Rigged For Failure

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Investors Business Daily:

Energy: A year ago, three oil rigs fled the Gulf of Mexico for better opportunities abroad. Now, it's 10. Make no mistake, the toll is rising on a business environment marked by the Obama administration's uncertainty.

It's a sorry spectacle when rigs, the mighty instruments for extracting oil and gas from miles under the sea floor, are quietly pulling away from U.S. coasts for better business environments oceans away — namely the Republic of Congo, Nigeria, Egypt and Brazil.

"When you have companies that would be spending hundreds of millions of dollars, or in some cases billions of dollars, they need certainty," Louisiana Oil & Gas Association President Don Briggs told BigGovernment.com. "We don't have that now, and I don't expect we will anytime soon."

The massive planning, capital, project management and luck required to produce energy are uncertain enough.

The climate of government caprice makes it even worse.

The 2010 BP oil spill proved Obama's anti-energy production talk was more than rhetoric — it was policy.

It started to create uncertainty when the president arbitrarily demanded $20 bil from BP to set up a cleanup fund for its spill in April last year. After it paid, however, what lingered was the image of a president who could extract what he wanted from any unpopular company.

Then the president issued an arbitrary moratorium on offshore drilling, idling rigs and throwing hundreds of thousands of Americans out of work. When a court ordered him to stop, he played three-card monte with the energy industry with an unannounced but real permit moratorium until another judge stopped him.

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Meanwhile, lease sales hit their lowest level since 1958. Now at this late date, the president finally set an auction for Dec. 14. But the Interior Department nearly tripled the minimum bid price for deepwater leases in the Gulf of Mexico from $37.50 an acre to $100 an acre.

Why the big increase? More regulators, of course.