US: A Ban On Truth

US: A Ban On Truth – Investors.com

Secretary Salazar: Trying to pull a blanket moratorium over experts' eyes?

The advisory board on offshore drilling says it never endorsed a moratorium, which was added later by the interior secretary. The only thing transparent about this administration is its lies.

Experts brought together by the Obama administration to review offshore drilling safety were asked to review recommendations in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. They did not give their blessing to the six-month drilling moratorium announced by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and have accused him of deliberately appending their report to make it seem like they did.

According to the New Orleans Times Picayune, Salazar’s May 27 report to the president said the seven experts “peer reviewed” his recommendations, including a six-month ban on drilling in waters deeper than 500 feet. The experts say the report they reviewed suggested stopping only new drilling in waters deeper than 1,000 feet.

The reviewers for Salazar’s report were provided by the National Academy of Engineering. Their joint letter says that while they agreed with the report’s various safety recommendations, “we do not agree with the six-month blanket moratorium on floating drilling. A moratorium was added after the final review and was never agreed to by the contributors.”

One panelist, Bob Bea of the University of California, Berkeley, said in an e-mail: “Moratorium was not a part of the … report we consulted-advised-reviewed.” The academy’s Ken Arnold was less subtle, saying: “The secretary should be free to recommend whatever he thinks is correct, but he should not be free to use our names to justify his political decisions.”

The panelists simply oppose the announced moratorium. “A blanket moratorium is not the answer,” the letter says. “It will not measurably reduce risk further, and it will have a lasting impact on the nation’s economy, which may be greater than that of the oil spill. We do not believe punishing the innocent is the right thing to do.”

Neither do we, and frankly we’re tired of the deliberate manipulation of facts and truth in the name of protecting the environment, whether it’s the U.N. con artists at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the charlatans at Britain’s Climate Research Unit who tried to “hide the decline” in global temperatures or our own political hacks at Interior.

We’re as concerned as anybody about oil-soaked pelicans, just as we’re concerned about the birds, including endangered species, who are daily hacked to oblivion by twirling wind turbines. And while tourism is a concern, so too are the tens of thousands of jobs in the oil and supporting industries that will be lost due to this ill-conceived moratorium. Homo sapiens is a species too.

“The last thing we need is to enact public policies that will certainly destroy thousands of existing jobs while preventing the creation of thousands more,” Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal has told Obama. The moratorium will shut down 33 deep-water rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, including 22 near Louisiana, costing as many as 6,000 jobs in the next three weeks and 20,000 by the end of next year.

America can’t afford not to drill, adds Texas Gov. Rick Perry, noting the oil industry accounts for 7.2% of GDP and 9.2 million American jobs and that if we don’t drill in the Gulf of Mexico, others will.

“U.S. investor-owned oil companies hold only 6% of the world’s petroleum reserves, while state-owned national oil companies in Venezuela, Iran, China, Nigeria, India, Russia and Saudi Arabia and other countries control 80% of the reserves,” Perry says. “Coincidentally, even some of these countries are drilling for oil in Cuban waters just 50 miles from Florida.”

We need the oil, the energy and the jobs. We also need the truth. Apparently Secretary Salazar and this administration can’t handle the truth, so they make it up as they go along.