Free Republic

In his enviro-extremism, President Obama is attempting to tie President-elect Trump’s hands by blocking vast swaths of the Arctic Ocean and stretches of the Atlantic from oil and natural-gas drilling. The gambit, announced by the administration on Tuesday, is part of an eleventh-hour wave by which Obama is flooding the regulatory zone: Promulgating so many rules – of the unpopular, hard-left variety that Democrats dare not unveil before Election Days – that he hopes the Trump administration will find it too cumbersome to undo all of them. The incoming president should not let his predecessor get away with it. Obama’s...

A decision to ban oil and gas drilling on state land in Pennsylvania was met with praise and criticism, with an industry leader describing it as a "lose-lose." Louis D'Amico, president and executive director of the Pennsylvania Independent Oil & Gas Association, said the moratorium struck a blow against an industry that's already returned more than $700 million in revenue to the state in the last seven years. "This is a lose-lose for Pennsylvania's taxpayers and energy consumers," he said in a statement Thursday.

Since day one of the Obama administration, I’ve chronicled Loathsome Cowboy Ken Salazar’s War on the West, War on Jobs, and War on Science/ Rule of Law as head of the Interior Department. His eco-radical sidekick Carol Browner is gone, yet Salazar remains in place. Federal judge after federal judge has spanked Salazar and Obama’s job-destroying eco-nitwits for lawlessly and fraudulently imposing their junk-science drilling ban . Salazar spearheaded the pulling of scores of oil leases by invoking bogus eco-claims and has presided over an expansive land grab through administrative fiat. Yesterday, yet another federal judge smacked Obama/Salazar and the...

Energy: As the House passes a bill to open up offshore drilling, the Senate holds another show trial of oil executives showing why people blame them, not the administration, for high gas prices. Last week they fought back. Summoned for what Sen. Orrin Hatch labeled a dog-and-pony show, executives of Exxon Mobil, Shell, ConocoPhillips, BP America and Chevron appeared before the Senate Finance Committee on Thursday and, in often-heated exchanges, indicated their days as whipping boys are over. The hearing was called ostensibly to support the Democrats' Close Big Oil Tax Loopholes Act, a bill with no chance of passage....

Energy Policy: While we sit on abundant oil and natural gas reserves, prices at both the wellhead and the pump are rising on fears of spreading Mideast turmoil and short domestic supply. But then, maybe that's the plan. The silver lining for this administration in the gathering storm over the Middle East may be what it's doing and may yet do to energy prices. The average price for gasoline jumped nearly 12 cents a gallon last week to $3.287, according to AAA. But at the White House, that's not necessarily bad news. Oil has surged to 2 1/2-year highs as...

On top of tens of thousands of workers losing their jobs when Obama imposed a drilling moratorium by executive order (and fudging what scientists and experts believed in order to justify his moratorium) now comes news that Seahawk Drilling, a major publicly-held drilling services company, has declared bankruptcy due to the sharp decline in Gulf drilling work.From USA Today: Seahawk Drilling Inc. said it has filed for bankruptcy protection and plans to sell its fleet of offshore drilling rigs to a competitor for $105 million.Seahawk, which announced the deal with Hercules Offshore Inc. Friday, has been hurt by a slowdown...

Energy Policy: An administration that has no respect for Congress, the courts or the Constitution has been found in contempt for reissuing a drilling moratorium that a U.S. district judge found overly broad. The Obama administration's trouble with the courts has continued with a judge's ruling last week that the Interior Department's reinstating of a drilling moratorium followed by a de facto moratorium via an overly restrictive permitting process constituted contempt. The administration had issued a drilling moratorium in May in waters deeper than 500 feet after the explosion and sinking of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig off Louisiana that...

Not Since President Andrew Jackson defied the Supreme Court has a president of the United states ignored a judicial ruling. Federal Judge Vinson ruled this week that the entire Obamacare law was unconstitutional, yet the Obama Administration is continuing to implement the law. Unless Obama applies for and is granted a stay, Obama is in contempt of court, and we have a dictatorship in America. If this were not bad enough, today another federal court found the Obama Administration in contempt for its continuing ban on offshore drilling in the Gulf:

Republican Florida governor-elect Rick Scott slammed President Obama’s ban on offshore drilling near the coast of Florida. Mr. Scott issued a statement saying Wednesday’s decision is another example of the government regulation impeding economic growth. Mr. Scott said drilling could be conducted safely if proper regulations were implemented. Offshore drilling does not currently occur near the coast of Florida. The Obama administration announced a ban on offshore drilling, shelving plans to open offshore waters near Florida to oil and gas drilling. Officials said the decision was due, in part, to the BP oil disaster earlier this year. The western coast...

Three Republican senators demanded Friday that the White House explain last-minute editing changes to an Interior Department report on the BP oil spill that falsely implied that a group of independent experts had endorsed a political decision to temporarily halt all deepwater oil drilling. The senators, members of the Environment and Public Works Committee, called for hearings into the matter, contending that the White House had manipulated science for political ends, a claim Democrats frequently made about the George W. Bush administration. The Interior Department’s inspector general issued a report this week asserting that officials in the office of Carol...

The White House rewrote crucial sections of an Interior Department report to suggest an independent group of scientists and engineers supported a six-month ban on offshore oil drilling, the Interior inspector general says in a new report. In the wee hours of the morning of May 27, a staff member to White House energy adviser Carol Browner sent two edited versions of the department report’s executive summary back to Interior. The language had been changed to insinuate the seven-member panel of outside experts – who reviewed a draft of various safety recommendations – endorsed the moratorium, according to the IG...

Energy Policy: The administration lifts the Gulf drilling moratorium in time for the election, but it's not as good as it sounds. Meanwhile, China buys up Texas oil land to develop the energy reserves we won't. The lifting of the Gulf drilling ban imposed after the explosion of British Petroleum's Macondo well came as welcome news. But like anything this administration does, one must read the fine print. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced that the ban was being lifted before its Nov. 30 target because of the "the higher standards we have set" for drillers applying for new permits.

Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) is vowing to block a Senate vote to confirm President Obama’s choice to head the White House Office of Management and Budget unless a temporary ban on offshore oil-and-gas drilling is removed. Her pledge to hold up the nomination of Jack Lew represents a dramatic political escalation of Landrieu’s fight against the federal moratorium on deepwater drilling and the slowdown in permits for shallow water projects. RELATED ARTICLES Budget nominee Lew easily clears Senate panel “Due to the Administration’s unwillingness to reverse or modify its policies that have halted all deepwater and nearly all shallow-water...

The Gulf oil spill should not recede from the headlines without further attention to how President Obama continues to punish the victims. His moratorium on deep-water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico is unreasonable and unconscionable. Mr. Obama says the six-month ban on drilling is needed to buy time to investigate what caused the blowout, strengthen oversight and issue new regulations. This is nonsense. Copious investigation already has shown that a series of specific decisions and errors combined to cause the BP well to explode. Few details remain unanswered. Few if any new regulations are needed; the problem was in...

President Barack Obama's "reckless" moratorium on deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico is suffocating small businesses and destroying livelihoods, lawmakers and residents said Tuesday. "The decision to stop energy exploration in the Gulf of Mexico appears to have been made in an uninformed manner that borders recklessness," Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu told the small business committee, which she chairs. "It has increased our risk to the environment, it has increased our national security risk, it has increased the risks to job security. It must be reversed now." A study by Louisiana State University finance professor Joseph Mason estimates the...

Energy Policy: As the job-killing deepwater drilling ban continues offshore, our interior secretary defends an onshore ban imposed in Utah. If we could drill in places like that, maybe oil wouldn't be gushing a mile under the Gulf of Mexico. The 64-million-gallon question in the Gulf oil spill is why we were drilling 5,000 feet down in the first place. The administration line, as expressed by the president in his recent Oval Office speech, is that oil resources on land and just offshore are running out. The falsity of that claim can be seen in the battle over 77 oil...

Govt: Obama Drilling Ban to Cut Supply Sharply Thursday, 08 Jul 2010 09:42 AM The Obama administration's contested moratorium on deepwater drilling will take a larger portion out of U.S. oil production next year than previously thought, the government's energy forecasting agency said on Wednesday. Oil production next year is expected to be cut by 82,000 barrels per day, or almost 30 million barrels total, due to delayed or canceled drilling caused by the moratorium, the Energy Information Administration said. That is 17 percent more from the 70,000 bpd in lost output the agency predicted just last month. Monthly production...

From WDSU NBC 6 New Orleans LA today: Gov. Bobby Jindal is growing weary of federal efforts in the oil spill cleanup process, and in an interview with WDSU anchor Norman Robinson, he took the gloves off saying: "Cut through the red tape and get it done"! The problem is not communication, it's the red tape and bureaucracy courtesy of our Government!

The Interior Department is on the cusp of issuing a revised moratorium on deepwater oil-and-gas drilling to replace an earlier ban that a federal judge blocked last week, according to the White House and the Interior Department. Interior in late May issued the six-month ban on exploratory drilling in waters over 500 feet deep in response to the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar quickly pledged to impose a revised ban after the judge’s ruling. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said Thursday that he expects the revised Interior Department drilling freeze to be issued...

A leading House Republican is pressuring Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to release documents related to the Obama administration’s a six-month deepwater drilling moratorium. Rep. Darrell Issa of California, the top Republican on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, claims that the administration is “pursuing policies inconsistent with its commitment to protect the Gulf region” by insisting on the drilling moratorium. Issa writes in the letter, obtained by POLITICO, that he is concerned about the administration’s decision to appeal a Louisiana court ruling that lifted the moratorium – the Californian claims that experts advised against the ban. Issa is seeking...