Interior Department bureaucrats bury 2-1 public support for more off-shore drilling in comments on proposed rule
02/06/10 8:15 AM EST
Remember the "Drill More, Drill Now" flap in the summer of 2007 over the expiration of legislative and executive branch bans on off-shore drilling for oil in the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf (OCS)?
Gas was selling at $4 and more per gallon across the country and big majorities of the public were demanding that the government get out of the way of producing more energy supplies from America's vast untapped domestic natural resources like the OCS.
President Bush left office after allowing the executive branch ban to expire. And the democratic majority in Congress failed to renew the legislative ban that had been included every year for two decades.
But then last year along came the U.S. Department of Interior, led by President Obama's Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar, the former Colorado Democratic senator, with a rule-making proposal to open up the OCS. Such proposed rules typically require a public comment period of 90 days, and those comments must be analyzed by federal officials, compiled and published.
The comment period for the proposed Interior OCS rule ended months ago, but Salazar has rebuffed all requests for information about the results, saying the comments had not yet been fully analyzed and compiled.
Now, thanks to Americans for Solutions for Winning the Future, the advocacy group formed by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, what is likely to be the real reason for Salazar's foot-dragging is known - the comments favor by about a 2-1 margin opening up the OCS for new exploration and drilling.
But the Obama administration opposes allowing more drilling in the OCS, or anywhere else in America, according to many critics in the energy industry, so the delay in moving the proposed rule forward creates a substantial political problem for Salazar and the White House.
Turns out the "solution" is to obfuscate, delay, and suppress. Interior Department emails obtained by Americans for Solutions via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request turned up an Oct. 27, 2009, email from Liz Birnbaum, who directs Interior's Minerals Management Service, in which she explains to Salazar's chief of staff and other senior Interior officials that she had told the Interior head that the public comments favor increased OCS energy production by a 2-1 margin.
As a result, Vince Haley, American Solutions' vice-president for policy, released this blistering statement criticizing Obama and Salazar:
<<< "It's sad and pathetic that Secretary Salazar and his team knew way back in late October the breakdown of the comments but have yet to announce the results to the public three months later. It is now abundantly clear that all of President Obama and Secretary Salazar's talk about openness and transparency and wanting to know what the American people think about offshore development is a complete charade.
"It's also now increasingly clear that this administration's repeatedly expressed openness to offshore energy development is also a complete pretense. Instead, we have an administration that can only be understood as ideologically committed to stifling offshore energy development of oil and natural gas while they offer up platitudes and a p ose of openness. Holden Caulfield had a word for this behavior: 'phony.'
"Public opinion polls already measure near 70% support for offshore drilling, so the results from a public comment period that reflect the same public sentiment should not be surprising. But after all this talk of wanting the public's input, Secretary Salazar and his team must find it a real stumbling block to have to explain all their anti-energy development actions in light of the comment period results to which they previously attached such great importance.
"Here's the bottom line political reality: Ten percent of Americans are out of work and more have stopped trying to find work; the President just submitted a budget that projects trillion dollar annual deficits for the next ten years and a near tripling of the national debt by 2020; and the President has said his number one priority is jobs and his administration has stated that anything that contributes to job creation is on the table.
"But the foot dragging at DOI on something as simple and seemingly small as announcing results of the public comment period on offshore drilling is the latest indication that everything is NOT on the table when it comes to job creation.
"According to the American Energy Alliance, a robust development of our offshore oil and natural gas resources over the next three decades would create over one million jobs and generate more than $270 billion in annual economic growth, including $54 billion annually in federal tax receipts that could help lower the federal deficit and the national debt.
"These extraordinary benefits of job creation and economic growth - all without requiring any federal spending - are, sadly, not on the Obama Administration's agenda, notwithstanding all their phony rhetoric to the contrary." >>>
Haley has more on Drillgate here.
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