By Dan Calabrese ——Bio and Archives--April 28, 2017
American Politics, News | CFP Comments | Reader Friendly | Subscribe | Email Us
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.
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.
Support Canada Free Press
View Comments
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.