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CNBC’s Najarian: Drilling Moratorium ‘Shows a Tone-Deafness From This Administration’

Posted on September 2, 2010 by Benny Hollywood| Leave a comment

With a 9.6 percent unemployment rate overall in the United States and unemployment rates showing an uptick in states on the Gulf of Mexico that allow offshore oil drilling, one has to wonder what the Obama administration is thinking its Draconian wide-sweeping moratorium halting deepwater drilling in the Gulf after the BP oil spill. While environmentalists are using today’s explosion on a oil production platform in the Gulf to support a drilling moratorium, critics like CNBC’s “Fast Money” panelist Jon Najarian have questioned the wisdom of the Obama administration’s decision to put up to 75,000 in limbo. “As far as what was going on in the Gulf, it shows a tone-deafness from this administration ,” Najarian said on the Sept. 2 broadcast of “Fast Money.” “I mean, I’ll pound the table for that because I’m not running for office. But I mean, this guy is tone deaf that 75,000 jobs in the Gulf of Mexico that have been idled for no good reason . It’s costing all of us and it costs all the places where they would normally spend money as well.” On Sept. 2, a federal judge denied the federal government’s request to dismiss a lawsuit challenging that moratorium. The 75,000 jobs number is a figure backed up by the Dr. Lee Hunt, president of the International Association of Drilling Contractors. In a May 13 letter to Interior Secretary Ken Salazar , Hunt warned then the ban would eventually impact that many job in the Gulf Coast states. “Due to the Department’s order, rigs completing wells in the next weeks will be unable to take on new work,” Hunt wrote. “Over the next six weeks, up to 50 drilling rigs will complete wells and be unable to accept new work. These rigs will be idled, and those employees working directly on the rig face the prospect of unemployment, even if only temporarily. Additionally, employees of supporting service companies will also face unemployment. These workers represent a significant portion of the 75,000 hard-working individuals employed in the offshore Gulf of Mexico. The ripple effects of this abeyance of all new drilling will adversely impact coastal communities across Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi and Alabama.”

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CNBC’s Najarian: Drilling Moratorium ‘Shows a Tone-Deafness From This Administration’

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Media Ignore Ken Salazar’s Misleading Case for Drilling Moratorium

Posted on June 24, 2010 by Benny Hollywood| Leave a comment

As Interior Secretary Ken Salazar prepares a new moratorium on offshore oil drilling after the last one was shot down by a federal judge Wednesday, lost on the media seems to be Salazar’s dishonesty in promoting the policy thus far. Very few have reported that he misrepresented the position of a team of experts designed to look into the costs and benefits of the moratorium. In reality, the seven-member panel, recommended by the National Academy of Engineering, said Salazar’s proposed moratorium would be ” punishing the innocent .” The policy “will not measurably reduce risk further,” the panel explained, “and it will have a lasting impact on the nation’s economy which may be greater than that of the oil spill.” Despite the panel’s clear opposition to the policy, Salazar implied that they supported the moratorium. Salazar was forced to apologize after the panel publicly rebuked the Secretary’s implications. “The Secretary should be free to recommend whatever he thinks is correct,” said one member of the panel, “but he should not be free to use our names to justify his political decisions.” Even the judge in the case, Martin Feldman, noted that Salazar’s statement was “misleading” and “factually incorrect.” Michelle Malkin took it one step further. “Salazar lied,” she claimed in her syndicated column on Wednesday. “Salazar committed fraud. Salazar sullied the reputations of the experts involved and abused his authority.” She reiterated this sentiment in a hard-hitting Hannity segment last night. But only a day after Salazar apologized for at the very least misrepresenting the panel’s views, he once again cited the panel’s support for the moratorium in arguments filed in federal court. DOI’s legal team wrote that the Department’s policies had been prepared with the benefit of consultations with experts from state and federal governments, academic institutions, and industry and advocacy organizations. As a result of that wide-ranging review, and the five-week discharge of hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico that preceded it, the Secretary concluded that “offshore drilling of new deepwater wells poses an unacceptable threat of serious and irreparable harm to wildlife and the marine, coastal, and human environment…”…Consequently, Secretary Salazar ordered a brief six-month moratorium on one particular segment of oil-drilling on the Outer Continental Shelf that uses similar technology to that used on the Deepwater Horizon, in order to give industry and the agencies time to assess how best to address the findings and recommendations contained in the Safety Report. Now, that argument is technically correct. The only element of DOI’s proposed policies that the panel objected to was the moratorium. The panel made sure to note that “we broadly agree with the detailed recommendations in the report.” The moratorium was the only policy to which it strongly objected. But by noting that the recommendations as a whole were created after extensive consultation with the panel, and then touting the moratorium as the primary policy recommended, the legal team implied in hardly ambiguous terms that the panel had recommended the moratorium, which it obviously did not. The media so far have almost completely ignored Salazar’s continued use of dishonest and misleading statements in an effort to promote a moratorium. “In a sane world, Salazar’s head would roll,” Malkin wrote. “In Obama world, he gets immunity.” And in the world of the mainstream media, apparently, he is completely ignored.

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Media Ignore Ken Salazar’s Misleading Case for Drilling Moratorium

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Breaking: Federal Judge Blocks Obama Admin Moratorium (Brave NAE Experts Score a Win)

Posted on June 22, 2010 by Benny Hollywood| Leave a comment

Via the Associated Press (link may be dynamic and subject to change):  A federal judge in New Orleans has blocked a six-month moratorium on new deepwater drilling projects that was imposed in response to the massive Gulf oil spill. The White House says President Barack Obama’s administration will appeal. Several companies that ferry people and supplies and provide other services to offshore drilling rigs had asked U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman in New Orleans to overturn the moratorium. This later paragraph from the breaking news report explains why I believe Ken Salazar’s dissenting experts may have influenced the judge’s outlook on the case: Feldman says in his ruling that the Interior Department failed to provide adequate reasoning for the moratorium. He says it seems to assume that because one rig failed, all companies and rigs doing deepwater drilling pose an imminent danger. Feldman’s take seems to mirror the language of the dissenters. Investors Business Daily editorialized on Salazar’s moratorium imposition travesty on June 10 : Experts brought together by the Obama administration to review offshore drilling safety were asked to review recommendations in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. They did not give their blessing to the six-month drilling moratorium announced by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and have accused him of deliberately appending their report to make it seem like they did. According to the New Orleans Times Picayune, Salazar’s May 27 report to the president said the seven experts “peer reviewed” his recommendations, including a six-month ban on drilling in waters deeper than 500 feet. The experts say the report they reviewed suggested stopping only new drilling in waters deeper than 1,000 feet. The reviewers for Salazar’s report were provided by the National Academy of Engineering. Their joint letter says that while they agreed with the report’s various safety recommendations, “we do not agree with the six-month blanket moratorium on floating drilling. A moratorium was added after the final review and was never agreed to by the contributors.” One panelist, Bob Bea of the University of California, Berkeley, said in an e-mail: “Moratorium was not a part of the … report we consulted-advised-reviewed.” The academy’s Ken Arnold was less subtle, saying: “The secretary should be free to recommend whatever he thinks is correct, but he should not be free to use our names to justify his political decisions.” The panelists simply oppose the announced moratorium. “A blanket moratorium is not the answer,” the letter says. “It will not measurably reduce risk further, and it will have a lasting impact on the nation’s economy, which may be greater than that of the oil spill. We do not believe punishing the innocent is the right thing to do.” Neither do we, and frankly we’re tired of the deliberate manipulation of facts and truth in the name of protecting the environment … Even the Associated Press finally broke down and covered the dissenters’ outcries yesterday, while still somewhat concealing the full scope of their objections: The scientists, who had consulted with Salazar on a May 27 report on drilling safety, said the Interior Department falsely implied that they had agreed to a “blanket moratorium” that they actually opposed. The scientists said the drilling moratorium went too far and warned that it may have a lasting impact on the nation’s economy. A spokeswoman for Salazar said the May 27 report was not intended to imply that all experts from the National Academy of Engineering had agreed to the moratorium. “By listing the members of the NAE that peer-reviewed the 22 safety recommendations contained in the report, we didn’t mean to imply that they also agreed with the moratorium on deep-water drilling,” said spokeswoman Kendra Barkoff. Sure, Kendra. Though it’s only one step, it may very well be that thanks to the stink raised by the NAE experts and outlets like the Wall Street Journal, IBD, and many center-right blogs, the nation might start getting the energy sector of its economy back in gear. Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.

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Breaking: Federal Judge Blocks Obama Admin Moratorium (Brave NAE Experts Score a Win)

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