Senate anti energy bill threaten jobs and growth

Jack Gerard:

The Senate bill unveiled today by Majority Leader Harry Reid moves forward with provisions that will cost American jobs, slow economic growth and will place our energy security at risk.

While full details of the Senate bill are not yet available, the liability provision sticks out as a jobs killer. Requiring an unattainable level of insurance coverage for domestic energy producers on the Outer Continental Shelf will force the vast majority of American companies out of U.S. waters, according to insurers.

This would cut domestic production, kill American jobs, slow economic growth and cost billions in federal oil and natural gas revenues.

Even those that could self insure operations would see costs skyrocket, driving investments out of the United States, further hurting our economy, employment and energy security, according to a recent analysis by Wood Mackenzie.

While we are glad that the bill recognizes the need to analyze the economic repercussions of the current deepwater moratorium, a better tack would have been to repeal it.

Majority Leader Reid suggests his bill will create 150,000 new jobs, but our analysis indicates that failing to develop in the deepwater of the Gulf of Mexico will cost more than that - 175,000 jobs, the majority of them in already hard-hit Gulf Coast communities.

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This gets to the dirty little secret the Democrats always omit on the magic energy jobs. They fully intend to kill jobs in the oil and gas business the way they are killing them now with a drilling moratorium and a proposal for insurance beyond the reach of most independent drillers. The Democrats hatred of the most efficient energy reflects their frustration at trying to push a "magic energy" agenda the voters do not want.