Deepwater Horizon~Gulf of Mexico oil spill disaster

[madhatter256]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101006/...gulf_oil_spill

WASHINGTON – The White House blocked efforts by federal scientists to tell the public just how bad the Gulf oil spill could have been, according to a panel appointed by President Barack Obama to investigate the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history.

In documents released Wednesday, the national oil spill commission's staff reveals that in late April or early May the White House budget office denied a request from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to make public the worst-case discharge from the blown-out well. The Unified Command — the government team in charge of the spill response — also was discussing the possibility of making the numbers public, the report says, citing interviews with government officials.

Obama wants to block the facts... god I hope it gets leaked to wikileaks....

[AMDScooter]

Why block facts? It's apparently much easier to just change what was said as they did to justify the drilling moratorium.

[madhatter256]

Why block facts? It's apparently much easier to just change what was said as they did to justify the drilling moratorium.

The moratorium was stupid. I highly doubt it was enforced.

[AMDScooter]

The moratorium was stupid. I highly doubt it was enforced.

IIRC the administration is still appealing the courts to have it enforced. Regardless, rigs are already leaving due to it and it was based on doctored testimony from experts who immediately cried foul upon discovering their work had been altered to support the administrations desires.

[AMDScooter]

Completely surprising absolutely not a single freakin person in the werld... bamma lies. That these slimeballz can say with a straight face that "There was no intent to mislead the public" is more amazing than the lie the statement represents.

Inspector: Drilling Moratorium Report Altered by White House

WASHINGTON -- The Interior Department's inspector general says the White House edited a drilling safety report in a way that made it falsely appear that scientists and experts supported the idea of the administration's six-month ban on new drilling.

The inspector general says the editing changes resulted "in the implication that the moratorium recommendation had been peer reviewed." But it hadn't been. The scientists were only asked to review new safety measures for offshore drilling.

"There was no intent to mislead the public," said Kendra Barkoff, a spokeswoman for Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, who also recommended in the May 27 safety report that a moratorium be placed on deepwater oil and gas exploration. "The decision to impose a temporary moratorium on deepwater drilling was made by the secretary, following consultation with colleagues including the White House."

The Interior Department, after one of the reviewers complained about the inference, promptly issued an apology to the reviewers during a conference call, with a letter and personal meeting in June.

The inspector general's report, which was originally requested by Louisiana Sen. David Vitter and Rep. Steve Scalise in June, said the administration did not violate federal rules because the executive summary did not say the experts approved the recommendations and the department offered a formal apology and had publicly clarified the nature of the expert review.

But Louisiana Rep. Bill Cassidy, a Republican, said in a statement that the investigation proved "that the blanket drilling moratorium was driven by a politics and not by science."

"Candidate Obama promised that he would guided by science, not ideology," Cassidy said. Cassidy said if that were true thousands of jobs and billions in economic activity would have been preserved on the Gulf coast.

The Web site Politico was first to report the inspector general's findings.

Click here for a copy of the report.

[AMDScooter]

No joke... not like we needed a judge to tell us king bamma's administration was way outta bounds here.

U.S. Administration In Contempt Over Gulf Drilling Moratorium, Judge Rules

The Obama Administration acted in contempt by continuing its deepwater-drilling moratorium after the policy was struck down, a New Orleans judge ruled.

Interior Department regulators acted with “determined disregard” by lifting and reinstituting a series of policy changes that restricted offshore drilling, following the worst offshore oil spill in U.S. history, U.S. District Judge, Martin Feldman of New Orleans ruled yesterday.

“Each step the government took following the court’s imposition of a preliminary injunction showcases its defiance,” Feldman said in the ruling.

“Such dismissive conduct, viewed in tandem with the re-imposition of a second blanket and substantively identical moratorium, and in light of the national importance of this case, provide this court with clear and convincing evidence of the government’s contempt,” Feldman said.

President Barack Obama’s administration first halted offshore exploration in waters deeper than 500 feet in May, after the explosion and sinking of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig off the Louisiana coast led to a subsea blowout of a BP Plc well that spewed more than 4.1 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

Overly Broad

Feldman overturned the initial ban as overly broad on June 22, after the offshore-drilling industry and Gulf Coast political and business leaders challenged it. U.S. Interior Secretary Kenneth Salazar said later that day that he would “issue a new order in the coming days that eliminates any doubt that a moratorium is needed, appropriate, and within our authorities.”

In July, Salazar instituted a second drilling moratorium that was also challenged by an industry lawsuit claiming the ban was harming the Gulf Coast economy, which is heavily dependent on deepwater drilling activities. That ban was rescinded in October, before Feldman could rule on its validity.

Feldman later ruled that enhanced drilling safety rules Salazar imposed to permit companies to resume offshore exploration violated federal law, and he struck down those as well. Opponents of those rules complained to Feldman that regulators were continuing to block the resumption of drilling after Feldman’s rulings.

Wyn Hornbuckle, a Justice Department spokesman, said the government is reviewing yesterday’s ruling. He declined to comment further.

Informal Moratorium

The Offshore Marine Service Association, a group representing offshore service vessels and shipyards, urged the president to end what it called an informal moratorium on offshore drilling.

“President Obama claims to have lifted the Gulf moratorium, yet not a single deepwater permit has been issued in nine months,” Jim Adams, the association’s president, said in a release after the ruling. “As a result, thousands of workers are out of jobs, Americans are paying more for gasoline and heating oil, and our nation is becoming even more dependent on unstable nations for our energy needs.”

Feldman also ordered the government to pay the legal fees of Hornbeck Offshore Services LLC, which filed the initial lawsuit. The company had described the fees as “significant.”

Hornbeck “was put to considerable expense, after Judge Feldman issued the injunction, contending with the government’s litigation posturing and defiance of the court’s order,” Sam Giberga, the company’s general counsel, said today in an e-mail.

“The government was not at liberty to impose its own will after the court struck down the policy,” Giberga said. “The government, like any citizen, had to obey the ruling, even if it didn’t like it.”

The case is Hornbeck Offshore Services LLC v. Salazar, 2:10-cv-01663, U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Louisiana (New Orleans).

[AMDScooter]

Effects still being felt...

House Report: Obama's Gulf Oil Slowdown Costing 230,000 Jobs!

The oil lease regulatory process is holding holding back oil exploration and production activity in the Gulf of Mexico. This delay is preventing economic benefits that will spread past the gulf states, to the entire country if only the gulf oil activity activity were allowed to match industry capacity.

That was one of the important findings Restarting “the Engine”–Securing American Jobs, Investment, and Energy Security, a study done by IHS CERA and IHS Global Insight which was released by the House Oversight Committee today (and embedded below).

Committee Chair Rep Issa commented about the study's release.

"The Obama Administration has systematically blocked domestic energy production in the Gulf of Mexico, and today's report puts that action in stark terms. It documents a 250 percent increase in the deepwater exploration permit backlog with a decrease of nearly 80 percent for plan approvals and deepwater drilling. That means a loss of $9 billion dollars in capital investment in 2011, along with a projected loss to the government of $25 billion in royalties and tax payments over the next 3 years, to say nothing of the tens of thousands of jobs lost.

"Our domestic energy resources are the largest in the world. Tapping these resources will create more than 500,000 jobs in the next three years, grow the economy and put us on the path to recovery.

The study looks at the plan and permit levels in the six months following the lifting of the deepwater activity moratorium in October 2010. The analysis finds a:

250% increase in the backlog of deepwater plans pending governmental approval

86% drop in the pace of regulatory approvals for plans

60% drop in all GoM drilling permits

38% increase in the time required to reach each regulatory approval required.

One unexpected finding from the study was that “an increase in oil and gas activity reverberates throughout the broader economy,” said James Diffley, senior director of IHS Global Insight’s U.S. Regional Economic Group. “Each new hire (in the Gulf) results, on average, in more than three additional jobs in an array of industries around the country” – not just in the Gulf region.

The study reports that there is some sort of logjam in the regulatory process, however it does not report what the logjam is or how it was caused. That answer may come from a study Issa released in late May when Issa's House Oversight and Government Reform Committee issued a scathing report about the nation's energy saying in part that the President has deliberately created policies which would cause energy prices to rise.

"The United States has the largest reserves in the world—resources that can provide good paying American jobs and fuel our economic expansion. But standing between that energy and U.S. consumers is an obstacle course of government red tape, regulation, delays and obfuscations," Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) said. He pointed to statements by President Obama and Energy Secretary Chu about intentionally raising energy costs for Americans and how these goals are being implemented throughout the government.

The committee's report found that U.S. domestic energy resources are currently the largest on earth—greater than Saudi Arabia, China and Canada combined. It also said that the recent EPA and Department of Interior regulatory actions, some in collaboration with environmental groups or outside normal scope, are having a detrimental impact on independent energy producers.

Once again it seems as if the Barack Obama's politics has taken precedence of over the needs of the country, not just the energy needs but in this case a much-needed, no cost to the taxpayer stimulus to the economy.

[AAdjuster]

You need to remember this crap in the gulf is not about creating jobs, or producing more oil. It is obama proving what he is anti oil production so as to prevent his so called global warming. This is due obama being a eviromental nut job.

Obama does care about people having jobs. He does everything he can to stop job growth.

Look at cap and trade what a great way to ruin the US economy.

[tucker]

OFF-SHORE OIL-DRILLING, OBAMA, SOROS, PETROBRAS: CONNECTING THE DOTS


http://astuteblogger.blogspot.com/20...ama-soros.html

[AMDScooter]

Administration is still wreaking havoc on the region long after the spill..

The Obama energy crisis as you've never before seen it

It's been eclipsed somewhat in recent months by the continued stagnation of the economy and the increasingly loud Republican presidential nomination battle, but the energy crisis caused by President Obama's Permatorium on drilling in the Gulf of Mexico is just as serious as it ever was.

And it's going to get worse if something isn't done soon to lift the bureaucratic strangulation being applied to the oil and natural gas industries by Obama's Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar.

But other than pointing to staggering unemployment figures and gas prices that remain nearly double what they were when the president took office in 2009, it's difficult to convey the magnitude of the Obama energy crisis in the Gulf of Mexico. The consequences of this crisis far exceed in terms of human and economic losses those occasioned by the Deepwater Horizon disaster that was used to justify the Permatorium in the first place.

So along comes the Offshore Marine Service Association - as the name implies, they keep the rigs in the Gulf supplied and running - with a unique video that lays it out about as starkly as can be done, and all by a talented artist whose hand moves with remarkable speed.

[AMDScooter]

Questions still unanswered from the mostus transparent administration evar...

Subpoenaed: GOP wants to know why Obama administration misled Americans on drilling ban

. . .
The bottom line is I’m very comfortable with everything we did including the time out and reset button that we had to put in place in the Gulf of Mexico. What the House Natural Resources and energy committee is doing is simply a distraction in the name of politics.
. . .

^^^ Gotta love that git Salazar. he's sooo comfortable with his departments activities he won't submit to the committee’s requests.

Brimming with confidence.

[kbohip]

Questions still unanswered from the mostus transparent administration evar...

Subpoenaed: GOP wants to know why Obama administration misled Americans on drilling ban



^^^ Gotta love that git Salazar. he's sooo comfortable with his departments activities he won't submit to the committee’s requests.

Brimming with confidence.

I'm just glad he's still not senator of Colorado.

[Keven]

I'm just glad he's still not senator of Colorado.

kbohip's senator

[AMDScooter]

No surprises here...


White House Lied, Jobs Died
The story behind the drilling moratorium

While the White House and its media water-carriers try to distract the American public with gay-marriage talk and half-century-old tales of Mitt Romney’s prep-school pranks, the inconvenient truth remains: President Obama is responsible for perpetrating jaw-dropping, job-killing scientific fraud. And his minions are still trying to cover it up.

New internal e-mails disclosed by the House Natural Resources Committee this week show that a supposedly exculpatory report on the administration’s doctored drilling moratorium analysis — issued by the Department of Interior’s inspector general’s office — was itself incomplete, misleading, and unsubstantiated. Even more damning, the documents reveal that the White House actively blocked investigators and refuses to comply with subpoenas.

Now, as one senior IG agent warned his bosses, “the chickens may be coming home to roost.”

A quick refresher: After the BP oil spill in 2010, the White House imposed a radical six-month moratorium on America’s entire deepwater-drilling industry. The overbroad ban — inserted into a technical safety document in the middle of the night by Obama’s green extremists — cost an estimated 19,000 jobs and $1.1 billion in lost wages.

The anti-drilling administration based its draconian order on recommendations from an expert oil-spill panel. But that panel’s own members (along with the federal judiciary) called out then–eco czar Carol Browner for misleading the public about the scientific evidence and “contributing to the perception that the government’s findings were more exact than they actually were.” Browner and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar oversaw the rewriting of the drilling-ban report to completely misrepresent the Obama-appointed panel’s own overwhelming scientific objections to the job-killing edict.

Federal judge Martin Feldman in Louisiana blasted the Obama Interior Department for defying his May 2010 order to lift its fraudulent ban on offshore oil and gas drilling in the Gulf. He called out the administration’s culture of contempt and “determined disregard” for the law.

Ever since, GOP watchdogs have attempted to hold administration officials accountable for the drilling-ban fraud. In November 2010, the DOI inspector general issued a report cited by Salazar to argue that any editing of the drilling-ban report was unintentional and mistaken. But e-mails from IG senior agent Richard Larrabee released by the House Natural Resources Committee flatly contradict Salazar.

“I truly believe the editing WAS intentional — by an overzealous staffer at the White House. And, if asked, I, as the case agent, would be happy to state that opinion to anyone interested,” Larrabee wrote.

He noted that the IG report failed to mention that investigators were unable to independently validate e-mails supplied by Salazar’s office — and that the report was “simply silent” about how the White House blocked investigators’ attempts to interview one of Browner’s chief henchmen, Joe Aldy. “Well, it will be interesting to see if anyone picks up on these things, or cares about them,” Larrabee wrote.

Well, House Natural Resources Committee chairman Doc Hastings (R., Wash.) cares. In a letter to the DOI inspector general’s office, Hastings blasted the stonewallers who have hid in the dark for more than a year. “The IG report is being used by the Obama Administration and others as a defense that this matter has already been investigated and resolved. These emails contradict that claim and raise new questions on whether the IG’s investigation was as thorough and complete as it should have been,” Hastings wrote.

The actual drafts of the drilling-moratorium report and the communications between senior Interior Department officials and White House political appointees remain out of public view. “To date, the Interior Department has never had to disclose documents to the IG or to Congress,” Hastings noted. “Despite the President’s pledge of transparency, this Administration has not answered questions by anyone on how this decision was made that forced thousands of Americans out of work and cost millions of dollars in lost economic activity.”

This election isn’t just about jobs, jobs, jobs. It’s about the lies, lies, lies that have led to massive job destruction — and the ruthless corruptocrats using our tax dollars to whitewash their radical green agenda.