BURN: Obama's Gulf War Expanding

Barack Obama's war on the Gulf States continues and expands past the insane deep water drilling moratorium to shallow water and production infrastructure targets.

While no formal drilling or production moratorium in shallow Gulf waters has been announced, the figures and the reality on the ground show that one is effectively in place.

The people who make decisions about where, and whether, to invest billions of dollars on oil and gas exploration and production perform careful risk analysis.  One factor in that risk analysis is "political risk".

The Obami have converted our domestic drilling political risk from a manageable level to Banana Republic levels.

The madness of environmental regulation has RAISED the risks of oil exploration in the U.S. by pushing drilling into the deep waters of the Gulf, when we KNOW we can safely drill in places on land or in shallow waters...places that are forbidden by stupid law and regulation.

By simply dragging their feet on issuance of new permits for production infrastructure (i.e., pipelines and the like), the Obami are effectively making exploration and development drilling impossible.  Nobody in the productive world of drilling wants to spend millions on a well (that may never be productive in the first place) that they cannot produce if it comes in.

What the Obami are doing is talking (falsely and deceptively) about ending the U.S. dependence on foreign oil, while at the same time very actively assuring that we will be dependent on foreign oil.

Today, we are treated to word that the Gulf war on jobs MAY be ended early.  I wonder if that is a means to forestall a new court challenge to the Salazar moratorium, more than anything else.  Time will tell.

Whatever the immediate future holds from the Obami, the damage to Gulf production has already been done.  Some of it will be far more destructive and long-lasting than the oil spewed into the warm waters of the Gulf.