President Barack Obama has been given a chance to avert a secondand possibly larger — disaster in the Gulf of Mexico that he ought to take.
Tuesday, a federal judge rightly rejected the ill-advised moratorium the Obama administration placed on deep-water drilling projects that imperils tens of thousands of jobs in the region. Drilling interests, with the support of the state of Louisiana, had sought the injunction.
Regrettably, the White House has said it will immediately appeal.
Why is the president so bent on sending those jobs elsewhere?
In the time since the moratorium went into effect on May 28, many experts have come forward to decry the measure as a foolish game of politics that actually increases the danger of another leak — or leaks — even as it clearly endangers an already battered economy.
In fact, eight members of a 15-member advisory board that Interior Secretary Ken Salazar consulted in drafting new safety measures after the collapse of the Deepwater Horizon roundly rejected the idea of a blanket moratorium for 33 deepwater rigs.
Those experts say there is always a risk in shutting down and re-entering deepwater wells, according to The Post’s David Olinger and Mark Jaffe. The experts warn that the moratorium also risks sending reliable operators to other waters and that once they pull up stakes and leave, it can be years before they return — if they ever return.
Meanwhile, some 38,000 jobs are related to drilling projects in the Gulf.
Moratorium advocates join the president in arguing that it only makes sense to determine what went wrong at the Deepwater Horizon to make sure that other wells don’t fall prey to a similar weakness. But in a meeting with The Denver Post’s editorial board last week, Salazar said that BP’s disaster appeared to be an isolated event caused by a string of preventable mistakes.
Tuesday, New Orleans Federal Judge Martin Feldman used that same logic to argue that a “generic” moratorium was “punitive” rather than based on science.
Feldman wrote that “the blanket moratorium, with no parameters, seems to assume that because one rig failed and although no one yet fully knows why, all companies and rigs drilling new wells over 500 feet also universally present an imminent danger.”
Salazar told us he wished to take a reasonable middle road. Faced with critics calling for a full stop of drilling and with others calling for no new government regulation, Salazar said he wished to “hit the pause button.”
He also indicated that some aspects of the moratorium might be adjusted that could be less onerous.
Now that Feldman has called the administration on its lack of evidence to support the need for a moratorium, we suggest revisiting “the pause button.”
Obama’s plan looks more like a stop button.
