President Obama did not include Houston on his visit to Texas last week rallying his base and raising funds for Democrats for the November elections. The President was originally expected to be here but ended up in Austin and Dallas. Was this bypass a duck-out? After all, Congressman Kevin Brady (R. Tx.) pointedly invited the president to meet face-to-face with Houston energy workers on the other Gulf Crisis—the federal offshore drilling moratorium that threatens tens of thousands of jobs here and in much of the Gulf Coast region.
Sure, Obama’s Texas visit was not about helping Republican candidates or hosting a Tea Party event. But why couldn’t the president reserve an hour to talk to workers whose livelihoods depend on Houston’s largest industry – an industry that is being victimized by the President’s everyone-is-guilty drilling policy?…
Continue ReadingBarring the trickery of a lame duck conference committee, cap-and-trade is dead in the 111th Congress. Some blame President Obama for not taking a more hands-on role. Others blame environmental groups for waging a $100 million lobbying campaign without winning a single GOP convert to the Kerry-Lieberman bill. Others blame the allegedly “well-funded denial machine,” even though proponents, who include major corporations like BP as well as Big Green, must have outspent free-market and conservative advocacy groups by more than 100 to 1.
The August 11 edition of Climatewire (subscription required) featured interviews with Exelon Corp. VP Betsy Moler and Resources for the Future President Phil Sharp, who lament that Republican lawmakers, the “inventors” of “market-based” environmental policy, turned against their own “invention.” Moler and Sharp are trying to spin GOP opposition to cap-and-trade as self-contradictory, hence as unstable, hence as reversible. …
Continue ReadingIn his highly relevant study, Dr. Joseph R. Mason, chair of banking at the Ourso School of Business at Louisiana State University, offers a sophisticated estimate of the economic impacts of a federal moratorium on exploratory offshore oil drilling. The new moratorium, issued by the Obama administration after federal judge Martin Feldman issued an injunction banning the government from enforcing the original moratorium, freezes some 33 current exploratory drilling operations and places a six-month ban on the issuance of exploration permits by the MMS (now the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation, and Enforcement).
Dr. Mason begins by identifying the “phases” of drilling that support local economies. Exploratory drilling and the development of offshore facilities, the extraction process, and the refining of the crude oil are all identified as impacting Gulf of Mexico economies.…
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