Obama seeking dominion over nation's waters
Ed Lasky
From the Los Angeles Times
President Obama on Monday is set to create a national stewardship policy for America's oceans and Great Lakes, including a type of zoning that could dramatically rebalance the way government regulates offshore drilling, fishing and other marine activities...
The recommendations embrace a controversial practice called marine spatial planning, a zoning process of sorts that seeks to manage waters in the way some cities manage factories and strip malls. The process could result in confining activities such as drilling, shipping and conservation to areas the planners deem best-suited to each use...
If the Great Lakes regional body designated certain lake areas for offshore wind farms, for example, the Interior Department would agree to approve wind farms only within those areas.
The same would be true for any new offshore drilling projects. Currently, Interior officials develop drilling plans under a public comment process within their department.
In Southern California, the heavy focus on "ecosystem-based management" could cause the U.S. Navy to retool its fleet deployment, with an eye on how its operations affect water quality or whales.
Administration sources indicate that vast changes will come that will bring radical changes to how Americans use the oceans that lap our shores. Shipping, resource development, fishing, tourism - all areas will feel the impact of this maniacal drive for power - and not the kind the rest of us can use to light our homes. But the bureaucrats will bloom. The one growth industry left in America is government service.
This follows in the wake of the Environmental Protection Agency's quest to regulate every carbon molecule out of existence, as well as taking control of as much of industry as it can. The Department of Interior is clamping down on development of vast acreages of land that can be used to reduce our oil import bills and vulnerability to unstable and unfriendly oil exporting nations.
Does the administration have Utopian views about a return to some ideal prelapsarian age? But President Obama may want to reconsider. After all, there were no golf courses before Adam and Eve, no Broadway shows, no musical bands that can entertain him and his family and friends at the White House' and no airplanes that burn vast amount of aviation fuel for his jaunts to vacation spots.
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