Obama Enacts New Ban on Deepwater Drilling
In opposition to two separate rulings by federal judges, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar and the Obama administration imposed another moratorium on new offshore drilling permits in U.S. waters. After an appeals court judge last week denied the administration’s request to overturn the lifting by a previous circuit judge of the initial ban, the Obama administration decided to take matters into its own hands.
The new moratorium will be in effect until November 30 or such time as Secretary Salazar sees evidence that deepwater oil exploration and drilling can proceed with safety.
The oil industry and its political allies are in an uproar over the move, citing primarily the loss of thousands of jobs as good reason not to enforce the ban.
Said Secretary Salazar, “I am basing my decision on evidence that grows every day of the industry’s inability in the deepwater to contain a catastrophic blowout, respond to an oil spill, and to operate safely.”
Democratic Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu felt otherwise: “Obviously more effective regulations and greater transparency are a must, but this Deepwater Horizon incident is an exception and it should be treated as such,” she told a presidential commission investigating the BP oil spill. “I urge this commission to take immediate and swift action to immediately lift the moratorium.”
Landrieu noted that the ban could cause the loss of up to 120,000 jobs in Louisiana as unusable oil rigs move to countries where they are allowed to work. She stated that this “second economic disaster has the potential to become greater than the first.”
42,000 other wells still operate in U.S. waters in the Gulf of Mexico, and the moratorium only affects new deepwater drilling permits, limited to just 33 projects.
While the Obama administration has expressed concern and understanding regarding the economic loss in the region stemming from the moratorium, it presses that safety is of the utmost concern.
As Salazar and a number of other administration officials have reiterated several times, any evidence showing that oil companies are prepared for an oil spill or even to operate safely pales in comparison to the glaring evidence that they are not. Until these companies can show the administration otherwise, the moratorium remains in effect.
“I remain open to modifying the new deepwater drilling suspensions based on new information,” noted Salazar, but first the oil drilling industry “must raise the bar on its practices and answer fundamental questions about deepwater safety, blowout prevention and containment, and oil spill response.”
Oil companies have been using their economic clout to try to dissuade the administration from instituting the moratorium. Indeed, Diamond Offshore Drilling, which operates 10 of the 33 rigs affected by the moratorium, has already redeployed two rigs to Egypt and West Africa with a third slated for departure to Brazil if the administration sticks to its guns on the new moratorium.
Source: Grist.org
Posted on July 13th in Solar News by Dan.