[Wash Examiner] President Obama took the "historic step" to ban offshore oil drilling in the Arctic and off the Atlantic coastline, the White House announced Tuesday afternoon.
The action represents a partnership between the United States and Canada "to build a strong Arctic economy, preserve a healthy Arctic ecosystem and protect our fragile Arctic waters, including designating the bulk of our Arctic water and certain areas in the Atlantic Ocean as indefinitely off limits to future oil and gas leasing," the White House said.
I heard on NPR yesterday the claim that this action could never, ever be reversed in the future. No basis was given for this claim, which a cynical mind would find suspicious.
The actions, and Canada's parallel actions, reflect the scientific assessment that, "even with the high safety standards that both our countries have put in place, the risks of an oil spill in this region are significant and our ability to clean up from a spill in the region's harsh conditions is limited," the White House said.
"By contrast, it would take decades to fully develop the production infrastructure necessary for any large-scale oil and gas leasing production in the region -- at a time when we need to continue to move decisively away from fossil fuels," according to the statement.
#7
Supposedly under a 1953 law he can withdraw the leases and there is no way in the law to restore them. But the law, much like Obamacare it can simply be repealed
#9
Supposedly under a 1953 law he can withdraw the leases and there is no way in the law to restore them. But the law, much like Obamacare it can simply be repealed.
#11
#7 Supposedly under a 1953 law he can withdraw the leases and there is no way in the law to restore them. --Silentbrick
FOIA will be interesting on this if the new Trump administration keeps them from stonewalling.
#12
Building on what Darth said, many are now speaking of 'peak demand' for oil (not peak supply, which has been totally debunked) hitting in the next 10-15 years due to the worldwide move to renewables, higher fuel mileage standards, etc. eroding the demand for fossil fuels. Faced with a future of overall lower oil prices, energy companies will only invest in wells that pay off in shorter timeframes at lower price levels. Arctic/deepwater drilling is very high cost and therefore a high risk at low oil prices. Fracking is less expensive than Arctic drilling, but requires a certain oil price to make sense. With oil prices rising again thanks to our friends at OPEC, fracking has cranked back up. There's ample evidence that oil companies see the writing on the wall with regard to 'peak demand', with some scrambling to secure options in 'easy' (low cost) oil fields in Qatar and/or nixing big Arctic projects altogether (TOTAL, French oil company).
Frankly, I'm rooting for peak demand, because oil drilling is a dirty business and I'd rather not see a Deepwater Horizon incident (I live in Pensacola, FL) in that pristine Arctic environment or anywhere else for that matter.
#15
I doubt anyone reading this will live long enough to see peak demand. In most of the world petroleum is primarily an industrial feedstock, not a motor fuel. There are more than enough un- and under-developed areas to take up the slack should the developed world successfully wean itself off liquid hydrocarbons utilized as motor fuels. If oil stays cheap for a long period of time global demand will explode.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
