Senators Aim to Repeal and Replace Obama’s 5-Year Offshore Drilling Plan
Two of the senators who pushed an investigation into a suspected Interior Department cover-up of the White House fudging scientific conclusions to justify the gulf drilling moratorium are now fighting the administration’s plan to stymie exploration and production on the outer continental shelf.
On the same day that the nation’s attention was turned toward the ObamaCare ruling at the Supreme Court, the Obama administration was quietly issuing a five-year energy proposal that would place a virtual moratorium over 85 percent of the nation’s offshore areas.
Gulf Coast Sens. David Vitter (R-La.) and Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) fought back yesterday with a bill to repeal and replace, so to speak, the plan of Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and President Obama.
“Offshore energy production provides Americans with good-paying private-sector jobs; produces substantial royalties for the federal government and the states; reduces our trade imbalance; and puts an end to the huge wealth transfer from America to competitors oversees,” Sessions said. “We need to take bold action to harness America’s vast energy resources, but the Administration clearly has a different vision.”
Under the administration plan, from 2012-2017 the government would have to hold an annual lease sale in the western Gulf, which has already taken place. Lease sales in the central Gulf would begin in spring 2013, and new tracts in the eastern Gulf wouldn’t open up for lease sales until 2014.
The Vitter-Sessions bill opens more areas of the Gulf for production and includes production in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, as well as in Alaska — declared off-limits in Obama’s plan.
Alaska’s senators wrote Obama yesterday to protest the lack of an overall national energy strategy for the Arctic.
“The United States is the only Arctic nation which lacks such a formal strategy which ties together all the individual agency policies and visions,” wrote Sens. Mark Begich (D) and Lisa Murkowski (R. “Developing an American Arctic strategy is especially timely now, with the hope for offshore oil and gas exploration in Alsaka’s Arctic this summer, the number of cargo ships transiting the Bering Strait are increasing to new record highs and America’s indigenous peoples are justifiably concerned with the impacts of these developments and changing conditions on their subsistence way of life.”
In November, Vitter wrote to Salazar with the concern that the emerging five-year plan, requested by a group of senators last September, was tailored toward reduced energy consumption in America.
“I am concerned what you have proposed falls well short of the clear intent of the law. In fact, your current proposal reduces leasing by orders of magnitude when compared to the program you threw out in 2009,” Vitter wrote.
“The 2010-2015 plan you threw out opened areas of the Atlantic, significant acreage in the Eastern Gulf of Mexico, four geologic basins off S. California, one geologic basin off N. California, and in Alaska the North Aleutian Basin and Cook Inlet. How does excluding all these areas in your proposed 2012-2017 plan best meet our national energy needs?” the senator asked Salazar. “You substituted a plan that would have provided approximately five lease sales a year, with a plan that provides about 2.5 lease sales per year. How does a schedule of sales at a pace about half of what you threw out help address America’s energy needs?”
The Vitter-Sessions legislation to instate a 5-year plan “more in line with the energy and economic needs of the United States,” which has been referred to the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, was introduced on the same day that the Integrity Committee of the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency met behind closed doors to probe the administration’s Gulf drilling moratorium in the wake of the BP spill.
Vitter and Sessions, along with Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), asked the panel to investigate the Interior Department’s Acting Inspector General Mary Kendall, whom they say “failed to ensure an independent, impartial and complete investigation into the Administration’s offshore drilling moratorium and related activities.”
Kendall, the senators noted in their request, was reportedly involved in the so-called 30-Day Report, “which erroneously indicated that independent peer review experts endorsed the Administration’s six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling.” Then, Kendall conducted an oversight investigation of the report — perhaps impeding the probe in the process.
The offshore leasing legislation is just another move by the gulf senators to right what they see as wrongs by the administration that have cost jobs in their home states and weakened energy security nationwide.
“Obama’s five-year lease plan for offshore production is only half of what the previous plan was – moving us in the complete wrong direction of where our energy production should be headed,” Vitter said. “The fall-off from the leasing and permitting actions of the Obama administration is very significant, and it’s projected to get even worse.”
“Our bill is a common-sense approach that will increase the areas available to sell leases offshore, and of course will put a substantial amount of revenue back into the federal treasury.”
One more reason (as if we needed any more) to replace the Democrats in the Senate, and end Harry Reid’s tenure (along with his boss, Barry O).
Does anyone still believe this administration wants what is best for this country?
Obama’s administration does everyting they can to crush American businesses, and then have the gall to blame Romney and Bain Capital. How many American companies have been forced to outsource due to Liberal policies?
Obama, King of Outsourcing. Thousands of high paying US jobs lost and $750,000 taxpayer dollars … going to Russia to take our astronauts to the space station.
Now THAT’s the epitomy of outsourcing!
NASA can’t send a man to the space station because their number one priority is making Muslims have more self-esteem.
In order for progressive/regressive leaders to transform the US into an unexceptional nation, many plans have to be effectuated. However, few stand atop the heap.
As such, making sure that the US is energy dependent(despite their protestations to the contrary, ala their various green schemes)is a sure way to knock her off her peg. The climate change/global warming fraud is the apex of this scheme, and many are catching on to the massive fraud attached to it. Add Obamacare/tax to the mix, and total destruction is in the making. This is part and parcel of the Usurper-in-Chief’s dual (electoral) mantra-hope and change via transformation. Bastard.
I expend much time detailing, at my blog, the machinations of the left, further exposing their leftist clones in Israel.
Take a peek at my blog and you will be shocked, repulsed and duly enraged – http://adinakutnicki.com/
I am heartened that some at the Hill still have the balls to beat them back.
I remember some experts protesting a report, saying that hadn’t been their findings at all. Is that part of this?
There is no doubt that the supremacist Obama-Clinton administration would much prefer Americans to be jobless and poverty-stricken rather than have the jobs America’s oil industry would provide.
It is far more sinister than ruthlessly denying jobs that Americans so desperately need. The completely sold-out-to-Islam Obama-Clinton administration prefers that America FINANCES GLOBAL JIHAD by PURCHASING OIL from the MUSLIM MIDDLE EAST.
Protect America and the Free World! Drill for American oil and STOP FINANCING GLOBAL JIHAD!
Just MORE evidence that Obama and his Regime is enriching themselves at the expense of all American taxpayers, and turning the U.S. into a third world economy.
Just take their word for everything, and ignore all America’s riches and resources; You don’t need them any more. You’re gonna get free healthcare, sucka.
For this administration an energy policy designed to drive prices through the clouds is a feature not a bug. They (ObamaRx and his enviro-whacko minions) fully intend to drive coal, oil, and if they have their way natural gas, into price equity with wind & solar.
They are socialists at best and Marxists at worst.
There is a huge mount of money being spent, right under our noses, on the environmentalist lobby and Obama has to help them destroy the oil industry in order to keep up the phony justifications for this. Much of this money is being turned around into Obama campaign donations. He hasn’t ever given a damn about how energy is produced (he has no competence to understand), he just knows that he is up to his neck in indebtedness to the green energy lobby. What did we expect him to do? Support cost effective energy instead? Sheesh. These environmental alarmists have been extorting money from our government for forty years and they are supporting themselves nicely on this largesse.
What’s with all the 5-year plans lately? Sounds somehow like gummint plans from a different age and a different gummint….
Why are we waiting so long for the lease to go through in spring?