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| Ken Salazar, Secretary of the Interior, former US Senator (D-CO) |
Quote of the Year
"Our job basically is to keep the boot on the neck of British Petroleum..."
Our Winner: Ken "All Hat, No Cattle" Salazar
Consider the fact that American passenger vehicles and aircraft, integrated into our way of life, run almost exclusively on fossil fuels. Consider the fact that we consume about 20 million barrels a day and went from an oil exporting nation to an oil importing nation decades ago, and our primary production wells are maturing, requiring more imports of energy from unfriendly nations or unstable regions (e.g., the Middle East). Consider the fact that although we have extraordinary natural resources, the utilization of which can address a major import category in unsustainable trade deficits and provide well-paying American jobs, exploration efforts are constantly hobbled by environmentalist lawsuits and environmental impact studies that are little more than delay tactics meant to drive up the cost of production and constitute a barrier to entry.
I can still remember working for a university ERP software vendor in the late spring or early summer of 2008; I had just finished a gig for a Long Island community college and had to top my gas tank of my airport rental car before returning it. I can still recall the shock of being charged almost $4.50 a gallon at the self-serve pump; was it really just 4 years earlier I was paying nearly a third of the cost commuting to a gig in southern Maryland?
Barack Obama was grasping at straws, refusing to acknowledge the obvious (the need to expedite development of untapped areas, especially off our coastline), but with a straight face arguing that if we just kept our cars properly maintained, our need for foreign-produced energy would melt away without increasing local production... The McCain campaign, in one of its more inspired moments, seized on Obama's obsession with car maintenance, producing a tire gauge imprinted "Obama's Energy Plan". Obama subsequently hinted he might be willing to accept a modest amount of new domestic exploration as a part of a comprehensive strategy including massive subsidies to alternative fuel sources.
We conservatives realized that Obama was not a born-again wildcatter; he would never really abandon his progressive base environmentalists. He would likely engage in his now familiar pattern of paying lip service to centrist/conservative concerns but making only token concessions. And when Obama finally came up with his exploration plan, 14 months into his Presidency and just before the BP oil spill, it fell within our expectations. I wrote some posts at the time pointing out the trivial amount of exploration being allowed, but consider the following extract from a Forbes' post, entitled "Obama's Lackluster Oil Plan", which quotes our hero:
Obama's oil plan is (in Texas parlance) a classic case of all hat, no cattle. Even under the best circumstances it will be a couple years before the feds will auction off new acreage to oil companies offshore Virginia and Florida... Only after a thorough environmental study would the government schedule a Florida lease sale. Never mind that Cuba has leased its own Caribbean coasts [just a few miles from Florida's shores] for oil exploration...The administration never even considered opening waters off the West Coast, which, according to government, has at least 10 billion barrels of oil and 18 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. "The Pacific Coast is too special and needs to be protected," said Salazar... So much for reducing America's reliance on foreign oil.Then came the BP oil spill; I'm not going to summarize the history of the Obama Administration's inept handling of the crisis. I'm more interested at framing their defensive reaction. The President made this response to the point that BP had been granted certain waivers by the Interior Department:
Under current law, the Interior Department has only 30 days to review an exploration plan submitted by an oil company. That leaves no time for the appropriate environmental review. The result is, they're continually waived.
Now consider the following exchange by ABC's George Stephanopoulos and Ken Salazar during the BP oil spill process:
George: You gave BP and other oil companies permits without getting the proper clearances, you failed to conduct four monthly inspections of the rig over the last year, approved dozens of projects without the right permits are these failures your responsibility? You were secretary at the time.
Salazar: …The fact of it is there’s responsibility to go around from the companies to congress, to the executive branch…it’s congress that has had that law in place for a number of years and so congress has the responsibility to step up and also to reform the laws of this country relative to the requirements of the development of energy on the outer continental shelf .
George: It sounds like you’re shifting the blame back. This all happened on your watch...Glenn Greenwald does a good job of cutting through the Obama/Salazar's thin excuses:
Even if that were true -- even if Congress really did impose an impossible-to-meet 30-day period for conducting environmental reviews -- why didn't the Obama adminstration, whose party controls the Congress, ever ask that the law be amended to provide 6o or 90 days, or however much time is needed to complete the review?...The Interior Department just threw its hands up and circumvented the spirt of the law by oh-so-reluctantly and helplessly handing out exemptions like candy to any oil company that asked?More to the point, Greenwald points out that the Bush Administration had come up with exactly the same excuse before Obama ever took office, and the court rejected the excuse, noting that the MMS could have rejected the application as incomplete (before the clock started ticking) and stipulated necessary changes at the end of the review process.
But what to make of the Obama Administration's bizarre on-off-on again Gulf/offshore moratorium, which is clearly a political decision, not a risk-based one? Forbes recently interviewed small independent ATP Oil & Gas CEO Paul Bulmahn, waiting on 10 permits for the company's safety-engineered deepwater platform:
Citing government figures he says, “There have been 58,375 wells drilled in the Gulf of Mexico in the last 60 years, successfully without a spill. Of those 3,191 have been drilled in the deepwater. Of those, the independents have drilled almost 50%.Now explain how one industrial accident out of thousands of wells is being used to widely brush an entire industry and various unrelated participants, when, in fact, BP's own partners have raised issues with the operations leading up to the oil spill? How does Obama's counterproductive moratorium policy not put this country's economy at risk, subject to wild price swings or even cutoffs by hostile suppliers?
Ken Salazar's rhetoric (see the opening quote) has been over the top, disrespectful and irresponsible. Whereas President Obama sets policy, Secretary Salazar seems to view the energy industry in adversarial terms instead of a key partner in lessening our nation's unhealthy dependence on foreign-produced oil and gas and has done little more than set the stage for an inevitable day of reckoning.
