WhatFinger


Drill, baby, drill!

Excellent: Trump reverses Obama order limiting oil drilling in Atlantic, Arctic oceans



It seems like months ago now - wait, it was months ago - that the one-foot-out-the-door Barack Obama was pushing through as many executive orders as he could in an attempt to lock in liberal policies after he left office. One of the worst, which we reported at the time, put severe limits on offshore drilling in the Atlantic and Arctic oceans - and there was some question as to whether President Trump would have the authority to reverse the orders once he took office. I suppose nothing is ever truly over until left-wing federal judges weigh in, but it appears for the moment that the question has been answered in the affirmative:
The executive order will reverse part of a December effort by President Barack Obama to deem the bulk of U.S.-owned waters in the Arctic Ocean and certain areas in the Atlantic as indefinitely off limits to oil and gas leasing. It will also direct Zinke to conduct a review of the locations available for offshore drilling under a five-year plan signed by Obama in November. The plan blocked new oil and gas drilling in the Atlantic and Arctic oceans. It also blocked the planned sale of new oil and gas drilling rights in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas north of Alaska, but allowed drilling to go forward in Alaska’s Cook Inlet southwest of Anchorage. The order could open to oil and gas exploration areas off Virginia and North and South Carolina, where drilling has been blocked for decades. Zinke said that leases scheduled under the existing plan will remain in effect during the review, which he estimated will take several years.

Support Canada Free Press


The order will also direct Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross to conduct a review of marine monuments and sanctuaries designated over the last 10 years. Citing his department’s data, Zinke said the Interior Department oversees some 1.7 billion acres on the outer continental shelf, which contains an estimated 90 billion barrels of undiscovered oil and 327 trillion cubic feet of undiscovered natural gas. Under current restrictions, about 94 percent of that outer continental shelf is off-limits to drilling. Zinke, who will also be tasked with reviewing other drilling restrictions, acknowledged environmental concerns as “valid,” but he argued that the benefits of drilling outweigh concerns.
In many ways, this promises an even bigger impact than Trump's reversal of Obama's decision to reject the Keystone XL pipeline - although both actions are important and correct. The pipeline is energy infrastructure, and we need more of that. A lot more. But the drilling order deals directly with the question of whether U.S. companies can go and get natural resources in the first place.

Obama went back on a promise and cancelled all leases along the Atlantic coast

Obama used to brag that domestic drilling increased while he was in office, and that's true, but all the increase took place on private lands where he couldn't do anything to stop it. When the oil was on federally controlled lands, Obama consistently did everything in his power to stop drilling and force the resources to be left in the ground. The same was true of offshore drilling, where Obama went back on a promise and cancelled all leases along the Atlantic coast. These moves never made any sense in the context of U.S. energy needs. The U.S. has been dependent for far too long on other nations for its energy needs, and anything we can do to reverse that is worth pursuing. Obama made a habit of preventing these moves just because he is ideologically ill-inclined toward fossil fuels, and he simply didn't care if it was in the nation's best interests. Trump can do a lot of good as president simply by not following Obama's lead on all kinds of things, and this is one of them. Allowing drilling in the Atlantic and the Arctic is very much in this nation's interests, and it's really not complicated to figure that out. For a U.S. president, the nation's interest simply has to be more important than ideological crusades. This move is a big win for the nation's interests, and President Trump deserves plaudits for making it.


View Comments

Dan Calabrese -- Bio and Archives

Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain

Follow all of Dan’s work, including his series of Christian spiritual warfare novels, by liking his page on Facebook.


Sponsored