drill baby drill

Landrieu: Lift the Drilling Moratorium

Landrieu: Lift the Drilling Moratorium

10:32 AM, Jun 10, 2010 • By JOHN MCCORMACK

The Hill's Michael O'Brien reports:

Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) ramped up pressure on Thursday for the Obama administration to shorten and lift its moratorium on offshore drilling.

Landrieu, whose home state has bore the brunt of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill close to the Louisiana coast, said that the administration's indefinite ban on drilling could only exacerbate the economic damage from the spill to the region.

"This is a conundrum for us -- a very difficult situation," Landrieu said during an appearance on ABC's "Good Morning America."

President Barack Obama issued the moratorium on deepwater drilling after the explosion on a BP-leased rig 52 days ago that triggered an underwater leak in a pipeline, which has not yet been stemmed.

Landrieu said that ban had been "slapped on without much economic analysis," and should be lifted.

The owners of a small Louisiana shipping company that services rigs make a persuasive case that the moratorium is misguided.

Update: Via David Freddoso, a tougher line from Louisiana Republican Bill Cassidy: "thousands of Louisianans are going to be out of work because the president wanted a get-tough headline."

Email: Public Comments Favored Drilling By 2-to-1 Margin

The people versus the powerful, energy edition.

2:47 PM, Feb 5, 2010 • By MATTHEW CONTINETTI

You probably changed the channel by then, but at one point in his State of the Union Address last week, President Obama brought up offshore drilling. Here is what he said:

To create more of these clean energy jobs, we need more production, more efficiency, more incentives. That means building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country. It means making tough decisions about opening new offshore areas for oil and gas development.

Note that Obama does not mention exactly who will be making these tough decisions -- it certainly won't be him! For more than a year, his Interior Department has sat on a Bush administration proposal to open the outer continental shelf to oil and natural gas exploration and development. Like every such proposal, secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar opened it up to public comment for an extended period. When that period ended in September 2009, the Interior Department said it had received more than 530,000 comments. But it wouldn't reveal whether those comments were pro or con.

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