What you don’t know can really hurt you (and the environment), especially when it comes to the so-called moratorium on new offshore oil drilling permits declared by the Obama administration after the Deepwater Horizon explosion.
It’s not exactly a moratorium as it turns out. This “bold” move by the government is just one more lie.
The government has, in fact, continued to issue new permits and shockingly given the same kind of “environmental waivers” that were given to BP for its Deepwater Horizon oil rig.
The New York Times revealed on May 23 that at least 7 permits and 5 environmental waivers have been issued since the May 7, 2010 “moratorium”—and at least 17 permits and 19 environmental waivers since the April 20 explosion caused the flooding of millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.
The government wants to make the people think they are actually trying to stand up to Big Oil, but it is really just smoke and mirrors.
Over the past several years, Democrats and Republicans alike have cleared the path for Big Oil to carry out ultra-hazardous deepwater offshore drilling.
In 1981, Congress passed a ban on offshore oil drilling along the east and west coasts of the United States and the eastern Gulf of Mexico. In 1990, George Bush Sr. issued an executive order banning offshore drilling in the Outer Continental Shelf. In 2008, George W. Bush lifted the executive order issued by his father, and two months later Congress decided not to extend the ban, thus clearing the way for drilling that had been off limits for 27 years.
Then, in March of this year, President Obama proposed the first new offshore drilling in the Atlantic Ocean in two decades. On April 2, 2010, just 18 days before the oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, President Obama defended his (and George W. Bush’s) oil policy by declaring “oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills. They are technologically very advanced.”
