Even though he knew a drilling moratorium would kill at least 23,000 jobs, Obama went ahead with it anyway.
The Wall Street Journal reported:
Senior Obama administration officials concluded the federal moratorium on deepwater oil drilling would cost roughly 23,000 jobs, but went ahead with the ban because they didn’t trust the industry’s safety equipment and the government’s own inspection process, according to previously undisclosed documents.
Critics of the moratorium, including Gulf Coast political figures and oil-industry leaders, have said it is crippling the region’s economy, and some have called on the administration to make public its economic analysis. A federal judge who in June threw out an earlier six-month moratorium faulted the administration for playing down the economic effects.
After his action, administration officials considered alternatives and weighed the economic costs, the newly released documents show. The Justice Department filed them in a New Orleans court this week, in response to the latest round of litigation over the moratorium.
Spanning more than 27,000 pages, they provide an unusually detailed look at the debate about how to respond to legal and political opposition to the moratorium.
They show the new top regulator or offshore oil exploration, Michael Bromwich, told Interior Secretary Ken Salazar that a six-month deepwater-drilling halt would result in “lost direct employment” affecting approximately 9,450 workers and “lost jobs from indirect and induced effects” affecting about 13,797 more. The July 10 memo cited an analysis by Mr. Bromwich’s agency that assumed direct employment on affected rigs would “resume normally once the rigs resume operations.”
What about the rigs that pack up and leave? How can employment resume when the rigs are gone?
Someone needs to tell Cuba about this moratorium, since they’re planning to drill just miles from Key West.
And it’s still in effect…it’s more or less gotten to the point where one can no longer attribute his actions to inteptitude or ‘rookie mistake’ and instead cite malice towards those that are not like him (i.e. hard-working red-staters)…
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[...] to feign support for the moratorium. The White House admitted that they knew the moratorium would kill thousands of jobs. People like Thomas Clements have had their businesses wiped out. A judge found the [...]
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