Shell's plans for responding to a blowout and spill for offshore Alaska are laughably weak.

The oil giant Shell filed suit in federal court in Alaska last week against a dozen environmental groups, employing a rare — and rarely successful — legal gambit in an effort to pre-empt anticipated legal challenges to its plans to begin exploration in the Arctic Ocean this summer.

The unusual maneuver an act of desperation by a company fearful that it might be thwarted again in its efforts to begin drilling in the seabed off Alaska’s North Slope? 

The environmental groups who have spent years trying to block its drilling project say that the effects on native communities, air, water and wildlife are too great and that the company’s plans for responding to a blowout and spill are laughably weak. 

While the groups have not announced their intention to go to court to challenge the company’s 450-page oil spill response plan, which was tentatively approved by the Interior Department two weeks ago, the company has every reason to think that they will. 

“We just got the spill plan and are reviewing it,” said Whit Sheard, a lawyer for Oceana, one of the environmental groups named in the Shell lawsuit. “It’s based on technology that doesn’t exist and on faith that a spill won’t happen. What we’ve seen in the Gulf of Mexico and the North Sea, of course, is that spills do happen.” 

Mr. Sheard said that Oceana and the other groups reserved the right to challenge the plan in court and would use every weapon at their disposal to ensure that drilling, if it ever takes place, is conducted in the safest possible way. He called Shell’s novel legal maneuver “frivolous.” 

“It’s very unusual,” Mr. Sheard said. “I’d suggest it’s either desperate or abusive in terms of the American legal process. It’s not likely to prevail.” 

There are few precedents to guide the court in deciding Shell’s suit, technically known as a complaint for declaratory relief, which essentially asks a judge to declare a lawsuit without merit before it is even filed. 

How about this for a process?  Get the NGOs, Company and regulator in the room; create a document before its filed; the company can naturally object to all the parts they deem uneconomic and the regulator can then regulate....oh I forgot there is more money in it for the lawyers, lobbyists the way we're doing it....