To: TimF who wrote (887248 ) 9/12/2015 7:00:43 PM From: tejek Read Replies (1) | Respond to The issue with the aquifer was reasonable dealt with, and was to an extent a pretext anyway. He opposed it because certain parts of his base opposed it strongly. washingtonpost.com Obama delayed new drilling for a long time in the gulf, and presided over many other delays in drilling (now always as a matter of policy, sometimes it was just poor performance by the bureaucracy, but that's still poor performance by the administration, and is esp. relevant if he's trying to claim credit for lower oil prices, or other people are trying to give him credit) and when the house Republicans passed bills to speed things up, which rejected in the senate he did nothing to get things back on track) He opposed a route for the output of the drilling in Canada. For some time he stopped approval of new drilling in the arctic outside ANWR, eventually reversing much of that, but it had an impact. He opposed developing ANWR. Alaska accounts for only 7 percent of it , and most of the protected areas have been off-limits to industry for decades. And it didn't really change the status quo or offer anywhere near the environmental protection the President could have conveyed. But he sure ticked off some Alaskans.In what has become the trademark Texas two-step of its energy policy, the Obama administration compensated the oil industry generously : Braving opposition from marine scientists and environmentalists , it opened up tens of millions of acres off the mid-Atlantic coast and in the Gulf of Mexico to drillers.news.nationalgeographic.com
