Bush looks to offshore Alaska for energy production

NY Times:

President Bush is considering whether to lift the 17-year-old moratorium on energy drilling in the waters off southwestern Alaska, a White House spokeswoman said Sunday, which would allow oil and gas companies to try to tap into more than five trillion cubic feet of natural gas that lies beneath rich fishing grounds.

The push to market oil and gas leases in these waters, which oil and gas companies favor, is part of a larger national effort to expand domestic supplies of fossil fuel by opening up areas of the outer continental shelf, long off-limits to energy development.

Last summer the Interior Department recommended reopening several areas of the outer continental shelf, including the southern part of Bristol Bay, which lies just north of where the Aleutian Islands meet the Alaskan mainland, to energy exploration. The report said that 14 oil and gas companies had supported the idea. The department has estimated that such a move could create up to 11,500 jobs, part of what it describes as “net benefits” of $7.7 billion.

In a letter to President Bush on Friday, a coalition of environmental groups, including the Wilderness Society, the Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Counsel, citing the impact of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, called the bay “an economically critical salmon fishery,” adding that “it provides essential habitat for the endangered northern right whale.”

The executive director of Greenpeace, John Passacantando, said Sunday that the Bering Sea was “the most intact marine ecosystem in United States waters” and that Bristol Bay was “among the most important parts of the Bering Sea.”

Asked about the potential impact of an outer continental shelf leasing program confined to the southern waters of the bay, Mr. Passacantando said: “The energy industry ultimately gives you things that look like the Exxon Valdez. It was because of the threat of this kind of spill that that leases were initially rescinded.”

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This is an absurd argument. There have been no major spills of oil in off shore platforms off the coast of Texas and Louisiana where there are hundreds of rigs and where hurricanes are a threat every summer. If they are mainly drilling for natural gas the the argument goes beyond absurd. It would provide Alaska with a low cost fuel to warm its poor areas instead of taking subsidized heating oil from an enemy like Hugo Chavez.

The environmental wackos, as usual, want to starve energy availability making the US more dependent on on countries that do not support the US. This is just one example of how the watermelon activist (green on the outside and red on the inside) want to starve energy production. They also oppose nuclear plants and wind farms and drilling the the Gulf of Mexico.

They don't like coal production or coal generated electricity. They are control freaks who want to use energy starvation as a means of controlling business and government. They wrap their control freak agenda in environmental goo-goo to fool people and they are very successful at it.