As events unfold, it is increasingly unnecessary to explain, let alone defend, my recent book’s unsubtle title — Power Grab: How Obama’s Green Policies Will Steal Your Freedom and Bankrupt America.
In fact, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Luisiana did a pretty good job explaining things in its opinion enjoining the Obama administration’s attempted moratorium on drilling in water deeper than 500 feet. As I also noted in recent testimony to a Joint Hearing of the Senate and House Western Caucuses on the War on Western Jobs:
The federal court enjoining that move cited factors which equally apply to today’s discussion:
‘[T]he Court is persuaded that it is only a matter of time before more business and jobs and livelihoods will be lost. The defendants trivialize such losses by characterizing them as merely a small percentage of the drilling rigs affected, but it does not follow that this will somehow reduce the convincing harm suffered….
The effect on employment, jobs, loss of domestic energy supplies caused by the moratorium … will clearly ripple throughout the economy in this region…[1]‘
The same applies to locking up land out West, halting more than just energy production, but harming a diverse array of communities.
Neither two judicial slapdowns nor these realities articulated therein have stopped Team Obama from knowingly, effectively imposing a moratorium on both deepwater and shallow water drilling, as rigs already have headed off to friendlier shores; friendlier to energy production but, in our continuing wisdom on these matters, not necessarily friendly to us, let alone more environmentally friendly.
Today the American Energy Alliance released a report by a professor at Louisiana State University titled “The Economic Cost of a Moratorium on Offshore Oil and Gas Exploration to the Gulf Region”. You can find it here. It’s not pretty. In fact, it is pretty disheartening, this war on Americans and their contribution to our freedoms.
This is the least joy I have had in saying I told you so.
[1] Order, U.S. District Court for the District of Eastern Louisiana, Case 2:10-cv-01663-MLCF-JCW Document 67 Filed 06/22/10 (Judge Martin Feldman).
