Seven Years of Bad Policy: Government Maintains Offshore Drilling Ban | The Foundry: Conservative Policy News.
As the rest of the world continues to drill off its respective coasts, the United States is heading in the opposite direction.
The Obama Administration announced that the eastern Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic and Pacific coasts will not be part of the government’s 2012–2017 Outer Continental Shelf program, effectively banning drilling in those areas for the next seven years.
The decision is a reversal from the President’s announcement in March in which he opened access to waters for offshore drilling in the Atlantic and eastern Gulf of Mexico. But even that decision did more to tighten offshore oil and gas explorations than open it. That proposal canceled four lease sales in Alaska that were already pending. And it was just last month, when the Administration lifted the six-month ban on deepwater drilling, that Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said, “There will always be risks associated with deep-water drilling … [but] we have reached a point where we have significantly reduced those risks.”
If that’s the case, and the industry demonstrates that it can drill safely, the government needs to step aside and let companies determine whether these projects are economically feasible.
