking out of both sides of its mouth," said Ben Stewart of the international environmentalist organization Greenpeace. "It tells Parliament it's committed to the highest safety standards for the oil industry, but in Brussels it's working to gut regulations designed to prevent a Deepwater Horizon disaster off our own coast."

The leaked documents also revealed U.K. plans to lower the bar for overseeing companies' required "emergency response plans" -- requiring only "descriptions" of such plans rather than full reports, according to the United Kingdom's proposed alternative.

A spokesman for the U.K. Department of Energy and Climate Change said negotiations over offshore drilling regulations were ongoing but added that "the U.K. is working to ensure that the highest levels of safety and environmental protection are upheld" (Fiona Harvey, London Guardian, Jan. 14). -- BS