Obama Suspends Coastal Drilling Plan

msnbc.com

The Obama administration on Tuesday overturned another Bush-era energy policy, setting aside a draft plan to allow drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.

"To establish an orderly process that allows us to make wise decisions based on sound information, we need to set aside" the plan "and create our own timeline," Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced in a statement.

....

"In the biggest area that the Bush administration's draft OCS plan proposes for oil and gas drilling - the Atlantic seaboard, from Maine to Florida - our data on available resources is very thin, and what little we have is twenty to thirty years old," he said. "We shouldn't make decisions to sell off taxpayer resources based on old information."

What a joke. Surely he knows that the best way to update the data is to go find out. And surely he knows that finding out means drilling. This is nothing more than a sop to the environmental lobby. But we all figured that one out.

As a practical matter, I don't believe that the oil companies were going to do a whole lot of investing in drilling, but the Obama administration is taking a huge risk that $3 and $4 a gallon gas is never coming back, that the Atlantic seaboard states won't be eying that needed drilling revenue, and that Americans won't be needing those energy jobs. Well that last part is true now, but hey, why help unemployed Americans when you can pay back your Sierra club buddies?

All in all I totally support Obama dissipating his political capital on issues that are bound to be deeply opposed the people at large. Go for it and let's vote in a pro-energy congress in 2010.