Obama’s Atlantic Drilling Plan Infuriates Environmentalists

By Melanie Batley
Newsmax

The Obama administration has moved to begin extensive oil and gas drilling along the East Coast, with potentially profound economic and environmental implications, The New York Times reported.

The Interior Department announced the final part of its five year plan which would give the government the power to sell leases for oil and gas development in federal waters from 2017-2022.

Specifically, one lease sale area would be off the southeast stretch of the Atlantic Seaboard and it would also give access to new areas of the Gulf of Mexico. At the same time, however, drilling will be banned in parts of Alaska, in the Arctic Ocean’s Beaufort and Chukchi Seas.

“This is a balanced proposal that would make available nearly 80 percent of the undiscovered technically recoverable resources, while protecting areas that are simply too special to develop,” Interior Secretary Sally Jewell said in a statement, according to the Times.

Environmentalists are outraged. They say that opening the Atlantic waters could present an environmental disaster for the coastal areas of Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia.

There are also concerns that the move could harm tourism, fishing, and other coastal industries at the heart of the Southeastern economy, the Times said.

“Risky drilling off our Southern coasts jeopardizes the communities, jobs and beloved beaches that are the very heart of our coastal states,” Sierra Weaver, a senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center, told the Times.

“Our coastal economies are the backbone of hundreds of towns and cities along the Southern coast, providing thousands of jobs, multibillion-dollar tourism industries, multimillion-dollar fishing industries, and critical local tax revenues.”

Lawmakers, however, have been pushing for the opening of their waters for years, and see the benefit of possibly billions of dollars in new revenue from taxes on oil companies which could boost state budgets.

The plans will also have implications for the president’s environmental legacy as he tries to strike a difficult balancing act between his energy initiatives and his environmental agenda.

“He giveth, and he taketh away,” Kevin Book, an analyst at Clearview Energy Partners, a Washington analysis firm, said of the president’s strategy, according to the Times.

“The pairing of environmental policy with energy policy is something that, conceptually, this administration has done since the first term. Sometimes it looks like a balancing act, sometimes it’s serendipitous.”

President Barack Obama is also trying to push through a comprehensive climate change initiative using his executive authority to enforce new regulations on emissions from coal-fired power plants.

If enacted, states could be forced to shutter hundreds of coal plants to transition to clean and renewable energy, the Times reported.

The simultaneous initiatives have found Republicans applauding the president for the oil drilling plans while fiercely criticizing the expected climate change edicts, the Times said.