Bush Acts on Drilling,
Challenging Democrats

STEVEN LEE MYERS and CARL HULSE / New York Times 15jun2008

WASHINGTON — President Bush lifted nearly two decades of executive orders banning drilling for oil and natural gas off the country’s shoreline on Monday while challenging Congress to open up more areas for exploration to address soaring energy prices.

Democrats in Congress, joined by environmentalists, criticized the step and ridiculed it as ineffectual, while most Republicans and industry representatives applauded it as long overdue.

The lifting of the moratorium — first announced by Mr. Bush’s father, President George Bush, in 1990 and extended by President Bill Clinton — will have no real impact because a Congressional moratorium on drilling enacted in 1981 and renewed annually remains in force. And there appeared to be no consensus for lifting it in tandem with Mr. Bush’s action.

Rather than signaling a change in the country’s policy, the president’s decision appeared only to harden well-established positions, intensifying an already contentious issue in the middle of an election year.

“For years, my administration has been calling on Congress to expand domestic oil production,” Mr. Bush said in a brief Rose Garden appearance in which he sought to saddle his party’s opponents with responsibility for gasoline prices exceeding $4 per gallon. “Unfortunately, Democrats on Capitol Hill have rejected virtually every proposal, and now Americans are paying at the pump.”

Mr. Bush’s critics reacted furiously, restating support for alternative legislative proposals, including releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Representative Rahm Emanuel, Democrat of Illinois, denounced the president’s decision as “a political stunt.”

Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the speaker of the House, derided “the oilman in the White House” and said the plan would not address the immediate spike in energy prices.

“The Bush plan is a hoax,” Ms. Pelosi said in a statement. “It will neither reduce gas prices nor increase energy independence.”

The two presidential campaigns mirror the sharp differences. Senator John McCain of Arizona, the likely Republican nominee, had previously expressed support for opening the continental shelf for exploration and production. The campaign of Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, the presumptive Democratic nominee, responded that Americans needed to concentrate on conservation and alternative sources of energy, not simply opening new oil fields.

“If offshore drilling would provide short-term relief at the pump or a long-term strategy for energy independence, it would be worthy of our consideration, regardless of the risks,” the Obama campaign’s spokesman, Bill Burton, said in a statement. “But most experts, even within the Bush administration, concede it would do neither. It would merely prolong the failed energy policies we have seen from Washington for 30 years.”

Since 1982, the ban on offshore oil and gas leases on the outer continental shelf — vast areas 3 to 200 miles offshore — has been renewed by Republican and Democratic presidents and Democratic and Republican Congresses.

But the price of oil has quickly changed the political contours of the debate. When Mr. Bush first called on Congress to join him in lifting the ban last month, oil was trading at $130 a barrel; on Monday, it reached $145.

Senator George V. Voinovich, Republican of Ohio, said that if the United States had opened the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling a decade ago as part of a comprehensive energy plan, “we wouldn’t be in this predicament today.”  [Mindfully.org note: This is just as ignorant as Bush's comments]

“But now the chickens have come home to roost,” he said. “We can afford to wait no longer.”

Democrats accused the White House of exploiting the issue for political purposes and said the administration could take steps to accelerate exploration of tracts already available to oil companies if it was serious about increasing domestic production.

Still, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, faces an increasing uneasiness among his colleagues, who have signaled receptiveness to allowing more drilling.

A bipartisan group of senators is trying to develop a compromise energy plan, and the leaders of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee have scheduled a workshop for Thursday where lawmakers and other experts will offer ideas on how to respond to the climb in oil prices.

The White House, for its part, signaled little interest in other measures that would stop short of expanding offshore drilling and supporting production in Alaska and new technologies to extract oil from shale. Opening the outer continental shelf, Mr. Bush said, could eventually produce nearly 10 years’ worth of the amount of oil the United States now produces.

“With this action, the executive branch’s restrictions on this exploration have been cleared away,” he said Monday. “This means that the only thing standing between the American people and these vast oil resources is action from the U.S. Congress.”

Mr. Bush’s decision was welcomed by industry representatives. Brian J. Kennedy of the Institute for Energy Research in Washington, which favors opening the shelf, said lifting the presidential ban would focus attention on the need for Congress to act, easing the speculative pressure driving up the cost of oil.

“This would send a very strong signal to the global market that the United States is finally getting serious about producing its own energy resources,” he said.

William L. Kovacs, vice president for environment, technology and regulatory affairs at the United States Chamber of Commerce, said the ban on drilling on the outer shelf reflected an environmental concern that was now outdated.

“The drilling, plus the technology, is much safer than it was 15 years ago,” he said.

But Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, said the president was “deluding the American public into believing that new offshore drilling is a quick fix to $4 per gallon gasoline.” Like others, she noted that drilling offshore would have no immediate effect.

“Even if new offshore drilling were allowed off the coast of California and along the outer continental shelf, which I wholly and resolutely oppose,” she said, “it won’t produce oil in time to solve the gas price emergency American consumers are facing right now.”

source: 14jul2008