The Criminal Moratorium

You may have seen or heard news reports regarding the Rally for Economic Survival event that was held in LaFayette, LA last Wednesday at that city's Cajun Dome basketball arena.  Fully 12,000 mostly ticked-off Louisianans – including Governor Bobby Jindal, Lt. Governor Scott Angele, and other elected officials - were in attendance to protest the ongoing efforts by our fascist President, Barack Obama, and his evil minions at the Department of Interior (DOI) to destroy the oil and gas industry in the Gulf of Mexico.

I felt fortunate to be there.  It was a wonderful, compelling and emotional event.  Too bad no one at the White House or at DOI was listening.

The imposition by Dear Leader Obama of a six month moratorium on drilling in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico on the pretense of allowing DOI to review safety processes in that arena in the wake of the BP disaster seems innocuous enough to the average man on the street who doesn't understand how the oil and gas industry works.  But to anyone who does have an understanding of the industry, and who has been paying attention to the collateral actions the Obama Regime has taken in the context of this moratorium, it is a de facto permanent shutdown of the enormously productive and historically safe deep water region, and a massive scaling back of oil and gas exploration activities in the shallower waters along the Outer Continental Shelf.

Here's why:  the daily rig rate – the rate just to reserve the rig for usage by a given operator – of these deep water drilling rigs and ships can run to $150,000 per day and even more.  Anyone who thinks the owners of these rigs are going to allow them to sit idle for 180 days and longer is living in a fantasy world.  Two such rigs have already been removed, one to Egypt and the other to the Congo.  The operator who is moving its rig to the Congo announced the decision was made to move the rig to a nation that had a more stable political climate than the United States of America.

Think about that for a second:  It is the judgment of the executives of that company, in making a decision that runs into the tens of millions of dollars, that the Congo has a more stable political climate than the USA.  Is that the kind of "hope" and "change" those of you who voted for Mr. Obama had in mind?

Once these rigs leave, they are not coming back for a long, long time, if ever.  They will be locked up into multi-year deals by other operators in other parts of the world – that is the reality.  The President and his minions fully understand this, and they do not care.  They are focused on placating the radical anti-development groups that fund their political campaigns to the exclusion of all other considerations.

A memo written by Interior Secretary Salazar and leaked to the media last week clearly showed that the Administration understands the true impacts of this action, and that, as Salazar stated, issues like loss of jobs and devastation of the Gulf Coast economy do not matter to this bunch of thugs.  They do not matter.  The memo further demonstrates the Administration's intent to prolong this moratorium long past their stated six month time frame, and to slow-play issuing any new permits in the shallow water as well.

To understand the impact of all of this to South Louisiana, all one needs to know is that roughly 80% of all operations in the deep water of the Gulf of Mexico are staged out of Port Fourchon at the very southern tip of the State.  A large portion of shallow water operations are also staged out of this port.  The men and women who work at that port and on those rigs are by and large Louisiana citizens, although a high number of Texas and Mississippi jobs are at stake as well.  In all, tens of thousands of direct, well-paying, secure jobs are threatened by the callous indifference of the Obama Regime.

Then you have all the indirect jobs created by all of this economic activity:  the cafes, hotels, motels, clothing stores, filling stations, movie theatres, fitness shops, furniture stores and every other kind of small business you can imagine that depend enormously on the health of two industries impacted by recent events:  the fishing industry that has been decimated by the BP disaster, and the Gulf of Mexico oil and gas industry that the Obama Regime is attempting to destroy.

We should all be concerned about the tragic effect the BP disaster has had on the Gulf Coast region.  But you won't bring back the Louisiana fishing industry by destroying the Gulf of Mexico oil and gas industry, and the thousands upon thousands of jobs that are dependent on it.

In a sane society, the people responsible for this moratorium would be brought up on criminal charges.  But in the liberal zoo, they just go on about destroying people's lives with impunity.

Three Positives From the BP Disaster

1)  In the last 20 years, the only thing our public school children have learned about the oil and gas industry has been the Exxon Valdez disaster.  From this point forward, the only thing future school children will learn about the oil and gas industry will be this BP disaster.  So Exxon will be able to feel better about its contribution - or lack thereof - to our system of education.

2)  If "climate" legislation wasn't already dead as a doornail before this happened, it certainly is now.  A big part of the compromise surrounding the Kerry/Graham/Lieberman (KGL) bill currently under senate consideration was the Obama Administration's recent announcement that its 5 year plan for the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf would include opening up new areas for exploration for oil and gas.  That has been key to getting the votes of Democrats like Mary Landrieu, Blanche Lincoln, Mark Pryor, Jeff Bingaman and a few others.  The BP disaster will destroy that compromise.  Good riddance.

3)  Over the last few days, we have been treated to the spectacle of our first openly fascist President, Barack Obama, and other high officials in his administration defending exploration for oil and gas in the offshore United States.  The only reason they are doing that is because they are desperate to hold together the votes to pass the KGL bill.  Had they not included expanded offshore access in their 5 year plan, they would without any question whatsoever have spent the last 10 days excoriating Republicans for their support of offshore drilling.  It has been hilarious to watch the rank hypocrisy in action.

If y'all can think of other positives from this horrible tragedy, let me know, because I'm keeping a list.

In all seriousness, our hearts should all go out to the people of Louisiana and elsewhere along the Gulf Coast whose environment and livelihoods will likely be impacted - and in some instances, devastated - by this broadening disaster.  It is now obvious that the oil from this spill will become an ecological and economic disaster along the Southern coast of Louisiana.  It is already moving into sensitive coastal wetland areas that were devastated just five years ago by Hurricane Katrina, and will almost certainly have severe impacts on the Louisiana fishing, shrimping and oyster bed industries that constitute such a vital part of the Louisiana economy.  It seems likely that the currents in the Gulf of Mexico will ultimately carry this oil to the shores of other states, ultimately even being carried around the Florida peninsula and impacting that state's Eastern shore.

All sorts of theories are beginning to float around about what might have caused the initial explosion that triggered this disaster, most of them centering around the failure of the blowout preventer to trigger and shut down the flow of oil through the well bore.  I have heard some of my colleagues talk about what "bad luck" BP has had in recent years, with several major disasters taking place at their U.S. facilities.  The truth is that such accidents at large facilities of this sort are almost always due to some form of human error - they are almost never the result of a "bad luck" mechanical failure. 

The reality is that BP has established an unfortunate safety record at its U.S. facilities in the last 5 years - both the explosion at its Texas City Refinery and its pipeline leak on the North Slope of Alaska were clear results of its personnel failing to follow safety procedures.  BP and the federal government will perform their investigations and ultimately identify a cause, and we can expect that cause to have very little to do with "bad luck", and much to do with human error.  Blowout preventers with triple-redundant triggering systems just don't fail on their own.

The sad part of this is that the oil and gas industry as a whole has over the last 20 years established an extraordinary record for safety in the Gulf of Mexico.  The federal government defines a "significant" oil spill as any spill over 1,000 barrels.  Not even the devastation wrought to oil and gas platforms in the Gulf by hurricanes Katrina and Rita triggered a single such spill.

That record will now be totally discounted in the U.S. liberal news media by this single incident, and the  nation will become far more dependent on foreign oil as a result.

That's very sad, but it's also an unavoidable outcome of this terrible tragedy.

We are also seeing questions beginning to arise, even in the Obama lapdog media, about the slowness of the federal government's response to this event, with some even beginning to speculate that this could become "Obama's Katrina".  Only time will tell if that ultimately becomes the case, but we must all realize that only the lapdog news media can make that happen, and given that they have richly earned their "lapdog" moniker in relation to this President, such an outcome seems very unlikely to ultimately take place.

After all, life in the liberal zoo bases its entire existence on a compliant and cooperative lapdog media.