Gulf oil spill: Offshore drilling firms threaten to go abroad

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, flanked by Bureau of Ocean Energy Management Director Michael Bromwich (c.) and Assistant Interior Secretary Tom Strickland, speaks to reporters at Gulf Island Fabrication in Houma, La., Monday, Nov. 22.


Gulf oil spill: Offshore drilling firms threaten to go abroad
By Patrik Jonsson, Staff writer / November 22, 2010

Atlanta - Gulf Coast offshore drilling companies, hoping for a stronger partnership with the Obama administration to make drilling safer without hobbling major plans, came away disappointed from a meeting Monday with Interior Secretary Ken Salazar.

In fact, companies and rig servicers raised the stakes by saying they're now actively looking to step up bidding for projects outside US waters as losses pile up.

Secretary Salazar met with the Shallow Water Energy Security Coalition on Monday in the oil mecca of Houma, La. The event highlighted the building tensions between the White House and largely Southern-based drillers, even after drilling moratoriums were lifted.

In May, following the Gulf oil spill, the Obama administration stopped all new drilling. It then ended a ban on shallow-water exploratory drilling after two months and lifted a deepwater drilling ban last month. Yet since then, only a nominal number of permits have been approved, causing critics to charge that a de facto moratorium remains in place.

"The Obama administration is sort of caught in the middle here: Do you go for short-term economic benefits concentrated in one area or the longer-term risk of some other environmental disaster?" says Daniel Fiorino, an environmental policy expert at American University in Washington.

We can't continue to allow these un-American assclowns to essentially hold us hostage and force us to choose between the economy and the environment.

I know it's a pipe dream and we're stuck with using oil for now but damn this pisses me off.

And go home?

is going to royally piss off the oil industry by being somewhat-non-pro-offshore-drilling-maybe, while refusing to give the kind of big FUCK YOU that would be red meat for the base. :(

Other countries' governments may have more stringent laws that protect the environment and hold the companies more accountable than we do.

Big Oil assholes.

When an elite controls the means of production they hold us all hostage.

Kill Capitalism

For ya to have fascism ya need a right wing populist political movement coupled with an agreeable Capitalists establishment. Fascism is just one way of doing capitalism.

are pumping are almost dry.

:kick:

...where the good Lord split ya.

If production moves elsewhere, the cost of fuel is pretty much unaffected.

Overall, it is probably wonderful as there is no way the jobs even come close to the cost of the downside.