Some Jobs To Save
Bureaucratic Sclerosis: A Gulf Coast governor tells Congress that the administration's inept response to the Deepwater Horizon explosion has done more damage to the local and national economy than the crude itself.
On Friday, we learned that the nation's unemployment rate rose above 9% again in May. On Thursday, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour was telling a hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that the administration's offshore drilling ban "not only cost jobs in all the Gulf states, it hurt the economy nationally by reducing domestic oil production." And it still is.
First, Barbour said, the administration erred in invoking the Oil Pollution Act (OPA) of 1990, a bill passed in the wake of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Instead, he said, it should have invoked the Stafford Act, under which the federal government aids states in responding to hurricanes and other natural disasters.
The OPA holds the responsible party, in this case BP, accountable for all costs and gives it a central role in response to an oil spill. The OPA was a "usurpation of state authority," Barbour said, noting that he "sent people to Wal-Mart to buy radios" because of the lack of communication with the Coast Guard.
"Sometimes BP was easier to deal with than the (federal) government," Barbour told the committee.
The administration compounded its chaotic bureaucratic response, Barbour testified, by its imposition of a drilling ban. Some 31,000 wells had been drilled and were operating in the Gulf before the federal government brought the Gulf economy to a screeching halt in the name of safety, he said.
"The risk of one in 31,000 is worth taking when you're talking about something that is as important to the economy of the United States of America," Barbour said.
He added: "This is no excuse to shut down an industry that is not only vitally important for job creation in the Gulf states, but is vitally important to the energy sufficiency of the United States. ... The blood of our country's economy is energy. Thirty percent of all the oil and gas in the United States produced domestically was produced in the Gulf of Mexico before the oil spill. Since the oil spill, the Obama administration has only permitted 15% as many deepwater oil rigs as before."
In his written testimony, Michael Bromwich, director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, claimed that shallow-water drilling permits "have averaged six per month since October 2010 compared to an average of eight per month in 2009."
As the Institute for Energy Research points out, Bromwich forgets to mention that shallow-water permits granted in 2008 averaged 16.8 a month. His statement highlights the drastic decrease in shallow-water permitting since President Obama came into office.
Another Mississippi Republican, Rep. Steven Palazzo, introduced Barbour at the hearing and criticized the Obama administration for its "thoughtless decision" to institute a moratorium on new drilling in the months after the oil spill. Palazzo put the net loss due to the moratorium and the draconian permitting process at 250,000 barrels a day and cites a Louisiana State University study putting the job loss at 24,000.
"Are all airplanes a danger because one was? All oil tankers like Exxon Valdez? All trains? All mines?" U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman asked in a ruling that struck down Interior Secretary Ken Salazar's original moratorium.
The administration's answer still seems to be yes, as offshore oil rigs find their way to other shores and communities dry up along with the oil business that sustained them.
As Gov. Barbour testified, "Great jobs are being lost."
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