On May 14, following the worst, and most relentless oil disaster in US history, the Obama administration announced it would impose a 6-month moratorium on new permits for deep water drilling in order to give a presidential commission time to study safety concerns. Its lawyers told US District Judge Martin Feldman that April’s sinking of the Deepwater Horizon rig off the Louisiana coast was a “game changer” that exposed the risks of offshore oil exploration.
    But, for a group of Louisiana offshore oil service and supply companies, such risks were not enough to justify a halt to deepwater drilling. So, Hornbeck Offshore Services Inc., along with more than a dozen other oil services companies, sued US regulators to lift the ban in a New Orleans federal court, arguing that if oil drilling were not allowed to continue, the state of Louisiana would lose thousands of jobs, and that the region would be economically devastated.
    While the moratorium imposes only a temporary pause on deepwater drilling (in waters deeper than 500 feet), Judge Martin Feldman, appointed by Ronald Reagan in 1983, agreed with the plaintiffs, finding that the Obama administration had failed to justify the need for such “a blanket, generic, indeed punitive, moratorium on deep-water oil and gas drilling.”
    The Obama administration immediately requested that the moratorium be allowed to continue while the issue was being litigated. The request was denied within hours after the Justice Department’s request
    In his opinion, Feldman repeated his criticism of the Obama administration’s moratorium, saying that it was “indeed punitive” because it was too broad, arbitrary industry workers and on local communities.
    The administration responded by requesting another stay from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals -- the same court where the initial ruling on the moratorium was appealed.
    Subsequent revelations that Judge Feldman held substantial investments in the oil and gas industries (including stocks in Exxon, Halliburton, KBR and Transocean Ltd., owner of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig), have done little to sway opponents of the ban; nor were they swayed by a statement released in June through Feldman’s own chambers revealing that the judge instructed his broker to sell his Exxon stocks and a subsidiary as soon as the market opened on June 22 -- one day after the hearing.     The UK Guardian and other financial news sources reported this summer that shares in oil services companies including Halliburton, Diamond Offshore, Baker Hughes, Schlumberger and other oil-related industries are in the tank, so it is hardly surprising that the moratorium would enrage the industry.

And with tens of thousands of jobs in the balance, it is equally understandable that such a move would strike fear in the hearts of residents from communities whose livelihoods have long been tied to the oil industry.
    Thanks in large part to corporate fear mongering specifically designed to exploit the very real anxieties of those who stand to suffer most from massive unemployment in the Gulf, much of the frustration and anger initially directed at BP has been redirected -- at the Obama administration. Political and corporate fear mongering is a tactic that can hardly go wrong when so many jobs are at stake.
    Environmentalists may have found it modestly encouraging that Interior Secretary Salazar, when confronted with the oft-repeated remark that a drilling ban would effectively destroy Louisiana’s offshore industries, responded: “The greater irreparable harm would be if there was another blowout, when there is not the oil response capability to even deal with the current Horizon event.”
    Yet, at least so far, it seems that Big Oil remains in charge, having successfully managed -- with the help of a complicit mainstream media -- to frame the national narrative as one of “jobs vs. environment.”
    That would seem to answer the “elephant-inthe- room” question, so poignantly posed by one beleaguered blogger: “Why does Louisiana still is getting slammed by the BP spill?” In the immediate aftermath of the spill, Obama resolutely called on Congress to roll back billions of dollars in tax breaks for Big Oil. He urged the Senate to waste no time in passing a clean-energy bill in order to end US dependence on fossil fuels.

Sandy LeonVest

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