According to Greenwire:
The Obama administration today imposed new offshore drilling
safety regulations, a move needed to end its moratorium on
deepwater exploratory drilling, but it gave no indication of when
that ban would be lifted.
Instead, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar promised the industry
would face a “dynamic regulatory environment” in the weeks and
months to come, as his department refines and further tightens its
safety and environmental standards for offshore drilling.
In anticipation of this continuing assault, yesterday Louisiana
Democrat Sen. Mary Landrieu was quoted saying the following about
the Obama administration’s War on the Gulf Region, accompanying its
War on the West (at the joint
hearing on which I was pleased to offer testimony), as quoted
by Politico:
“[T]he administration has not acted to lift its ill-conceived
moratoria on offshore drilling that are having such a devastating
impact on working people and small businesses throughout the Gulf
Coast…
What is clear is that the administration, for whatever reason,
has stood in defiance of our federal courts and disregarded
economists, experts and its own economic data in proceeding down a
path that is putting thousands of people out of work and hurting
the bottom line of hundreds of small businesses,” Landrieu said.
“The evidence is overwhelming that this moratorium is a poor
economic policy and has achieved no safety improvements that could
not have been achieved in its absence. Yet, the president and his
key advisers have never acknowledged that fact.”
Fox News reported Landrieu calling the moratorium “a terrible
error” and saying “This Administration has the entire exploration
of oil and gas shut down in the Gulf of Mexico.”
Elsewhere
she is quoted as saying:
“I find it stunning that the administration was aware that their
actions might eliminate nearly 23,000 jobs in an already faltering
economy, and proceeded anyway”.
And, finally, Landrieu says:
“The president’s policies right now are doing much more harm
than the [BP] spill itself to the economy of the South coast. …
It’s just gotten to a point where people in Louisiana ask, ‘Do they
even understand what is going on down here?’ They have the entire
offshore industry virtually shut down.”
Of course they understand what’s going on.
As Charles Krauthammer noted on FNC last night, it’s about the
Obama White House’s mantra of never letting a good crisis go
unexploited. This is their agenda — shut
down domestic production of energy sources that work, force you
onto those that do not work so well yet are spectacularly more
expensive when they do — and place energy production and
therefore, ever more of the economy’s fate in the state’s hands.
It’s not complicated. All one need to do is
listen to their admissions and vows.
Then the American people will with no doubt also understand
what’s going on. And that can’t come too soon.
UPDATE: As posted this, the following came in in an email from
Capitol Hill:
Senator Landrieu says: “We’ve got to get people back to work and
it’s thousands of people, thousands of people that have been put
out of work more from the moratorium than from the oil spill
itself…. Let my people go. Let them go. Let them get back to
work….”
The White House is calling Landrieu’s strong advocacy for Gulf
Coast jobs and economy “sad and outrageous”.
