Drilling Moratorium Lifted By Upper Court – Good News!

This is great news! Jindal and others were worried that this moratorium would make some companies move elsewhere, thus making this 6-month job killer extend even further.

Sunday by Jindal and state Atty. Gen. James D. “Buddy” Caldwell asserts that the moratorium could convince big oil companies to move their rigs out of the Gulf of Mexico to Brazil or Africa, with “little chance of their immediate return.”

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So here is the story about the moratorium being lifted. Again, great news for our economy.

The Obama administration lost its court bid to maintain a six-month moratorium on offshore deepwater drilling which a federal judge ordered lifted last month.

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals denied the government’s emergency request to stay that judge’s order pending appeal.

The motion was denied because the government failed to show “a likelihood of irreparable injury if the stay is not granted,” the appeals panel judges wrote in a 2-1 ruling.

[…]

President Barack Obama acknowledged the moratorium would cause economic harm, but said it was necessary to give investigators adequate time to understand what caused the accident and create new safety regulations.

Oil companies and Louisiana politicians railed against the moratorium, saying it would cause further economic devastation and that rigs and drilling plans should simply be inspected on a case-by-case basis.

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal hailed the court’s decision Thursday but expressed concern that the uncertainty has created a “de facto moratorium” which could cost the state 20,000 jobs.

“We absolutely want drilling to be done safely and do not want another spill or one more drop of oil on our coast or in our water, but thousands of Louisianians should not have to lose their jobs because the federal government can’t adequately do its job of ensuring drilling is done safely,” Jindal said in a statement.

“The federal government has an entire agency dedicated to monitoring safe drilling. It shouldn’t take them six months or longer for a new national commission to ensure safety measures are in place and their laws and regulations are being followed.”

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Verum Serum Points To Obama’s Own “Wag the Dog”

…Of course it’s obvious why BP would want to minimize the problem. They are on the hook financially for the clean-up and their reputation as a “green energy” company is taking a severe hit. But recall that the President claims to have his boot on BP’s neck. The only comparable motivation for the Obama administration is politics.

Granted politics are always an issue where Presidents are involved, especially with the midterms approaching. But in this case there seems to be ample reason to conclude that politics is wagging the dog on the Gulf spill. When Katrina hit, the media went overboard with stories of everything up to murder (and just short of cannibalism) in flooded New Orleans. This time around, the media–with the exception of Rolling Stone, Mother Jones and now PBS–are being far too reticent to investigate the government’s response.

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Democrats Do Not Think About Their Actions and Consequences, What Thomas Sowell Calls “2nd Tier Thinking”

All three network news shows on Tuesday skipped a report that eight of 15 experts consulted by the Obama administration opposed the government’s plan to halt deepwater oil drilling for six months. Only Special Report With Bret Baier covered the story….

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Controlling Big Government AND Big Business – Rich Lowry (realclearpolitics.com)

Limiting Government–And Big Business
By Rich Lowry

The Brits are upset that Pres. Barack Obama has been referring to disgraced oil giant BP as “British Petroleum,” a name it shed long ago.

But what else should Obama call an enormous Britain-based petroleum company? To ask such an innocent question betrays ignorance of the ways of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research. The marketing gurus at the firm – led by über Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg – helped conceive and execute one of the most perverse rebrandings of all time for BP.

British? So yesterday. Petroleum? Not very green. A logo of a shield emblazoned with “BP”? Disturbingly martial. In 2000, newly christened BP ditched all these negative associations by adopting the slogan “Beyond Petroleum” and emblazoning itself with a sunflower-like logo that could be mistaken for the symbol of the Green party of Canada.

It worked so brilliantly, a Joe McGinniss of marketing should write a blow-by-blow account – The Selling of BP. Greenberg Quinlan Rosner bragged that its work for BP “included extensive testing of advertising and evaluating the global response toward pioneering positions on the environment, climate change, and energy efficiency.” The case study outlining this extraordinary marketing success has since been removed from the firm’s website. (Greenberg et al. are image-conscious people, after all.)

BP knew how to play the game. It repeated all the environmentally correct platitudes that tickle the fancy of “NGO leaders, journalists, political elites,” in the words of the case study. It supported the fashionable reform of the day, cap-and-trade, knowing that the system would favor the big and connected, like itself. And it showered campaign contributions on the candidate of Hope and Change (its employees gave Obama about twice as much in donations as they did John McCain in 2008).

BP couldn’t have been notionally greener if Al Gore were its CEO. The group chief executive of BP, Lord John Browne, warned of the dangers of hydrocarbons, a little like the city fathers of Newcastle in the 19th century inveighing against coal. In a speech at Stanford in 2007, Browne advocated an “international climate agency” that would entail “a move beyond the limitations of national sovereignty.”

This green one-worldism was awfully rich coming from an executive of an oil company that couldn’t even drill responsibly. Despite all the hokum, BP spent vastly more resources on fossil fuels than green energy. In so doing, it compiled an atrocious safety record that made the poor decision-making that led to the blowout in the Gulf unsurprising to industry insiders.

And now tens of thousands of barrels of petroleum a day are fouling the Gulf, courtesy of the corporation that spent so much convincing people it was “beyond” it.

Rep. Joe Barton’s quickly retracted apology to BP for the administration’s strong-arm tactics was horribly misconceived. Fundamentally, we don’t want a free market and a system of laws to protect corporations, but to protect us from both government and corporations, especially when the two are in league with each other. Corporations like BP tend to be craven, unprincipled, and willing to use government for their own ends – all qualities evident in BP’s spectacular green-marketing campaign.

The bigger and more complex government is, the more incentive corporations have to politicize themselves and get in bed with Washington. If they have resources to do it (not everyone can afford Stan Greenberg), they’ll protect themselves from the worst while disadvantaging their competitors. This accounts for the corporatist paradox of the Obama administration. The president is so arbitrarily anti-business that The Economist dubs him “Vladimir Obama,” yet the same industries he demonizes support key elements of his “reform” agenda.

White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel argues that Barton’s apology to BP is the sum total of Republican thought on the economy, and that the fall election is a choice between Obama-style hyperactive government or the depredations of the execrable BP. To which the only rational answer can be, “None of the above.”

Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review.

Skimmer Watch (Obama’s Katrina)

Gateway Pundit… Crazy News:

…Last week Barack Obama told Politico that the BP oil spill was like 9-11But, it’s been over 60 days since the Deepwater Horizon rig explosion and he’s only sent 20 of 2,000 US oil skimmer boats to the coast of Florida.

Senator George LeMieux of Florida told the Shark Tank that there are only 20 skimmer boats off the coast of Florida out of 2,000 available skimmer boats in the United States. Lemieux says that Obama is afraid to move them to Florida because there won’t be any in place in case there is an oil leak somewhere else….

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“BP is Going to Help Us Save the World” ~ Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu

Pretty soon we will all be dressing like the Buck Rogers TV show:

Oh my! These guys are killing me… with laughter! This is a rockin’ article by BIG GOVERNMENT – Thanks:

While the White House really, really wants you believe that they have their boot on the neck of BP, it turns out that a key Administration official had his head inserted somewhere else just three short years ago. Do you think NOBEL LAUREATE (and Secretary of Energy) Steven Chu still thinks BP is going to help save the world?

 

This is one of the ironies of the disaster in the Gulf. From all available evidence, BP is as committed as anyone to the “comprehensive energy reform” agenda of the White House. No doubt this reflects both political realism and market opportunism on their part, but BP’s 2009 “Road Map for America’s Energy Future” could have been written by John Kerry. Higher energy prices, cap and trade? Bring it on, says BP.

And this isn’t a recent shift on BP’s part. Here’s embattled BP Chairman Tony Hayward back in June 2007:

From BP’s perspective, the evidence that climate change is happening, and that it is manmade, is mounting all the time. As the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has found, the evidence is almost overwhelming. We could wait until the science is 100% certain, but BP believes that, as an energy company, it has a duty to act pre-emptively. When you balance the likely impacts of not taking action against the real opportunities that exist to take action, it is difficult to believe that humanity will not move towards a solution to climate change…

We need to ensure that the costs of emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are included in the price we pay for everything – whether it be a television, a train journey, or switching on a light – all should reflect the cost of emissions in their price.

This can be achieved through a Cap and Trade system, taxation, or regulation.

So it makes perfect sense that back in 2007 Steven Chu and UC Berkeley would be more than happy to accept a $500 million investment from BP to form the Energy BioSciences Institute. The relationship between Chu and BP was so cozy in fact that Chu subsequently brought on BP’s Chief Scientist Steve Koonin as an undersecretary at the Department of Energy.

My guess is that this history – and these relationships – played a part in the Administration’s initial confusion over whether BP was a “partner” in the effort to resolve the Gulf spill. Because for many within the Administration BP had been one of the good guys.

This also explains why BP has been so willing to prostrate themselves in front of their Democratic overlords in Congress and the White House. Here they thought they were trusted partners in saving the world from impending climate disaster. It turns out that their allies in the Obama Administration might soon be the only thing saving BP from the anger of a raging public…and insolvency.

Steven Chu! Saving the Cosmos One Planet At a Time

“It’s A Tough Job,  But Someone Has To Do It”