Drill, baby, drill? Forget it. For all the political energy spent on offshore drilling - something that a vast majority of Americans support but liberals oppose - the courts have spoken and delayed drilling for years, perhaps decades.
Last Friday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit overturned the 2007-2012 plan authored by the Interior Department because - as the lawyers say, inter alia - its "environmental sensitivity rankings are irrational."
So the matter gets dumped into the hands of the much more sensitive Interior Secretary Ken Salazar.
Salazar is fresh from representing the State of Colorado in the Senate, where he specialized in fighting the development of that state’s energy riches to help the U.S. become less dependent on foreign oil. Since assuming office, he has led the Interior Department on a crusade to slow, reduce or stop oil and gas development on federal lands, both onshore and off. He canceled leases already issued to companies to develop energy in Utah against the wishes of the Utah Congressional Delegation and governor. He canceled the sale of commercial oil shale leases in the west that hold the key to what the government says is an energy resource of 2.6 trillion barrels....10 times as big as Saudi Arabia’s oil reserves.
And he ordered a halt to a plan for offshore oil and gas leasing that was almost 30 years in the making after Congress and President Bush finally lifted the moratorium that had made the U.S. the only country in the world that embargoed its own oil from itself….an act that would constitute an energy war against the U.S. if another country tried it.
After last summer’s proper American outrage over gasoline prices, many Americans would probably be surprised that a man with most of his important staffers still waiting to be confirmed by the Senate would be spending all of his time ensuring our next energy crisis will make us long for the days of $5 gasoline. He has, in less than 100 days, done more damage to America’s future energy security than any Secretary of Interior in history.
All of this from a man whom the mainstream media described as a “moderate.” Given the range of environmental extremists who have taken over in every corner of the new Obama Administration, the media was probably accurate…but that should be little comfort to Americans who think we ought to produce more of our own energy with more of our own people and import less from foreign countries that hate us. Instead of helping us find and develop more oil and gas to run our transportation system, heat our homes and fire our furnaces, the secretary is probably best known for his much-ridiculed declaration a couple weeks ago that we could replace all of our coal plants that generate electricity with American coal and instead run the country on offshore windmills built in the Atlantic Ocean. That’s how one builds “street cred” in the White House that now has more Czars than the Romanov Dynasty and more environmental extremists than a local chapter meeting of EarthFirst!
But Salazar’s biggest challenge to his “moderate” status was handed to him by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on Friday, April 17, when they threw out the existing plan for offshore drilling in the U.S. filed by anti-energy environmental groups who contended that there wasn’t enough red tape wrapping all the paper the government filed to comply with laws the environmentalists have designed over the years to stop all energy leasing in America. The judges ruled they were right; there wasn’t enough red tape to meet the laws the environmentalists and their puppets in Congress had written over the years, and the secretary had to go back to the Department and add some more red tape if we wanted to have any more oil and gas produced in our waters.
This puts the secretary on the hot seat, because the government has already cashed over $10 billion dollars of checks from oil companies who paid for the right to look for oil and gas in the U.S. instead of overseas, and he can’t replace that money with windmills, because they not only don’t generate energy anyone can afford, they don’t generate money for all the stuff the government wants to waste money on. While the case centered on stopping some Alaskan leases that just might hold the largest supplies of oil ever discovered here and fill the Alaskan pipeline back up, the court threw out the whole plan, affecting not just Alaska but the Gulf of Mexico, too. That’s the only place where oil and gas has been allowed to flourish on the OCS because it started way before the environmentalists replaced organized labor as the #1 force in “progressive politics.”
So now the secretary has to contend with Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, as well as Alaska and Americans who are fed up with importing more foreign oil and producing less of our own. Normally in this kind of case, the secretary would just order his people to fix the documents, comply with the red tape request since all the information has already been collected, and get on with things. But he has to go through the #1 Czar at the White House, and arguably the person who has more control over the economic future of the United States than anyone else, former Al Gore staffer Carol Browner.
Ms. Browner is the “Energy and Climate Czar” for President Obama, a position he created to bypass the Senate confirmation process, where she might have had trouble because her agency was found in contempt by a federal judge because she destroyed computer files in violation of a court order when she last left government as head of the EPA in the Clinton/Gore Administration. Without Senate hearings, and with her computer now protected by White House Executive privilege, Czar Browner has been given power over all energy and climate matters, up to and including decisions by underlings who work as Cabinet Secretaries like Secretary Salazar.
On the same day the court handed Salazar this hot potato, the EPA, under direction from Czar Browner, declared that carbon dioxide was harmful to human health, even though it is the building block of all life on earth and we exhale it each time we breathe. In an administration where government power is growing exponentially over our lives on a daily basis, this is, in a word, breathtaking. And because carbon dioxide is what you produce to get wealthy - it’s a byproduct of energy consumption that has made us the most powerful nation on earth - the government’s ability to regulate and tax carbon dioxide that this EPA decision makes possible is the largest expansion of government control in the U.S. in history.
The government can now decide what your energy bills will be, how much energy you can use, and whether you have a job. It will be able to punish industries or companies at will and hurt its enemies or friends within its borders. The EPA ruling won’t effect what other countries do.
So all Salazar has to do to keep from having to return over $10 billion in cash to oil companies and announce that we are importing more oil instead of drilling for it at home is convince Czar Browner that she should permit him to allow more energy to be produced and more carbon dioxide to be produced from it.
He might be more successful at announcing that we are selling Alaska back to the Russians and using the money to buy windmills from the Chinese, who will make them in their factories that use the coal burning energy production that will soon be outlawed in the U.S. At least the Russians would produce Alaska's oil.
