Senators Aim to Repeal and Replace Obama’s 5-Year Offshore Drilling Plan

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PJMedia:

Two of the senators who pushed an investigation into a suspected Interior Department cover-up of the White House fudging scientific conclusions to justify the gulf drilling moratorium are now fighting the administration’s plan to stymie exploration and production on the outer continental shelf.

On the same day that the nation’s attention was turned toward the ObamaCare ruling at the Supreme Court, the Obama administration was quietly issuing a five-year energy proposal that would place a virtual moratorium over 85 percent of the nation’s offshore areas.

Gulf Coast Sens. David Vitter (R-La.) and Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) fought back yesterday with a bill to repeal and replace, so to speak, the plan of Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and President Obama.

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“Offshore energy production provides Americans with good-paying private-sector jobs; produces substantial royalties for the federal government and the states; reduces our trade imbalance; and puts an end to the huge wealth transfer from America to competitors oversees,” Sessions said. “We need to take bold action to harness America’s vast energy resources, but the Administration clearly has a different vision.”

Under the administration plan, from 2012-2017 the government would have to hold an annual lease sale in the western Gulf, which has already taken place. Lease sales in the central Gulf would begin in spring 2013, and new tracts in the eastern Gulf wouldn’t open up for lease sales until 2014.

The Vitter-Sessions bill opens more areas of the Gulf for production and includes production in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, as well as in Alaska — declared off-limits in Obama’s plan.

Alaska’s senators wrote Obama yesterday to protest the lack of an overall national energy strategy for the Arctic.

“The United States is the only Arctic nation which lacks such a formal strategy which ties together all the individual agency policies and visions,” wrote Sens. Mark Begich (D) and Lisa Murkowski (R. “Developing an American Arctic strategy is especially timely now, with the hope for offshore oil and gas exploration in Alsaka’s Arctic this summer, the number of cargo ships transiting the Bering Strait are increasing to new record highs and America’s indigenous peoples are justifiably concerned with the impacts of these developments and changing conditions on their subsistence way of life.”

In November, Vitter wrote to Salazar with the concern that the emerging five-year plan, requested by a group of senators last September, was tailored toward reduced energy consumption in America.

“I am concerned what you have proposed falls well short of the clear intent of the law. In fact, your current proposal reduces leasing by orders of magnitude when compared to the program you threw out in 2009,” Vitter wrote.