Obama and Bush Drilling Policies

Obama is like an oil-soaked pelican.

There's no simple process to clean up the mess in which he finds himself. It's too late.

There is an important distinction between Obama and the pelican.

The pelican is an innocent victim of the Gulf oil spill.

It had no power to determine U.S. energy policy.

Obama wasn't powerless. He chose to keep many of the policies of the Bush administration intact.

Another broken promise.

From the Wall Street Journal:

Less than four months after President Barack Obama took office, his new administration received a forceful warning about the dangers of offshore oil drilling.

The alarm was rung by a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., which found that the government was unprepared for a major spill at sea, relying on an "irrational" environmental analysis of the risks of offshore drilling.

The April 2009 ruling stunned both the administration and the oil industry, and threatened to delay or cancel dozens of offshore projects in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico.

Despite its pro-environment pledges, the Obama administration urged the court to revisit the decision. Politically, it needed to push ahead with conventional oil production while it expanded support for renewable energy.

Another reason: money. In its arguments to the court, the government said that the loss of royalties on the oil, estimated at almost $10 billion, "may have significant financial consequences for the federal government."

The U.S. Court of Appeals reversed its decision and allowed drilling in the Gulf to proceed—including on BP PLC's now-infamous Macondo well, 50 miles off the Louisiana coast.

The Obama administration's actions in the court case exemplify the dilemma the White House faced in developing its energy policy. In his presidential campaign, President Obama criticized the Bush administration for being too soft on the oil industry and vowed to support greener energy forms.

But, once in office, President Obama ended up backing offshore drilling, bowing to political and fiscal realties, even as his administration's own scientists and Democratic lawmakers warned about its risks.

After the Macondo well blew out, sinking the Deepwater Horizon rig and causing a catastrophic spill, Mr. Obama said his administration should have been more vigilant in handling the oil industry. "More needed to be done, and more needs to be done" to tighten oversight, he told reporters recently.

Still, the administration defends its intervention in the court case, and says the ruling made it look more cautiously at whether to open new areas to offshore drilling. It pins blame on the Bush administration for pursuing a policy for deep-offshore drilling "that was driven by one principle: open everything," said White House spokesman Ben LaBolt.

...On March 31, Mr. Salazar joined President Obama in a hangar at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland to announce their new offshore policy. Standing before an F-18 "Green Hornet" fighter jet designed to run partly on bio-fuel, Mr. Obama told the audience that "we'll employ new technologies that reduce the impact of oil exploration...And we'll be guided not by political ideology, but by scientific evidence."

The plan was designed in part to allay the federal court's concerns. To satisfy the court's demand for better "balance," it included a broader environmental analysis, examining the impact of spilled oil on marine life and not just on shorelines.

It also ranked prospective drilling areas in terms of their environmental sensitivity. The Central Gulf of Mexico, where BP's Macondo well was based, topped the "most sensitive" column. It also scrapped a handful of planned lease sales in Alaska.

But the proposal kept much of the Bush plan intact, and even added for the first time new lease sales off the coast of Virginia.

It also relied extensively on environmental impact analyses carried out in April 2007 that the court had found wanting.

The 2007 document said "large oil spills associated with [outer continental shelf] activities are low-probability events." The "most likely size" of a serious spill, that report concluded, would total 4,600 barrels—a fraction of what the Deepwater Horizon continues to allow into the water every day.

Kieran Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity, which brought the original lawsuit, said their court victory wound up changing little. "Salazar, and by extension Obama, have pursued the same offshore program as the Bush administration, even while playing a smoke-and-mirrors game," he said.

Two weeks before the Deepwater Horizon explosion, President Obama offered a plug for wider offshore exploration. "Oil rigs today generally don't cause spills," he told a gathering in Charlotte, N.C. "They are technologically very advanced."

Bottom line: It's Day 78 and the oil keeps gushing.

Although Obama wants to blame Bush for the catastrophe, he can't.

The oil is on his hands.

Obama should be spending more time on tar balls and less on golf balls.
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Oil hits all Gulf states; Texas tar balls found