Despite the soaring price of gasoline resulting from Middle East unrest, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar is standing by the Obama administration’s resolve to curtail new offshore oil drilling sharply.
Salazar’s department filed an appeal on Friday to a U.S. District Court judge’s ruling ordering Interior to speed up action on pending deep water permits for drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.
“The department has dramatically slowed down the process of approving or denying permits since the BP oil spill last summer,” Newsroom America reports. “Critics say the department should be speeding up the process dramatically as oil prices rise on renewed unrest and turmoil in the Middle East.”
In his ruling, District Judge Martin Feldman of the Eastern District of Louisiana said Interior’s delay in issuing permits since the Gulf spill is “increasingly inexcusable.”
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| Sen. Rand Paul |
The Obama administration’s anti-energy development also is drawing increasing criticism from the legislative branch. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said Monday afternoon on Fox News that the administration’s policies represent a double economic-whammy to economically depressed states along the Gulf.
"We prevent them from drilling, and then we increase and have to pay their unemployment benefits,” Paul said. “It is a crazy system.
“We worry about being energy independent,” he added, “and we worry about sending troops over to the Middle East to guard the oil, and to take care of the oil production over there — but we don't drill for oil in our country.
The bias against coal-fired plants is especially egregious, he told Fox.
"Our electricity comes primarily from coal — half of our electricity comes from burning coal,” he said. “In Kentucky, it's 90 percent comes from burning coal.
“And yet they won't give any permits. We have oil permits that sitting there for 7 years," Paul said.
In a recent interview with CNS News, Salazar said the Obama administration opposes drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, despite the rising price of gasoline, because the “drill, baby, drill program” is not going to lead the United States to energy independence.
“What we need to do is have a robust energy program that includes a number of different sources of energy,” he said.
Asked about drilling in the Gulf, he responded: “What I say is what the White House would say and that is that we are moving forward with an effort to stand up oil and gas drilling in the deep oceans of the Gulf and are doing it in a safe and orderly way.”
In an exclusive interview with Newsmax.TV on Friday, Minnesota Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann said: “President Obama’s policies have made us more vulnerable than ever due to our dependence on foreign oil. And what is he doing? He’s approved only one [oil drilling] lease — and that one was in the last week — since he’s come into office.
“As soon as he took office, his new Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, canceled 77 leases. And now that oil is trading at over $100 a barrel, it is time that we open up American energy interests.”
Bachmann added that the “ambition” of the Obama administration is “to move people toward green energy.”
And Sen. Jim Inhofe told Newsmax in an interview on Tuesday that the Obama administration “wants to kill oil and gas.”
Inhofe, of Oklahoma, the ranking Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said the United States’ potential energy resources could make the nation independent of Middle East oil if they were allowed to be exploited. And he asserts that the administration sees rising gases prices as an aid in pushing the country toward green energy.
Some oil industry insiders have said that analysts were predicting higher gas prices months ago because of increasing demand. But the Obama administration made no plans to counter a price spike and was therefore caught unprepared for the rise resulting from the Middle East turmoil.
Now the administration is considering tapping the 727 million-barrel Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which could help ease gasoline prices, and deflect calls for new offshore drilling.
“The issue of the reserve is one we are considering,” White House chief of staff Bill Daley said Sunday on “Meet the Press.”
The reserve was created in the wake of the 1970s Arab oil embargo, and most recently tapped in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina disrupted oil and gas production in the Gulf.
But Tennessee Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander said on CNN on Sunday: “What we need to do is find more of our own energy, and that means explore offshore. That means explore in federal lands for oil and natural gas and explore in Alaska.”
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